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Looking into the eyes of a killer can give a unique insight into their character. There may be a hint of remorse, guilt even, despite their plea; there can be denial, even in the face of overwhelming evidence; and there can be the cold-blooded stare of a psychopath.

But Simon Levy, who was on Wednesday sentenced to a whole life tariff, managed to hide his true character every day of his six-week trial at the Old Bailey by wearing thick dark sunglasses. He is blind in one eye and had complained that his remaining sight needed to be protected from the glare of the lights in the wood-panelled court six.

Dressed in a prison-issue grey tracksuit and soft black trainers from the very first day of the trial in June, the only change in his appearance was the steady and unchecked growth of his scruffy beard and unruly hair.

Levy often sat with his head down, scribbling notes onto sheets of A4 paper as the prosecution described the brutality of his horrific crimes. It is chilling to think what he may have been writing.

On the rare occasions he did glance up, he avoided the gaze of everyone in court and stared ahead impassively, unmoved by the harrowing testimony of his surviving victim.

The court heard how during a seven-year rampage between 2018 and 2025, the predator hunted his victims in deprived areas of London and on the Tube, carrying out at least 13 sexual assaults, raping and suffocating a sex worker and murdering two women.

The British Transport Police, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service and magistrates had all seen fit to release this monster on bail four times, leaving him free to spend his days stalking fresh victims.

The Old Bailey heard that the partially blind defendant repeatedly sexually assaulted women on the London Underground between October 2023 and May 2025

A court sketch of convicted sex offender Simon Levy

Levy did not give evidence in his defence, again denying the families of victims, jurors and the public insight into the motives for his crimes.

The daughter of his first murder victim, Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, wiped tears from her eyes as she listened to the unvarnished truth about the injuries – internal and external – her mother sustained at Levy's hands.

The 53-year-old was found in the seventh-floor stairwell of a partially abandoned tower block on the Aylesbury estate in Peckham, south London, in March last year, more than 24 hours after she had been strangled to death.

Neighbours remember Colombian-born Carmenza, or Christina as she preferred to be called, as a flamboyant character who enjoyed playing Latino music and was devoted to her children.

The mother of two moved to London in the mid-1990s and worked for years as a cleaner to provide for her children. Her family remain traumatised by the events of her death, which her daughter has described as 'horrific'.

While Ms Valencia-Trujillo's family were moved to tears in court, the loved ones of Sheryl Wilkins were filled with rage and did not hold back their anger towards Levy throughout the trial.

Her daughter Mya and sister Lindsey glowered at him as they sat in court and listened to vile details of the case, including the many injuries he inflicted on Sheryl as she lay defenceless on the gravelled ground behind the B&M store in Tottenham in August last year.

The pair did not shield their ears when the court heard how mother-of-three Sheryl, 39, had gone into the car park with Levy one night and that he left alone an hour later.

They also heard the evidence of two witnesses who saw Levy lying on top of something – or someone – that night. This was when he was strangling the last breath out of Sheryl after he had violated her and she lay unconscious beneath him.

Sheryl's mother Mary, did not come to court during the six-week hearing, but it is understood she followed the trial closely from her home in Essex. As she put it bluntly to me one afternoon, last month; 'He's a c***. That's what I think of Simon Levy.'

Only one of Levy's three victims lived to tell the tale and did so with breathtaking courage every time she stepped into the court.

Sheryl Wilkins, 39, who was found unresponsive in High Road, Tottenham, on August 24, 2025, and pronounced dead at the scene

The body of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, was found in a stairwell of a disused block of flats in Southwark, south-east London, on March 17

The small, and painfully thin, young woman, who cannot be named, was working as a sex worker to pay for her £150-a-day drug habit when she was attacked by Levy. In the witness box she was taken through the horrific events of that night in January 2025, when he turned from customer to predator.

She had agreed to go with him around the back of the same B&M store where he later killed Sheryl and described how he jumped on her, broke her shoulder, before covering her mouth with his 'salty, smelly, sweet-tasting' hands, rendering her unconscious.

When she came round, she found she had been raped. She also discovered she had wet herself and soiled herself - the final stages before death by strangulation, the jury was told by an expert in the field.

The indignity of having to relive that terrible night was lost on no one – except Simon Levy's defence team.

Over several days Siobhan Grey KC questioned her, berated her, insulted her and dismissed her account as fiction with increasing hostility. It was difficult to watch. But, despite falling sick during this cross examination, she returned to court to face further questioning.

While she stood answering questions and reliving the trauma of her attack, Levy continued to hide behind his sunglasses, emotionless.

His family and legal team were no more forthcoming. Speaking to me through the bolted door of her modest north London home, where Levy was living when he attacked all three of his victims, his mother Marcia declined to say anything positive about her son. His solicitor also remained silent when I asked him for some kind of character reference.

In an effort to understand how this unremarkable 40-year-old man with a very low IQ has become one of London's most prolific sex attackers, I walked in his footsteps through the London streets where he has assaulted more than a dozen women.

Pictured: The B&M car park in Tottenham, north London - where Levy brutally raped one woman, leaving her for dead and strangled Sheryl to death

That B&M car park in Tottenham, north London - where Levy brutally raped one woman, leaving her for dead and strangled Sheryl to death - is a 12-minute walk from the two-up-two down house where he grew up.

As a young man, Levy rarely left the confines of the cramped terrace, preferring to hide away behind the thick black curtains of his mother's front room.

However, when he did venture out, he was known for leering at his female neighbours – including the elderly – and groping women on the Overground at his local White Hart Lane station.

A little further along the High Road, Levy was regularly seen at the B&M car park in the shadow of Tottenham Hotspur F.C's stadium.

But unlike the gleaming new stadium and the millionaire athletes who perform there, this sprawling pitch of tarmac attracts the margins of society and Levy felt at home.

This is where drugs are openly sold, traded and taken. During a visit at lunchtime last week two young men were touting narcotics. This is also where sex workers and their clients gather after dark.

Levy – who neighbours claims has no friends and whom court documents show counted his sexual encounters with prostitutes as trophies – knows this area well.

The killer, who first appeared in court some 15 years ago for receiving stolen goods, also stalked the streets of south London during his campaign of lust-filled terror, including the Aylesbury estate in Peckham.

It is a sprawling area of boarded-up tower blocks, notorious throughout the community as a centre of burglary, drug dealing and knife-crime. It is also well known as a place where illegal drugs are taken and illicit sex takes place.

Located on the edge of the area is also the bail hostel where Levy spent three months in 2023 after he was released from Brixton Prison following a conviction for carrying out sex attacks on two women, first at a party in Camden Town and later at the Notting Hill Carnival.

How many times he visited 'the Aylesbury', as this poverty-stricken housing estate is known, after he was allowed to return home to Tottenham, and went on the hunt is impossible to know.

But it is certainly an area with no shortage of potential victims.

During my visit there two weeks ago, I was approached by a young woman who described herself as a sex worker. Her eyes rolled back into her sockets as she spoke to me, one blacked and sore – while sipping from a can of super-strength cider, hidden inside a Lidl bag, before shuffling along the litter-strewn streets just off the Old Kent Road.

This is the sorry world Simon Levy inhabited and only he knows why he embarked on his vile and predatory pursuit of women.

His trial was an opportunity to offer some form of explanation or even apology to the families of his victims, not that it would ever be enough. Instead he hid behind his sunglasses, a coward to the end.