THIRD UPDATE: Murder He Wrote

Jeff––Saturday

 

Nineteen months ago, I first reported on a murder so horrendous that it shook the Greek people to the core. [See, Murder, He Wrote for an extensive description of events.] So much so, that Greek National TV interrupted coverage of the Euro football championships to broadcast details of the confession.

 

It involved a 20-year-old British-Greek wife and mother, Caroline Crouch, murdered on May 11, 2021 in the presence of her pilot/flight instructor husband, Babis Anagnostopoulos, and 11-month-old baby.  The original story, as told by the husband, placed the blame on a band of brutal home invasion thieves claimed to have entered their suburban Athens home at random.  He accused them of being Eastern European foreigners—so ruthless that they also strangled the couple’s dog.  The crime spread fear across the nation over the potential risk to each family’s safety in its own home.

 

On June 16, 2021, after eight hours of police questioning, Husband confessed to the murder, claiming his wife told him that she was planning to leave him and take their baby with her before he “blurred” and killed her. In other words, a crime of passion, not premeditated.

Nine months ago, in an update to my original post, [See, UPDATE: Murder, He Wrote] I described in detail a new twist asserted by Husband on the verge of trial.  He now claimed to have acted “in a fit of rage” over Caroline’s “mistreatment” of their baby daughter and that he’d acted to protect the baby. [Husband’s subsequent changed trial strategy, the outcome of the trial, and ironic twists brought on by his wild story were described three months ago in Second Update: Murder He Wrote.]

The press reported Husband as desperate to avoid the life sentence and minimum twenty-year imprisonment imposed for premeditated murder. Not to mention an additional likely ten-year sentence for killing their dog.

In my mind, I saw a far more compelling reason behind Husband’s desperation to keep secret his true motive for killing his wife. I alluded to what I saw as his motive in this somewhat opaque reference to a popular TV series:

“Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see another shoe drop—or, for you Breaking Bad fans, make that a pair of sneakers laced together and hanging from a power line.  But that’s for another update.

The time for that update is now: Husband was a helicopter pilot flying in and out of Mykonos (which I’d heard from locals), and from that I surmised he’d killed his wife out of some fear she’d expose him as a drug smuggler and in so doing put his own life at risk to those who paid him to transport their drugs.

I did not write that back then, because it was based on pure conjecture on my part…but that no longer is so.  Here is the story as reported earlier this month by a colleague, Helena Smith, in The Guardian, in which she describes the circumstances surrounding a letter written in prison by Husband to his wife’s father admitting he murdered her because “he got involved in drug smuggling.”

What follows is the article from The Guardian:

The father of Caroline Crouch, the British woman who was murdered by her Greek helicopter pilot husband as she lay asleep in their Athens home, has claimed his daughter died because her self-confessed killer got involved in drug smuggling.

Speaking publicly for the first time, David Crouch, 79, said his incarcerated son-in law, Babis Anagnostopoulos, had gone so far as to give a detailed account of the events that led to Caroline’s death in a typewritten letter.

“I have a letter from Babis telling me what happened,” he told the local TV station ANT1.

The revelations are the latest twist in a crime that has long gripped Greece

For nearly six weeks after the killing in May 2021, Anagnostopoulos maintained that burglars had broken into the couple’s suburban maisonette, used duct tape to tie them up, fatally smothered the 19-year-old Briton and hanged her beloved puppy from the villa’s bannister. It was only when confronted by inconsistencies in his version of events that he finally confessed.

Before being found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison, Anagnostopoulos told a Greek court that he had killed his wife in a “blurred state of mind” after a heated late-night row.

 

The killing, described by a state coroner as a prolonged and agonising death, was among dozens of femicides in Greece that year.

 

David Crouch, a retired gas and oil executive who lives on the island of Alonissos in the Greek Sporades, alleged it was the helicopter pilot’s involvement in drug running that was behind his daughter’s death.

“I’ll tell you why he murdered Caroline in front of his child … he was involved with a drugger’s gang,” he said. “There was a restaurant that Caroline and Babis used to go to, and the man there who owned the restaurant was involved in drugs. He spoke to Babis and he told him that the gang he was involved in needed a helicopter pilot and it was one job for which he’d be paid a lot of money … Babis was very stupid. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, he told Caroline.”

The Briton reacted by threatening to walk out on him immediately, her father claimed. He said the gang told Anagnostopoulos that he would have to get rid of his wife.

“And so in the end he killed her. That was the only reason he killed her, because he thought if he didn’t, both he and Caroline would be killed by the drug gang,” Crouch said.

The revelations come less than two weeks before a custody battle over their daughter Lydia’s guardianship resumes in a Greek court. Anagnostopoulos’s schoolteacher mother and civil engineer father have appealed against a decision giving the Crouch family exclusive care of the child.

Anagnostopoulos, 35, who is being held in a high-security prison in central Greece, is also seeking to overturn his sentence before an appellate court next month.

When asked for a response to the allegations, Anagnostopoulos’s lawyer, Alexandros Papaioannidis, said Crouch had been motivated by the upcoming hearings. “They were never included in the case file and do not reflect reality,” he said Thursday. “Where is the letter? The father has his own reasons to make such claims.”

--Helena Smith

I concluded my second update with this line: Stay tuned for further plot developments…

I repeat that here, for as reported in another publication discussing the letter, The Greek City Times, “He [Husband] is currently being held in Korydallos Prison, which is known as the toughest jail in Greece, and is said to be unpopular among other inmates.”

––Jeff