Murdered British mother Caroline Crouch ‘died in agony’, coroner’s report claims 

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Data taken from murdered British mother Caroline Crouch’s smartwatch has revealed her pulse rocketed 50 per cent at 4.05am as her husband suffocated her with a pillow.  

Babis Anagnostopoulos, 33, admitted killing 20-year-old Caroline in a fit of rage after she threatened to divorce him and take their baby daughter Lydia with her.

Caroline ‘died in agony’ as Babis suffocated her with a pillow for five minutes, a doctor told a coroner during the inquest into her death.

Babis said he ‘panicked’ when he saw she was dead and – once he realised hiding her body was not an option – he staged a fake robbery because he ‘wanted to raise’ their daughter out of prison.

Data from Caroline’s smartwatch foiled Babi’s ruse, as it revealed she died hours before she was allegedly killed by robbers. Now it has been revealed she was suffocated for five minutes after she was attacked while she was sleeping.

At 3.58am, a few minutes before her pulse abruptly increased at 4.05am, the mother-of-one’s heart rate reflected a person who was fast asleep, the coroner’s report stated according to Greek media site Amna.

A doctor said: ‘At 04:05 her pulse increases abruptly by 50 per cent up from a state of sleep. I think at that time the person was in an extreme state of mental or physical stress.’ They concluded ‘the death process took place from 4:05am to 4:11am’.

Black belt kickboxer Caroline fought her husband before she died, it was previously reported. In police interviews, Babis claimed the British mother was ‘aggressive’, telling police ‘you cannot imagine my love for this girl’. He claimed Caroline ‘threw the child in the crib’ and hit him, causing him to lose his temper on the night she was killed.

Harrowing diary entries made by Caroline – which form part of a 26-page police file – paint a picture of a violent and unhappy marriage, with her vowing to leave him at several points. 

Babis also told police he killed the couple’s dog to make the robbery ruse more plausible because ‘no one would have thought that I could harm a dog’, Greek media reports.

Neighbours recalled hearing the animal – a seven-month-old husky puppy – crying at the time, but not barking, which alarmed them.  

In his testimony to police, Babis said: ‘I thought of making one last attempt so that [Lydia] might at least grow up with her father. 

‘I thought of disappearing [Caroline’s] body, but it was impossible for me to do so. Just looking at her, I cried. 

‘The next thing I thought was to say that someone else did it. I would tell the police that robbers entered the house. I was in a panic. I did not know what to do. I thought that in order to look more plausible and to believe that rogue robbers had entered, I would have to hurt the dog. 

‘No one would have thought that I could harm a dog. With heartache I hung the dog leash on the railings of the stairs.’

Diary entries made by Caroline reveal the British wife first told her husband she would leave him in July 2020, when their baby was a month old.

She admitted she wanted to leave before she fell pregnant but changed her mind, saying: ‘I didn’t want my daughter to grow up without her parents’.

The heartbreaking entries – published on a Greek news website – also told of bitter fights between the pair, with Caroline recalling one where she ‘hit him’ and ‘broke down a door’.

Police revealed her pilot husband’s grovelling murder confession just moments before he appeared in court wearing a bullet-proof vest yesterday.

There, he was charged with Caroline’s murder and the death of the family pet that police say he killed as part of his cover-up in the Glyka Nera suburb of Athens. He faces life in prison if convicted.

Just hours before his confession on Wednesday, Babis was seen hugging Caroline’s distraught mother at a memorial service, where he ‘was crying’ while looking at his late wife’s photographs, witnesses said.

Caroline’s friend Kiki Anagnostou, a former English literature teacher, told the Sunday Mirror: ‘His behaviour at her funeral was bordering on cold-blooded. I remember he held the baby in his arms the whole time. He didn’t let anyone else carry her, not for a minute.’

Another friend said: ‘Babis made us all cry with his funeral speech. He looked icy but we thought he was just in shock.’

It was there that police approached Babis and asked him to follow them, claiming they had made an arrest and he needed to identify the suspect. Babis begged police to let him visit Caroline’s grave first – but they refused. 

The tragic victim’s mother ‘never suspected’ Babis as the killer. A family friend told local media: ‘Susanna is very angry. She is full of anger and a lot of questions. 

‘She can not manage it, it is as if she is in a nightmare. On Babis she had placed all her hopes, she saw him as a continuation of her daughter. She had no idea, she had never suspected Babis.’

In December 2019 – while Caroline was pregnant with their daughter who was born in June the following year – one diary entry reads: ‘I fought with Babi again. This time it was serious.

‘I hit him, I cursed at him and he broke down the door. All I wanted was for him to ask how I am when I woke up. I woke up so weak and tired.

‘I am thinking of leaving. I am thinking of going to my sister, I don’t know if I can keep going with Babi. I love him so much that I can’t leave him even though this relationship hurts me.’

Then, in 2019, she writes: ‘Last night we fought with Babi because I had a meltdown because of my hormones.

‘I yelled at him and hit him and told him I don’t want our baby… I am not well, I am very upset, I know he would never hurt my baby. My love for her is stronger than anything in the world.’

And in July 2020 – when Lydia was one month old – an entry read: ‘Today my little one is a month old – it’s also the day I told Babi I want to leave…I feel awful.’

She says she thought of leaving even before falling pregnant but, despite finding a house in Athens to go to, she stayed because she ‘didn’t want my daughter to grow up without her parents’.

Throughout the diary extracts, Caroline says the couple’s blazing rows were due to her hormones, which she was ’embarrassed’ about.  

Recalling the moment Babis’s story finally collapsed after a six-week goose chase for a gang of masked raiders that he had dreamed up, police chief Petros Tzeferis said he told detectives: ‘I tied myself up.  

‘I did everything because when I realised I killed her, I thought of my child.’

Police announced late Thursday that Babis had confessed to smothering Caroline during a fight at their home in the early hours of May 11. 

Detectives say he then concocted an elaborate story about a break-in and spent the pre-dawn hours staging the raid, including lurid allegations that three men had tied up him and his wife, threatened their infant daughter with a gun, strangled Caroline to death, then fled with £10,000 in a case which shocked Greece.

But detectives now say it was nothing more than a fabrication which fell apart when data collected from a fitness tracker on Caroline’s wrist showed her heart had stopped beating before the alleged break-in took place. 

More tracking data from Babis’s phone also showed him moving from the attic to the basement of the house and back again, despite claiming to have spent all night tied to the bed.

And data from a security camera at the home showed its memory card had been removed at 1.20am – again, hours before Babis claimed the break-in happened. 

It was this evidence that prompted Greek police to drag the father away from his wife’s memorial service, where he had been continuing to play the part of the grieving widower.

He was taken by boat to a neighbouring island before being loaded into a helicopter and flown back to Athens – and it was during this journey that he seemed to grasp the truth of what police were up to, Protothema reports.

After arriving at police headquarters, Babis was taken to an interrogation room and seemed to understand that he was being questioned as a suspect rather than a witness, a senior officer said.

After a short opening exchange Babis is said to have snapped and told investigators: ‘I killed her. I will tell you everything in detail.’

‘It really didn’t take long for him to confess,’ said a senior investigator. ‘He said he had been fighting with Caroline for some time and they were fighting that night, exchanging heated text messages while he was on the ground floor and she was in the attic.

‘At one point,’ he said, ‘when Caroline texted him that he was ‘stupid,’ he lost his cool. He disabled the home’s surveillance camera, discarding its memory card, before charging up to the attic where he had another heated argument with Caroline, pushing her onto a bed there, and smothering her to death.’ 

The officer said Babis recounted the story of his relationship with Caroline, from their first meeting while he was on holiday in Alonissos to falling in love and then their marriage in 2018.

But he said their marriage had devolved into daily arguments driven by his fear that she was planning to leave him, which culminated in her ordering him out of the house and asking for a divorce.

Babis is said to have told officers that he threw her down on the bed and pressed her face into a pillow until she passed out, before realising he had killed her.

He then drowned the family dog in an area outside the home and removed the CCTV memory card which he snapped and flushed down the toilet.

After his confession was over, police left Babis in the company of two psychologists and then announced his guilt to the world in a statement at 9.36pm local time on Thursday evening. 

‘Suspicions loomed from the start,’ Police Chief Petros Tzeferis said. ‘But we lacked the hard evidence.’

Still, weeks into the investigation, a step-counter detected on the husband’s smartphone, yielded the most damning piece of evidence, authorities said, quickly shifting the focus of the investigation onto the husband.

‘It showed that he was moving during the time he claimed to have been immobilized by the robbers,’ said Penelope Maniatis, director of the Greek Police’s forensics department. ‘This was the first major inconsistency created in his testimony and the first clear suspicion created about his potential involvement.’

Coupled with other digital forensic finds, including from the fitness watch, investigators managed to establish a case against the husband.

An examination of Crouch’s mobile phone, authorities said, also showed that on the night of the crime, the 20-year-old mother was trying to book herself and daughter, Lydia, into a hotel room.

‘I never wanted to lie,’ Anagnostopoulos said in the course of his marathon confession late Thursday. ‘I did what I did to evade arrest; to protect my daughter.’

The fate of the 11-month old infant remained unclear. Authorities refused to say whether she would be placed in the care of social services or her grandparents – Crouch’s Filipino mother and British father.

Babis said in his statement: ‘That night we were fighting early. At one point she threw the child in the crib and told me to leave the house. 

‘She pushed me and punched me. I lost my temper, I suffocated her with the pillow. Τhen I made up the robbery.’

Laying out what they believe to be the true timeline of events on the morning of May 11 to news site Protothema police said a downstairs CCTV camera had captured its last images shortly after midnight, as Babis sat on the sofa downstairs cradling his daughter and arguing over text with Caroline, who was upstairs.

They say the camera’s memory card was removed at 1.20am while the argument was still ongoing, and which continued for another two hours and 40 minutes.

Then, at precisely 4.01am, Caroline’s fitness tracker captured an intense burst of heart activity, which is when they believe the couple came to blows.

The activity continued for another 10 minutes, until Caroline’s heart stopped beating around 4.11 am.  

The confession comes five weeks after Babis led mourners at Ms Crouch’s funeral and read a eulogy while standing over her grave.

‘Our loved ones are the most important people to us all,’ he said at the time – wiping away tears while holding their baby daughter in his arms.

‘You should always look after your loved ones and enjoy your time together.’

On social media, the young couple appeared to enjoy a blessed life – 20-year-old Caroline posting snaps of the couple with their daughter, or else showing off their idyllic-seeming life in Greece as she wandered on sunny beaches in bikinis.

The pair had met while Babis was on holiday to the Greek island of Alonissos where Caroline, who was born in the UK, had lived with her parents since the age of eight.

They were married in 2018, and she gave birth to their first child – a daughter – in June last year.

But a friend said last night that the idyllic images were a mirage – in fact, Babis was a jealous and controlling husband and Caroline was deeply unhappy.

‘She could not have the time she wanted with her friends and she was constantly expressing her complaints about his behavior,’ a source told Greek news site Ethnos.

It was a fact that police had also uncovered during their investigation, after speaking with a psychologist who was treating both Babis and Caroline in separate sessions. 

At the time, it was reported that Caroline was suffering from post-natal depression. Officers did not say what Babis was being treated for. 

Texts found by police on the couple’s phones also reinforced suspicions of a less-than happy marriage, with police saying messages exchanged in English showed that one had called the other ‘stupid.’

On the night of the murder, Caroline had allegedly messaged a friend saying that she was leaving Babis.

Phone data also showed that Caroline had attempted to book herself into a hotel on the night she died, detectives said.  

Police also revealed on Thursday that officers had ‘immediately’ suspected Babis of committing the murder, after noticing his ‘cold’ demeanor when they arrived at the crime scene on the morning of May 11.

One officer even told how he took Babis’s daughter away from him and handed the girl to her grandmother out of fear that he might harm the girl, Protothema reports. 

But detectives agreed to pursue the burglary theory while keeping their suspicions about Babis under wraps to avoid ‘spooking’ him.

That included allowing him to attend Wednesday’s memorial service with Caroline’s family.

Hariklia Theodorou, a cafe owner who employed Babis before he changed careers to become a pilot, was at the service and recalled how he was weeping and looking at pictures of Caroline before the police arrived.

‘I remember the look on his face, he was puzzled. He did not expect it,’ she told Greek media.

”Hey guys, let me go to my wife’s grave’ he said, but they told him ‘No, Babi, you have to follow us now, a man has been arrested who fits the characteristics of Caroline ‘s killer and we have to go there to identify him.’

‘Babis did not object and followed them.’ 

His confession ends a month-long investigation into what authorities billed ‘a near-perfect murder’ for the lack of evidence the killer left behind. 

Anagnostopoulos, who trained as a helicopter pilot in Liverpool, had married Miss Crouch in May 2018 after they met while he was on holiday to Alonissos.

Miss Crouch, a student at the University of Piraeus, had a British passport. She moved to Alonissos with her mother Susan Dela Cuesta and father David Crouch, 78, when she was eight.

Three days after her death, every shop, bar and restaurant on the island of Alonissos closed as its 2,000 residents laid to rest the British woman they had adopted as their own in a hilltop cemetery overlooking the Aegean.

Earlier, her killer had brazenly addressed the mourners from the altar of the island’s Greek orthodox church.

Wiping away a crocodile tear, he told them: ‘I was very lucky that I knew her and she loved me. I was very lucky for all the moments we had together.

‘One thing that makes me even more sad than her death is the fact that our daughter will grow up without remembering her beautiful mother, who was the joy of life, though our daughter will always be with me and with all of us.’

As the wife he’d killed was buried, Anagnostopoulos – still clutching their infant daughter to his chest –hugged Miss Crouch’s distraught mother.

Anagnostopoulos spent 37 days expertly playing the part of the grieving widower, providing the police with a detailed account of the robbery and even descriptions of the intruders.

He claimed that three men had broken into the house through a downstairs window, disabling security cameras before strangling the family dog on their way upstairs to the couple’s bedroom where they found them asleep.

Babis claimed he was blindfolded and gagged, then tied to a bedpost with his back towards Caroline, who was also restrained.

He said the men had somehow known the couple were keeping £10,000 in cash at the house, hidden inside a Monopoly box, which they had planned to use for building works on a new plot of land they had bought.

Babis said he quickly gave up the location of the money to avoid an altercation, but the men were not satisfied and began demanding more valuables. 

Through a gap in his blindfold he claimed to have seen the men – who he said spoke Greek to him but a foreign language among themselves – point a gun at his baby daughter’s head while making their threats.

That had caused Caroline to scream, he said, after which the burglars bundled her to the bed and suffocated her before fleeing the property and leaving him tied up.

He claimed to have spent hours in that position, before managing to free himself just enough to crawl to a phone and dial a neighbour’s number with his nose.

The neighbour then summoned police, who arrived to find the grisly scene. 

Police had initially pursued the burglary narrative, and even arrested a suspect – a Georgian with a history of violent burglaries who tried to leave the country on a fake passport – but failed to link him to the crime. 

DNA evidence collected from underneath Caroline’s fingernails as she fought her attacker has also proved to be inconclusive.  

But the investigation now appears to have been a ruse, concocted so that Babis would remain calm and stay in Greece while they pursued him as the real suspect.

During that time, Babis had given several interviews to the media while allegedly playing the grieving husband – telling reporters ‘imagine how I feel’ when questioned about the tragedy.

He was also frequently pictured with Caroline’s parents, even hugging her mother at the funeral which took place last month.

Babis had also sat down for two lengthy interview session with police, sticking to his story about the break-in both times.

Suspicions around him only crept into public view a few weeks ago, when it emerged the police had interviewed the couple’s therapist.

At the time, detectives said they had uncovered ‘vital evidence’ about Babis and Caroline’s relationship that they believed would help solve the case.

Babis is expected to be formally charged with murder on Friday. It is unclear whether he will enter a plea at the same time.