Simon Levy, a serial sex offender who was being monitored by the Metropolitan Police, has been found guilty of murdering two women and raping a third in London. The verdict closes a case that prosecutors described in the starkest terms and that has already prompted the Crown Prosecution Service to accept a share of the responsibility for what happened.
The court heard that Levy killed Carmenza Valencia Trujillo, who was 53, in March 2020. Years later, in August 2025, he murdered a second woman, Cheryl Wilkins. Alongside the two killings he was convicted of raping a third woman, and together the offences drew the picture of a predator whose violence stretched across years rather than a single moment.
Central to the trial was the assessment that Levy was a pathological offender, the words used by the prosecution. One prosecutor told the court that Levy's desire to assault women seemed to be on the verge of compulsive or pathological, a characterisation that framed the case as one of sustained and deliberate danger to women rather than a series of isolated incidents.
Levy was no stranger to the courts. He had already been convicted of a number of sexual assaults going back many years, and there had been opportunities to stop him that were not taken. That history has turned attention onto how a man with such a record was able to remain free long enough to kill again.
He was released on bail in May 2025 despite that record. He then failed to attend court on multiple occasions, yet an arrest warrant was not issued against him. It was during this period, in August 2025, that he went on to murder Cheryl Wilkins, one of the two killings for which he has now been convicted.
The outcome has raised pointed questions for the police, the courts and the Crown Prosecution Service. The prosecution service issued a statement accepting some of its responsibility for what happened, an acknowledgement that the failings in the case reached beyond the individual offender to the institutions that were meant to manage the risk he posed.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Kevin Southworth said the force needed to understand better what could have been done differently to apprehend and manage Levy in a way that would have protected the public from the harm he posed. He pointed to a wider lesson about system failure, and about how Levy came to be bailed from court at the peak of his offending, only to go on to commit even further offences.
The case also drew reaction beyond the courtroom. Gender equality campaigner Patsy Stephenson warned that it remains dangerous for people inside the police to speak out, arguing that there is little room for whistleblowers and that it often takes investigations such as the Panorama documentary to bring the force's deep-rooted problems into the open.