How the British state enabled Simon Levy’s atrocities

The recent history of policing in England has been one of startling incompetence. The most obvious consequence is an atmosphere of creeping lawlessness and a grim acceptance among the public that most crimes won’t be investigated. All this is bad enough. But what about when police ineptitude kills innocent people?

At the Old Bailey last week, a jury found Simon Levy guilty of murdering two women, two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm and intentional suffocation. On Wednesday, he was sentenced to an indefinite life order for these crimes. Rightly, he will never again see the light of day.

What is so horrifying about Levy’s case isn’t just the fact that he is a sadistic sexual predator. It is a sad truth that such people have always existed in our society. What hasn’t always existed – and what is possibly the most wretched aspect here – is a criminal-justice system so inept that he was repeatedly given a free pass to do it.

Levy’s offending began in 2018, when he molested two women. In September 2021, he was sentenced to three years in prison for these crimes. Despite a report that he had sexually assaulted a prison guard in 2022 (an offence he was later convicted of), Levy was released in February 2023, after serving just 17 months. A breach of his licence sent him behind bars again in May 2024 to serve the final three months of the original sentence. When freed, he was inexplicably downgraded from a high-risk individual to low-risk, with his monitoring conditions relaxed accordingly.

Levy started to reoffend almost immediately. He sexually assaulted three women on the Tube in October and November 2024, and one of the attacks was filmed. Considering the extent of surveillance on London’s public transport, particularly the Underground, one would hope that this would be a relatively easy crime to prosecute. Not so. Levy was ‘interviewed under caution’ before he appeared to be forgotten about.

A few months later, in January 2025, Levy violently raped a sex worker in a car park in Tottenham. The woman fractured her right shoulder and was choked unconscious. The victim gave an accurate description of Levy and even told police where he lived. Yet the investigation was closed in a matter of months. The victim, meanwhile, was charged with breaching a community-protection notice that prevented her from being in the car park where she was attacked.

It gets worse. In March of that year, Levy murdered Colombian grandmother Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo on the steps of an apartment block in south London. He was arrested after his DNA – including blood and semen – was found at the scene. Incredibly, he was interviewed only to be released without charge. Investigators even refused to classify the death as murder and the case was never passed to the homicide squad. A short time later, Levy was at liberty to sexually assault another woman on the Tube.

Levy was charged for this assault (along with earlier sex offences), only to be bailed again. And, a few months later, in May and June, he sexually assaulted more women on public transport. Once again, he was charged and, once again, he was released on bail.

It is hardly a surprise that, by now, Levy had such contempt for the English justice system – if it can even be called that – that he didn’t bother to attend his two pre-trial hearings (the police issued no warrant for his arrest for this either). And so he was allowed to commit his final crime.

In August, Levy murdered Sheryl Wilkins in the same car park in Tottenham where he had previously committed rape. In September, he was finally arrested, charged and – this time – denied bail. But it was too little, too late.

Such rank incompetence from the police and the judiciary should be beneath contempt. Yet criminals are routinely slipping out of the authorities’ hands, only to commit even more despicable crimes. Jihad al-Shamie was on bail for an alleged rape when he attacked a Manchester synagogue in October last year, resulting in the death of two Jewish men. Paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane had an outstanding arrest warrant for assaulting a police officer when he killed Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates in Nottingham in 2023. The phrase ‘known to the authorities’ continually reappears in the news coverage high-profile cases like these.

By now, everyone is familiar with the scourge of two-tier policing, but it seems we have a two-tier bail system too. It is worth contrasting Levy’s treatment – being bailed repeatedly – with those whose ‘crime’ was to have promoted distasteful or controversial political views. Lucy Connolly was arrested and charged for an intemperate tweet she posted in July 2024. ‘Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care’, she posted at the height of the Southport riots. She deleted the post in a matter of hours. But it didn’t matter – the police and prosecutors were determined to get their woman, even if she was the primary carer for her 12-year-old daughter and had never committed a crime before. Connolly was effectively forced to plead guilty, denied bail twice, sentenced to 31 months and spent 10 months in HMP Peterborough.

Then there’s the case of Jamie Michael in Wales. Like Connolly, he had taken to social media to share his thoughts on immigration amid the Southport riots. In a video posted on Facebook, Michael said the UK was ‘under attack’ from immigrants. He was charged and immediately imprisoned, only to be granted bail after spending 17 days in jail. A jury later acquitted him in a matter of hours.

So what do those who are responsible for letting Simon Levy loose on the streets of London have to say for themselves? Not much, it seems. The Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Kevin Southworth, has described Levy’s case as ‘tragedy beyond words’ and a ‘collective system failure’ for the police. But this isn’t good enough. Two women are dead and another has been raped. These were entirely preventable crimes, not unfortunate tragedies. Each individual decision to let Levy go or to release him on bail has played its own grim role.

There must be consequences for Simon Levy’s enablers, not just a collective shrug of the shoulders. The indifference and incompetence of the justice system are now literally costing lives.