The Greek pilot who allegedly confessed to strangling his British wife in May as she slept in their Athens home beside the couple’s baby should be tried for premeditated murder, according to charges made public on Thursday.
The public prosecutor handling the case also recommended that Babis Anagnostopoulos be charged with lying to police after claiming for 37 days that the death of his wife, Caroline Crouch, was the result of a botched burglary.
In a 24-page report, excerpts of which were published by the Greek press, the prosecutor, Giorgos Noulis, said the UK-trained pilot had a “premeditated plan” when he killed the 20-year-old.
Anagnostopoulos reportedly told police after eight hours of questioning that he had committed the crime in a fit of rage, denying it was premeditated. The pilot, imprisoned pending trial in the capital’s high-security Korydallos prison, claimed he was thrown into a “blurred state” after his young wife threatened to divorce him. But Noulis described him as being in a “calm state of mind”.
“He had no inhibition to go through with the act despite the fact that she was the mother of his child,” he was quoted as saying in the report. “The victim was just 20 years old, while he was 13 years older and should have been her protector.”
The prosecutor also recommended that he be tried for the crime of animal abuse after allegedly confessing to choking the family’s seven-month-old puppy by hanging it from its own leash as part of the attempt to make the crime look like a burglary.
The killing of Crouch in May – one of 12 femicides to be reported so far this year – shocked Greece. Police launched a countrywide search for the “ruthless gang of foreign thieves” that the pilot blamed for the tragedy. Anagnostopoulos said he had been tied up and blindfolded when his wife was killed.
In a rare step, authorities offered a €300,000 bounty for information that might lead to the murderers.
Anagnostopoulos was brought in for a final round of questioning – and arrested – after police analysis of Crouch’s smartwatch, combined with data downloaded from his own mobile phone, conflicted with his version of events.
Citing a coroner’s inquest, the prosecutor described Crouch’s death as “agonising”, saying the process of asphyxiation lasted five minutes and induced a state of “physical and psychic stress” in her during her last moments. The young woman had been asleep for two and a half hours, he said, and was “unsuspecting”.
The daughter of a retired oil and gas executive, Crouch was raised on the small island of Alonissos in the Sporades.
She met Anagnostopoulos in her mid-teens before marrying him in Portugal at the age of 18.
Thanassis Haramanis, the family’s lawyer, told the Guardian that he expected the trial to take place next year in what would be lightning speed for a judicial system that is notoriously slow. “We believe it will be listed some time between May and September,” he said. “We are optimistic.”
In a separate development on Thursday, an Athens court awarded custody of the couple’s child to Caroline’s mother, Susan, revoking any parental rights the pilot may have had as her father, and granting limited visitation rights to his parents.
• The headline of this article was amended on 12 November 2021 to clarify the prosecutor’s recommendation.
