‘I wanted to raise our girl so I staged burglary after killing my wife,’ says pilot
THE husband of Caroline Crouch concocted an elaborate hoax that a gang killed his young wife because he was terrified of prison and “wanted to raise his daughter”, police revealed.
Babis Anagnostopoulos, 33, made the confession before appearing in a Greek court yesterday wearing a bulletproof vest. He was charged with murdering the 20-yearold British-born woman.
He was arrested after his story did not stack up.
Data from Caroline’s fitness watch showed her heart had stopped before he said the attack took place.
Under interrogation he cracked, telling officers: “I killed her. I will tell you everything in detail.
“I tied myself up. I did everything because when I realised I killed her, I thought of my child.”
Anagnostopoulos admitted smothering her with a pillow during a fight after she threatened to leave him with their baby girl. He placed the child
next to the body and killed the pet dog.
The arrest came after he hugged his grief-stricken mother-in-law during a memorial service on the island of Alonissos last week.
Anagnostopoulos told mourners he had been asked to identify a “new suspect” but police whisked him away for eight hours of questioning.
Detectives say he concocted the story about a break-in and spent the pre-dawn hours staging the raid, including drowning the family’s husky puppy. His story also included lurid allegations that three gun-toting Albanian gangsters had tied up him and his wife, threatened to shoot their infant daughter, strangled Caroline to death, then fled with £10,000 from a safe.
But data from his phone showed him moving from the attic to the basement of the house, despite claiming to have spent all night tied up.
The confession comes five weeks after the husband led mourners at Caroline’s funeral and read a eulogy while standing over her grave.
The pair had met while he was on holiday on Alonissos, where Caroline had lived with her parents since the age of eight. They wed in 2018, and she gave birth to their daughter in June last year.
But a friend said he became “a jealous and controlling husband” and Caroline had demanded a divorce on the night she was killed.
Five days after the death on May 11, he posted online a picture from their wedding with the message: “Always together. Farewell my love.”