The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, has defended the Met chief Simon Levy defence line on Wednesday, insisting detectives did carry out serious investigative work before the double murderer killed a second time, while acknowledging the force made a series of mistakes in handling his case.
Simon Levy, 40, was given a whole life prison sentence at the Old Bailey on Wednesday. He had been on bail and under police monitoring when he murdered Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and, five months later, Sheryl Wilkins. He also violently raped a third woman.
Met chief Simon Levy defence: what Rowley said
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir Mark said the suggestion the Met had not tried to build a case following Valencia-Trujillo’s death was ‘just not true’. He said detectives had done ‘serious’ work but ‘didn’t have enough evidence’ for a charge. A pathologist had been unable to determine a cause of death, Sir Mark said, and it was only after Wilkins was killed that the force had the ‘combined evidence’ to move forward.
The Met, however, did not seek a charging decision from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) over Valencia-Trujillo’s murder until after Wilkins had been killed, the BBC has previously reported. The Met did not class Valencia-Trujillo’s death as murder, or pass the case to specialist homicide detectives, until after the second killing.
Levy’s semen was found on Valencia-Trujillo and his blood was at the murder scene. CCTV placing Levy in the area was not viewed by the local investigating team despite being gathered. Other potentially relevant footage was never collected and had been deleted by the time specialist officers took over months later.
A specialist homicide team attended the crime scene on the day Valencia-Trujillo’s body was discovered in March 2025 and recommended the case remain with local officers pending further enquiries. There was no further contact between the local team and specialist murder detectives until after Wilkins was murdered in August.
Admitted mistakes and wider system failures
Sir Mark accepted specific failures. He said the force was ‘too slow’ when it waited five months to question Levy over the sexual assault of a female prison officer at HMP Brixton in April 2022. Levy was not charged with that offence until October 2025, by which point he had been able to attack 13 more women, killing two of them.
Sir Mark also acknowledged it was a mistake to downgrade Levy from a high-risk to a medium-risk sex offender in August 2024, which reduced the level of monitoring required. ‘Those are mistakes and those are our mistakes,’ he said.
The Met chief pointed to failures elsewhere in the system. He said Levy ‘was released on licence by the prison service having sexually assaulted in prison one of its people’ and said he did not understand that decision. The report establishes, however, that Levy was released automatically on licence in February 2023 at the halfway point of his sentence, a decision that was not down to the prison service.
Sir Mark also said the Met was now monitoring 10,800 registered sex offenders in the capital, a figure growing by 100 every three months, while the force was 4,000 officers smaller than it was four years ago. ‘The whole system is struggling,’ he said. ‘This is a systemic disinvestment by successive governments.’
IOPC probe and timeline of Levy’s offending
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is examining how Levy was managed over the four-year period from his first conviction for sexual assault in September 2021 to his final arrest in September 2025. The IOPC began its investigation in January following a voluntary conduct referral from the Metropolitan Police.
The timeline of Levy’s offending spans that period. A violent rape was committed in January 2025, before Valencia-Trujillo was killed in March 2025 and Wilkins in August 2025. The Met and CPS have both apologised over a series of decisions that left the convicted sex offender free to carry out those attacks.
Criticism from MPs and victims’ families
Labour MP Jess Phillips, a former safeguarding minister, said on Wednesday that the second murder ‘could have been avoided had the state not failed’ and described the case as a ‘litany of failures’.
Mina Smallman, whose daughters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry were stabbed to death in a London park in June 2020, also spoke to the Today programme. She suggested Valencia-Trujillo was ‘not taken seriously’ because she carried out sex work. ‘Once again the Met is deciding who matters,’ Smallman said. ‘Both those women’s lives were important to their families.’
Smallman said she had sent a text message to Sir Mark after Levy’s conviction. ‘How many times are you going to stand up publicly and apologise for failures in the Met? It becomes a joke,’ she said. She added that she believes Sir Mark ‘wants to change the Met, wants to do things differently’, but that the force is ‘too big, we’re asking them to do too much’.
The IOPC’s examination of Levy’s case is ongoing.
