The head of the Metropolitan Police Sir Mark Rowley has defended the force’s investigation into double murderer Simon Levy.

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.

Sir Mark 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 told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that detectives had done “serious” work but “didn’t have enough evidence” for a charge.

The Met did not seek a charging decision from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) over Valencia-Trujillo’s murder until after Wilkins had been killed.

The police and CPS has apologised over a series of decisions that left the convicted sex offender free to attack the women.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is currently examining how Levy, 40, was managed over the four-year period from his first conviction in September 2021 for sexual assault up to his final arrest in September 2025.

At the Old Bailey on Wednesday, he was given a whole life prison sentence, meaning he will never be released.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir Mark – who on Wednesday called the case a “whole system failing” – said he had already apologised for what the Met had got wrong.

It emerged after Levy’s conviction that the Met did not class Valencia-Trujillo’s death in March 2025 as a murder, or pass the case to specialist homicide detectives, until after he had killed again.

Sir Mark said “the public debate needs to be better informed” because “the facts on that are much more complex than people want to acknowledge”.

He said that while Valencia-Trujillo’s death was “clearly very suspicious and concerning”, a pathologist was unable to determine a cause of death and the force “didn’t have enough evidence to get to a charge”.

Sir Mark added it was only after the murder of Wilkins that the Met had the “combined evidence” to move forward.

“So the inference that the Met didn’t try on that case is just not true, the Met tried,” he said.

However, the Met did not ask the CPS for advice about Valencia-Trujillo’s death, let alone a charging decision, until after the murder of Wilkins, the BBC has previously reported.

The fact there was no formal cause of death would not have prevented the case being taken on by specialist homicide detectives, who are skilled at building murder cases even when there is not a formal cause of death.

Levy’s semen was on Valencia-Trujillo and his blood was at the murder scene. CCTV that showed Levy in the area, walking in the same direction as Valencia-Trujillo shortly after she passed a camera, was not viewed by the local team despite being gathered.

Other possible relevant CCTV was never gathered, and had been deleted by the time the specialist murder team took over months later.

In that case, the local team investigating the death did not engage with the Met’s specialist murder teams apart from the day her body was discovered in March 2025.

A specialist homicide team attended the crime scene that day and recommended the case stay with local officers pending further enquiries, but there was no further contact until after Wilkins was murdered in August.

Sir Mark acknowledged mistakes were made, saying the force was “too slow” after Levy sexually assaulted a female prison officer in HMP Brixton in April 2022. The Met did not even question him until June 2023, five months after he was released from prison.

Levy 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.

The Met chief also said it was a mistake to downgrade Levy from a high-risk sex offender to a medium one in August 2024, meaning a lower level of monitoring and contact was required.

“Those are mistakes and those are our mistakes, that is part of what is being investigated and that is part of what we’ve apologised for,” he said.

But Sir Mark also emphasised failures by other government agencies: “[Levy] was released on licence by the prison service having sexually assaulted in prison one its people. I don’t understand that decision either.”

“We take our accountability seriously, the rest of the system is not doing that,” he said.

However, Levy was released automatically on licence in February 2023 at the halfway point of his sentence. That decision was not down to the prison service.

The head of the CPS rejected Sir Mark’s suggestion it had not taken accountability for Levy’s release, telling the BBC “it’s not helpful for different parts of the criminal justice system to be taking shots at each other”.

Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson admitted the CPS played a part in Levy’s release and said there were “lessons to be learned” but insisted it had acted on those lessons and was “making enormous strides” to protect women and girls.

When pressed on whether Levy’s release indicates the criminal justice system fails to take violence against women and girls seriously, he said: “This is an appalling instance of failure but I would urge women not to read too much into this,” insisting it does not represent a “systemic” problem within the CPS.

Sir Mark’s comments follow criticism of the Met’s handling of the case.

Former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, said on Wednesday that Levy’s second murder “could have been avoided had the state not failed” and that the case displayed a “litany of failures”.

She told the BBC on Thursday that Sir Mark had “done much to change the Met regarding violence against women and girls” but police forces needed to accept the existence of “attitude problems” towards women reporting incidents.

All forces need “very clear protocols” around how to manage sudden deaths of women with vulnerabilities, Phillips added.

She said the police had “advanced way more” than other criminal justice bodies such as the CPS, probation services and the prison system which had “much to catch up on”.

Her criticisms were echoed by Mina Smallman – the mother of Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, who were stabbed to death in a London park in June 2020.

The Met was also scrutinised for its handling of that case, with two former Met constables later jailed for sharing photographs of the sisters’ bodies in a WhatsApp group.

Also speaking to the Today programme, Smallman suggested that because Valencia-Trujillo carried out sex work “she wasn’t taken seriously” by the police.

“Once again the Met is deciding who matters. Both those women’s lives were important to their families.”

“After reading this case, I sent a text message to Sir Mark and said to him ‘how many times are you going to stand up publicly and apologise for failures in the Met?’. It becomes a joke,” she added.

Smallman stressed 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 whole system is struggling”, Sir Mark told the Today programme. “This is a systemic disinvestment by successive governments”.

Sir Mark said while the Met was 4,000 people smaller than it was four years ago, the number of registered sex offenders it was monitoring in the capital stands at 10,800 people and is “growing by 100 every three months”.

When presented with Sir Mark’s criticism of the wider criminal justice system, Parkinson accepted it is “under pressure”.

However, he pushed back on Sir Mark’s suggestions that there had been “systemic disinvestment”.

“I’m not going to make that my complaint,” Parkinson said.

He pointed to attempts by the CPS to work more closely with the police to find greater efficiencies and reduce waste within the criminal justice system.

He also hit back at Sir Mark’s claim the CPS was reducing charges in some cases in order to save money, specifically downgrading charges of assault of an emergency worker to common assault.

Parkinson told the BBC Sir Mark’s comments were “deeply disappointing” and “wrong”.