Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, has questioned why the Prison Service released Simon Levy after he sexually assaulted a female officer at HMP Brixton in 2022, given Levy went on to murder Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins and rape a third woman. Whitehall sources countered that the Prison Service had no legal power to detain him further, and Rowley acknowledged Met failings while insisting the force did try to build a case.
Levy was not charged over the Brixton assault until October 2025, by which point he had attacked 13 more women. Mina Smallman, whose daughters were murdered in 2020, said the Met's failures had become a joke and that the force was too large and too troubled to fix itself, citing what she called its treatment of one victim as a sex worker as less urgent than another.
The crime and policing minister, Sarah Jones, called Levy a monster and said the failings that let him remain free were deeply concerning, promising the relevant institutions and watchdog would establish what went wrong. Levy received a whole-life sentence this week for his crimes, including 11 other sexual assaults.
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