In the early hours of Sunday, August 24, 2025, a security camera on Tottenham High Road in north London recorded a man and a woman crossing the road together and walking toward the car park of a B&M discount store. They went behind a wall, out of the camera's view. About 50 minutes later the man came out alone and walked away. He was partially sighted, and he was wearing sunglasses and a hood. At about 7:30 that morning police found the woman lying face down behind the wall. She was Sheryl Wilkins, a mother of four, and the next day would have been her 40th birthday.
The man was Simon Levy, a 40-year-old registered sex offender who lived with his mother a short distance away. When he walked out of the car park that night, he was on court bail for a string of sexual assaults on London's public transport. He had been arrested and interviewed five months earlier on suspicion of murdering another woman, Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, and released. And in January 2025, in the same car park, he had raped a third woman so violently that her collarbone was broken. She had told police where her attacker lived. She was not formally interviewed until after he had killed twice.
On August 7, 2026, an Old Bailey jury convicted Levy of both murders and of the attack on the surviving woman. Five days later he was sentenced to a whole life order, meaning he will never be released. The case is also a record of the chances the police, prosecutors and courts had to stop him, and the agencies involved have admitted that several of those chances were missed.
Simon Levy was born on August 14, 1985, according to the Metropolitan Police charge announcement and the judge's sentencing remarks. Very little about his early life appears in the public record. Press Association reports describe him as unemployed, and at the time of his arrest he lived on Beaufoy Road in Tottenham, in a home he shared with his mother. During the murder trial the prosecutor, Tom Little KC, told the jury that Levy had once lived in the Walworth area of south-east London, where the first murder took place.
The sentencing remarks list his earlier record. In April 2012 he was fined for handling stolen goods. The court was also shown reports on a language development disorder, and Levy had the help of an intermediary at points during his trial. He lost the sight in one eye in an attack in May 2024, and afterward wore dark glasses in court. The judge accepted that these conditions would affect his daily life in prison but found that they had little if any effect on his culpability.
Levy's record of attacks on women goes back to the summer of 2018. On July 29, 2018, he sexually assaulted a woman at an open party at Camden Market. On August 26, 2018, at the Notting Hill Carnival, he sexually assaulted a second woman by penetration; LBC reported that he had met her while travelling to the area on the Underground. On September 30, 2021, after a trial, he was convicted of both offences and received a total sentence of 36 months. He was placed on the sex offender register.
He offended again in prison. On April 14, 2022, while an inmate at HMP Brixton, he sexually assaulted a female prison officer. He was nonetheless released on licence in February 2023, according to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). On October 24, 2023, he sexually assaulted a woman on the Jubilee line. The woman reported it to British Transport Police (BTP), but officers could not identify the attacker and the case was closed until later allegations came to light.
In May 2024 the Metropolitan Police received a report of a rape in Battersea Park, which triggered Levy's recall to prison. Press Association reporting describes this as an alleged rape; no conviction for it has been reported. He was released again in August 2024, at the end of his sentence. That same month, two Met officers downgraded him from a high-risk to a medium-risk sex offender, a decision the IOPC is now investigating, according to BBC reporting carried by Joy Online and to Reuters.
Also in August 2024, according to LBC's timeline of the case, Levy came into possession of a Transport for London staff Oyster card that a bus driver had reported lost at the Notting Hill Carnival. It let him travel on the network for free, and he kept it for more than a year.
On October 21, 2024, he sexually assaulted two women on the Central line, and on October 28 a third. The method, as later described at his Tube trial, was to tie a jumper or hoodie around his waist, strap his arm down, and back toward a woman with his hand partly covered so that he could grope her. BTP arrested him in November 2024 and released him on police bail with a condition not to travel on the Central line. Officers took the details of his Oyster card without realizing that it belonged to a bus driver, and he was allowed to keep it. The force later admitted that the delay in arranging an identification parade, which did not take place until April 2025, was unacceptable, and it blamed two "incompetent" investigating officers, whom it said it had dealt with through internal discipline.
On January 21, 2025, while on BTP bail, Levy raped a woman in the B&M car park in Tottenham. She was a homeless sex worker who had been trafficked into the United Kingdom in 2012 and had become addicted to drugs; at the time, the court heard, she was spending about 150 pounds a day on crack cocaine and heroin. Under English law she has lifelong anonymity, and the judge referred to her by a cipher. She later told the court she had gone behind the wall after Levy showed her money and promised to pay for sex. He raped her twice, fractured her collarbone, and strangled her until she lost consciousness. The judge said that when Levy left her she was clearly unconscious.
Four days later, on January 25, police arrested her for breaching a community protection notice. Body-worn video shown at the trial recorded her telling the officers that she was on her way to hospital, that she had been raped earlier in the week, and that she had been strangled, knocked out and sexually assaulted. She said the attack had happened in the B&M car park and that her attacker was a black African man who lived in White Hart Lane. She did not know his name, but she knew where he lived. "It is obvious she was referring to you," the judge told Levy at sentencing. At hospital she was found to have a displaced fracture of the clavicle, which a doctor told the court would have needed a severe degree of force.
The case passed to a Met unit for serious sexual offences. Detective Sergeant Nina Muchamore told the jury that the woman was withdrawing from heroin and was too unwell to give an account; when the sergeant visited her cell on January 26, she could barely lift her head. The officer said the team did "very little" beyond checking what CCTV there was in the car park, and explained that the unit was handling about 150 rape investigations and had to prioritize. The woman was released after a court appearance, and with no home address she could not be traced. Officers missed a chance to speak to her after another arrest in May, she declined to say more to an officer from a different team on May 28, and on June 8, 2025, the investigation was closed. Levy was never arrested over it at the time.
Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo was 53. Her daughter, Nazly Johana Fuenmayor Valencia, told the court that her mother had come to Britain "to give her children a better life and for safety." Her children described her as a big character who was full of life, and as a much-loved member of her community who loved salsa dancing. She became a grandmother in 2024, and the judge noted that she had been planning for her grandson's future. She had a son as well as her daughter. Prosecutors said she was doing street sex work at the time to fund a drug addiction.
On Sunday, March 16, 2025, she left her home just before 6 a.m. The judge's sentencing remarks trace what followed through CCTV. She was filmed near Wendover, a largely abandoned block of flats on Thurlow Street on the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth. That afternoon Levy, who had travelled south from Tottenham using the stolen staff Oyster card, was filmed walking alongside Wendover. At 3:07 p.m. Valencia-Trujillo was seen on the Old Kent Road, and again at 3:18 and 3:20. That was the last time she was seen alive. Ten minutes later Levy was seen on the Old Kent Road walking the other way, and at 3:44 he was seen again, now heading in her direction. At 6:23 p.m. he was on Thurlow Street. At 6:52 he entered Elephant and Castle Underground station, and at 7:27 he left Seven Sisters station in north London.
Just before 7 p.m. the next day, March 17, a 999 call reported an unresponsive woman in a stairwell at Wendover House. Paramedics could not save her, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. She was lying face down on a landing between two flights of stairs. A post-mortem examination could not establish a cause of death. The pathologist recorded numerous injuries, some recent, to the head, neck, torso and limbs, with bruising to the neck and small hemorrhages in the neck, eyes and mouth. Toxicology showed she had taken cocaine.
Forensic scientists found Levy's blood on a pipe on the landing between the eighth and seventh floors and his semen on swabs taken from her body. On April 1, 2025, the Met arrested him on suspicion of murder. He answered "no comment" to every question. Because the post-mortem could not say how she died, police said, they could not confirm the involvement of a third party, the high threshold for a murder charge was not met, and he was released under investigation. The Met has described this as standard procedure. Joy Online's BBC-sourced report states that the force did not treat her death as a murder until after Levy had killed again.
In the five months between the two murders, Levy was under investigation by two police forces and monitored as a sex offender, and he kept attacking women. LBC's timeline records sexual assaults on the Victoria line on March 27 and April 7, on the Northern line on April 8, on the London Overground on April 26 and May 1, and on the Jubilee line on May 29, 2025. The Met's officers visited him at home in March and July 2025; he told them he did not go out and spent his time watching YouTube and films, and played on his partial sight, saying it made him unsteady on his feet.
In May 2025 BTP charged him with sexual offences on the Tube and asked Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court to remand him in custody. The court granted bail on condition that he not contact the victims or use TfL transport except for medical or legal appointments. He failed to attend his first Crown Court hearing on June 1; his lawyer said he was unwell, and no warrant was issued. In June BTP arrested him again, for further offences and for breaching his bail. A second remand application at Highbury failed, and he was bailed on the same terms, still holding the stolen Oyster card. He missed three Crown Court hearings in all, and no arrest warrant was sought.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has since admitted that it did not oppose bail at the first hearing and that its prosecutor did not give the court all the relevant information at the second. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, told LBC that the main failing was that prosecutors had not told the court Levy was under investigation for rape and murder. "That was relevant information that the court should have had," he said. "Of course, we can't know if it would have made a difference."
Sheryl Wilkins was 39 and the mother of four children. Her family said she was a much-loved woman, missed every day by everyone who knew her. Her sister, Lindsey Hicks, called her "a beautiful soul." The judge's remarks record that she had a history of drug use and had been prescribed methadone, and the prosecution said she, like the other two women, was doing street sex work to pay for an addiction.
Less than two weeks after a court hearing on August 11, 2025, which he did not attend, Levy met her on the High Road in Tottenham just after midnight on August 24. CCTV shown to the jury captured them crossing the road and going behind the wall of the B&M car park, the place where he had attacked the woman in January. A Sky News report from the trial said a driver who passed later remembered seeing someone lying on the ground and assuming it was a homeless person. Police found her at about 7:30 a.m., and she was pronounced dead at the scene.
Again, the pathologist could not give a cause of death. Her body showed no fewer than 83 injuries or marks, to her face, head, upper body, arms and legs. Each was minor in pathological terms, and some were older, but some had plainly been caused that night. She was lying face down, in a position the judge called "strikingly similar" to the way Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo had been found. No money was found among either woman's belongings.
The Met's Specialist Crime team arrested Levy on Thursday, September 4, 2025, eleven days after Sheryl Wilkins died, and re-arrested him on suspicion of murdering Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo. He had the stolen Oyster card with him. He told officers he had done nothing. In interview the next day he gave a prepared statement denying the January and August attacks and claimed that Sheryl Wilkins was already injured before they had sex, which the judge later said photographs of her body showed was untrue.
In early September a uniformed sergeant, Gemma Claydon, found the woman from January and told her a man had been arrested over a murder in the B&M car park. According to the sergeant's evidence, the woman replied: "I knew it. He strangled me. He lived off White Hart Lane." On September 6 she gave a full account on video, and she was moved into supported accommodation. While in custody Levy was further arrested over the January attack, and on September 7, 2025, he was charged with the murder of Sheryl Wilkins and with two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm with intent and intentional strangulation of the surviving woman. He appeared at Highbury Magistrates' Court on September 8 and at the Old Bailey on September 10, and he was remanded in custody.
Detectives then set out to map his offending. The Met said its specialist crime unit explored unsolved cases with a similar pattern, worked with coroners to check for any linked deaths, and combined the three attacks into one investigation. On November 25, 2025, Levy was charged with the murder of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo. The detective leading the inquiry was Detective Chief Inspector Neil John, working with senior Crown prosecutor Samantha Yelland.
Levy was tried first on the transport offences. At Inner London Crown Court a jury convicted him on February 5, 2026, of 11 counts of sexual assault on 11 women: ten on the London transport network between October 2023 and May 2025, and the prison officer at HMP Brixton in 2022. Six of the assaults were in the first five months of 2025, overlapping with the rape and the murders. He had claimed that his poor sight and crowded, swaying trains explained the contact; the jury rejected that. On June 9, 2026, Judge Michael Evans sentenced him to an extended sentence of nine years, a six-year custodial term plus three years on extended licence. "You were on the Tube for one purpose only, to sexually assault women," the judge said. Reporting restrictions kept the conviction from the public until the murder trial ended. (A CPS note gives the trial date as February 4, 2025, which appears to be an error; see the notes below.)
On March 27, 2026, Levy pleaded not guilty to both murders and to all four counts concerning the surviving woman. His trial opened at the Old Bailey in July 2026 before Judge Mark Lucraft KC, the Recorder of London, and lasted about five weeks. Tom Little KC led the prosecution with Kerry Broome as junior counsel. Little called Levy "a predatory serial sexual attacker" who chose the three women because they were vulnerable: all did street sex work to fund drug addictions.
The prosecution case rested on CCTV, on Levy's DNA at the Wendover scene and on Valencia-Trujillo's body, on the similarity between the two deaths, and on the evidence of the surviving woman, who testified in person. The jury also heard about Levy's earlier sexual offences. Police recovered from his phone and computers files with titles such as "My sex records" and "Submission," and from his home a collection of press cuttings about sexual crimes, particularly rape.
Levy did not give evidence. His barrister, Ms Grey, questioned whether either woman had been smothered at all, given that both used drugs and that the pathologists had recorded the causes of death as unascertained. When the surviving woman gave evidence, it was put to her that all the sexual contact had been consensual.
On Friday, August 7, 2026, after about 13 hours of deliberation and a majority direction, the jury convicted Levy on every count: two murders, two rapes, causing grievous bodily harm with intent, and intentional suffocation. Family members of both murdered women wept as the verdicts were read. Levy showed no reaction. The judge remanded him in custody and set sentencing for the following Wednesday.
At the sentencing hearing on August 12, 2026, Levy wore sunglasses and spoke only to confirm his name. The surviving woman's statement said: "He took away my soul that night and he took away my dignity." She called the attack worse than anything she had gone through as a victim of trafficking. The judge noted that she had written that she was stronger now and would play and smile again. He thanked her for the courage it took to testify.
Nazly Johana Fuenmayor Valencia told the court: "There's an emptiness that can't be filled. Our world has been ripped apart, she was taken from our family and we will never be the same again." She described her mother as "a truly special person who gave so much love to others." Lindsey Hicks addressed Levy directly: "You, Simon Levy, have destroyed our lives and we will never ever get over this." She called the verdict bittersweet, because nothing would bring her sister back. The judge noted that Sheryl Wilkins's mother had said the family would keep her alive through the memories and stories they would tell her children.
Under English law the sentence for murder is life imprisonment. The question was whether the judge would set a minimum term or impose a whole life order. Schedule 21 of the Sentencing Act 2020 makes a whole life order the starting point for the murder of two or more people where each murder involves sexual conduct. Ms Grey argued that sexual contact was not the same as evidence of sexual injury, and that the right starting point was 30 years, though she accepted a minimum term well above that would follow. The judge disagreed. He found that both murders were committed during or after sexual intercourse, that compression of the neck or obstruction of breathing was very likely in each, and that the case fell squarely within the whole life category.
He listed six aggravating factors: the murders were on separate occasions; both involved some premeditation, with Levy travelling to areas where he knew he would find women willing to have sex for money; the second murder was committed on court bail; it was also committed while he was released under investigation for the first; the seriousness of the attack on the surviving woman; and his 2021 convictions. He found no real mitigation. "This cannot be described in any way as a borderline case," he said, and imposed life imprisonment with a whole life order on each murder count. For the two rapes he passed concurrent life sentences with minimum terms of 12 years each, and he imposed no separate penalty for the grievous bodily harm and suffocation counts. "You are clearly someone who ruthlessly exploits others for your own personal sexual satisfaction," he said, adding that Levy "appears to have a morbid fascination with sex, rape and crime."
The verdicts were followed by a series of admissions. The Met, BTP and the CPS all acknowledged failings. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Kevin Southworth called it "a collective system failure" and said the failure to remand Levy at Highbury in May and June 2025 had left him free to kill a second time. According to the BBC-sourced report, the Met said it believed Sheryl Wilkins's death could have been avoided if not for the multiple points of failure. After sentencing, Southworth called for repeat offenders like Levy to be remanded automatically. The Met has said it introduced new training on sharing intelligence about risk and deployed specialist officers in Haringey and Enfield to protect people involved in street sex work.
The IOPC said its investigation, which began in January 2026 after a voluntary referral by the Met, covers Levy's management from his first conviction in September 2021 to his arrest in September 2025. It served a gross misconduct notice on a police constable and a misconduct notice on a detective sergeant, while stressing that this does not necessarily mean disciplinary proceedings will follow. In its statement, the CPS said: "Our actions fell short of the standards that victims, families and the public are entitled to expect." It also said its prosecutors had been given more training on bail.
The aftermath turned into a public dispute between agencies. On August 13, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said that no one from the courts, the CPS or probation was "stepping forward and talking about their failures." Parkinson, apologizing on LBC, said the public did not want "different parts of the system taking shots at each other." The crime and policing minister, Sarah Jones, said the case "raises serious questions that require urgent answers." The Victims' Commissioner, Claire Waxman, called it one of the worst examples of systemic failure in recent years. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, asked for a multi-agency review, and Harriet Wistrich of the Centre for Women's Justice said the failures were evidence that the justice system was collapsing. Deniz Uğur of the End Violence Against Women Coalition told LBC that "serious questions must be asked" of every agency involved.
Levy was convicted of both murders on August 7, 2026, and has been serving a whole life order since August 12, 2026. Reports through August 13, 2026, mention no appeal being lodged or heard. The IOPC investigation was ongoing as of its statement of August 7, 2026, with no findings yet made public. The Met has appealed for any other women attacked by Levy to come forward, and has said that despite searching it has found nothing linking him to other unsolved deaths.
Proven by jury verdicts: the murders of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins; two rapes, grievous bodily harm with intent and intentional suffocation of the surviving woman in January 2025; two sexual assaults in 2018 (convicted 2021); and 11 sexual assaults between April 2022 and May 2025 (convicted 2026).
Not proven: the May 2024 Battersea Park rape report that led to his recall to prison is described only as an allegation, and no charge or conviction is reported. No cause of death was ever established for either murdered woman; the judge's finding that their breathing was very likely obstructed is a sentencing finding based on the whole of the evidence, which the defense disputed at trial. Media and police descriptions of Levy as a serial predator with more victims reflect police appeals for other victims, not any further charge. The Met said it had found nothing to connect him to other deaths.
August 14, 1985: Simon Levy born.
July 29 and August 26, 2018: Sexual assaults at Camden Market and the Notting Hill Carnival.
September 30, 2021: Convicted of both; total sentence 36 months.
April 14, 2022: Sexually assaults a prison officer at HMP Brixton.
February 2023: Released on licence.
October 24, 2023: Sexual assault on the Jubilee line; case closed when he is not identified.
May 2024: Rape reported in Battersea Park (alleged); recalled to prison. Loses sight in one eye in an attack.
August 2024: Released at end of sentence; downgraded from high to medium risk; obtains a bus driver's lost staff Oyster card.
October 21 and 28, 2024: Sexual assaults on three women on the Central line.
November 2024: Arrested by BTP and bailed.
January 21, 2025: Rapes and strangles a woman in the B&M car park, Tottenham.
January 25, 2025: She reports the rape to police after an unrelated arrest.
March 16, 2025: Meets Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in Walworth; she is last seen alive at 3:20 p.m.
March 17, 2025: Her body is found at Wendover House, Aylesbury Estate.
April 1, 2025: Arrested on suspicion of her murder; "no comment"; released under investigation.
March 27 to May 29, 2025: Six more sexual assaults on the transport network.
May and June 2025: Charged by BTP; bailed twice by Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court.
June 8, 2025: Met closes the January rape inquiry.
August 11, 2025: Misses a Crown Court hearing; no warrant issued.
August 24, 2025: Sheryl Wilkins killed behind the B&M car park wall; found about 7:30 a.m.
September 4, 2025: Arrested for her murder; re-arrested over Valencia-Trujillo.
September 7, 2025: Charged with the Wilkins murder and the January offences.
November 25, 2025: Charged with the Valencia-Trujillo murder.
January 2026: Met refers itself to the IOPC.
February 5, 2026: Convicted of 11 sexual assaults at Inner London Crown Court.
March 27, 2026: Pleads not guilty to the murder indictment.
June 9, 2026: Sentenced to an extended nine-year sentence for the 11 assaults.
July 2026: Murder trial opens at the Old Bailey.
August 7, 2026: Convicted on all counts.
August 12, 2026: Whole life order imposed.
August 13, 2026: No appeal reported; IOPC investigation ongoing.