\n<\/p>\n
The director of the Crown Prosecution Service has apologised and vowed to increase staff numbers after conceding that the court deciding whether to release Simon Levy on bail should have known the serial sex offender was being investigated for rape and murder.<\/p>\n
Levy, 40, was this week given a rare whole-life sentence for the murders of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins, and the rape of another woman.<\/p>\n
He was on bail and being monitored by police when he murdered Valencia-Trujillo, 53, in March 2025 and Wilkins five months later. Wilkins was murdered the day before what would have been her 40th birthday. She was found with 83 injuries or marks on her body.<\/p>\n
In an interview with LBC on Thursday, the director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, said his agency should have told the court it was investigating Levy for rape and murder before he was released on bail.<\/p>\n
\u201cI absolutely accept that the court should have had that information, and I\u2019m very sorry indeed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Parkinson said that Levy\u2019s two bail hearings, which followed the murder of Valencia-Trujillo, were both held on a Saturday, when prosecutors were dealing with \u201can incredibly busy list\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Simon Levy was given a whole-life sentence for the murders.<\/span> Photograph: Metropolitan police\/PA<\/p>\n The details of the ongoing investigations into Levy were in the system but prosecutors were not \u201caware of that information\u201d and did not present it to the court, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know whether that would have made a difference, but the point is the courts should have had it,\u201d Parkinson said.<\/p>\n Asked whether he thought Wilkins might still be alive if Levy had been denied bail, Parkinson said: \u201cClearly, if he had been remanded in custody, then he would not have had the opportunity to commit the crime that he did.\u201d<\/p>\n Parkinson said the service was providing extra resources to prosecutors to \u201cminimise the risk\u201d of such a case being repeated. Offer letters would be sent out this week to employ more staff, he said.<\/p>\n After the Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, questioned why Levy was released from jail despite sexually assaulting a female prison officer, Parkinson said the public did not want to see different parts of the criminal justice system \u201ctaking shots at each other\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI think what they want to know is that lessons have been learned and that action is being taken,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Levy was not charged with the prison assault until October 2025, by which time he had attacked 13 more women \u2013 killing two of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The director of the Crown Prosecution Service has apologised and vowed to increase staff numbers after conceding that the court deciding whether to release Simon Levy on bail should have known the serial sex offender was being investigated for rape and murder. Levy, 40, was this week given a rare whole-life sentence for the murders<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[2198,1844,15932,4776,2107,1894,8249,2128,25173,745,3965],"class_list":{"0":"post-51767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-apologises","9":"tag-case","10":"tag-cps","11":"tag-crown","12":"tag-director","13":"tag-failings","14":"tag-levy","15":"tag-prosecution","16":"tag-rapistmurderer","17":"tag-service","18":"tag-simon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}