Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has questioned why murderer and serial sex offender Simon Levy was released from prison after sexually assaulting a female prison officer, sparking disquiet within the Prison Service. Levy, 40, went on to kill two women after his release from HMP Brixton in south London.
Whitehall sources have pushed back against Rowley's comments, saying it is "inaccurate" because the Prison Service had no legal power to keep Levy in jail. Levy was on bail and being monitored by police when he murdered Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in March 2025 and Sheryl Wilkins five months later, as well as violently raping a third woman.
Rowley's criticism and Prison Service response
Rowley told the BBC's Today programme: "That's one of the things we've apologised for but of course there are two mistakes in that: you've got he was released on licence by the prison service, having sexually assaulted in prison one of its people, I don't understand that decision either." He added: "The prison service should not have released somebody who's indecently assaulting its staff."
Levy sexually assaulted a female prison officer in HMP Brixton in April 2022. The Met questioned him in June 2023, five months after he was released from prison. He was not charged with the prison offence until October 2025 – by then he had been able to attack 13 more women, killing two of them.
Met's accountability and mistakes
Rowley acknowledged mistakes over the force's handling of Levy but said suggestions it had not tried to build a case over his first murder were "just not true", following criticism including from Labour MP Jess Phillips. He said: "I'm prepared to come here and be accountable, we've got two officers … we've referred to be investigated by the independent office of police complaints, we take our accountability seriously. The rest of the system is not doing that."
Rowley denied that the Met had not done enough, saying: "The inference that the Met didn't try on this death is not true, the Met tried."
Criticism from Mina Smallman
Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were killed in a north London park in 2020 by teenager Danyal Hussein, criticised the Met, claiming it decided which deaths were worth investigating and which were not. Two police officers were jailed in 2021 after taking photographs of the dead bodies of her daughters and sharing the images in WhatsApp groups, referring to them as "dead birds".
Commenting on the police investigation into Levy, she said: "One of the women that were murdered, because she was a sex worker, she wasn't taken seriously. They didn't look into her murder until he murdered a mother of four, and then they joined the two cases together. How ridiculous is that. Once again, the Met is deciding who matters. Both those women's lives were important to their families, how dare they decide that they weren't going to look into that case."
Smallman said she had been in contact with Rowley, after reading about the case. She told the Today programme: "After reading this case I sent a text message to Sir Mark and said: 'How many times are you going to stand up publicly and apologise for failures in the Met?' It becomes a joke. The truth is, the Metropolitan police is too big for any senior team to be able to have a hands-on understanding of the day-to-day activities of that organisation."
She said the Met was incapable of change because it was "too big". "I believe that Sir Mark Rowley wants to change the Met and wants to do things differently, but they haven't got a clue," she added. "We are asking them to do too much, they haven't got the finances, it has become riddled with inactivity, corruption, misogyny, racism and they just can't do it."
Government response and next steps
Levy, who this week was given a whole-life sentence for his crimes, was also convicted earlier this year of sexually assaulting 11 other women, 10 of them on trains and the underground in London between 2023 and 2025. The crime and policing minister, Sarah Jones, previously described Levy as a monster and said the failings that had allowed him to remain free were "deeply concerning".
Jones signalled the government would allow the relevant institutions and police watchdog to establish what had gone wrong. "The fact that Levy was able to inflict such devastating harm after being freed by police and the courts is deeply concerning," she said. "It raises serious questions that require urgent answers." The Prison Service has been approached for a comment.
