CAROLINE Crouch’s dad has said he’s “dreading” the day he has to tell his granddaughter her mum was brutally murdered by her father.
Babis Anagnostopoulos, 34, was jailed for life for suffocating his 20-year-old wife to death at their home in Greece in May last year.
3
3
Caroline was horrifically tortured and suffocated with a pillow in front of 11-month-old daughter Lydia as she slept at the couple’s house in an upmarket Athens suburb.
Anagnostopoulos said the couple had been the target of a robbery, going to elaborate lengths to create a fictional crime scene and giving interviews to media, before cops saw through his lies.
Caroline’s heartbroken dad David, 79, and his 58-year-old wife Susan are now bringing up Lydia as their home on a Greek island.
“Someday, Lydia is going to ask where her mother is – it is a day that I am dreading,” he told he Daily Mail.
“She has to know and no amount of hedging around the subject is going to work.
“One day she will find out the unvarnished truth, so it is far better that she learns it from her loving grandparents than pieces it together bit by bit.”
David said that Lydia is beginning to look like more her mother as the days pass.
“Every time I sit and watch Lydia playing I’m hit with a pang of grief as I see her mother in every movement and gesture she makes,” he said.
“It makes me so sad that Caroline will never have the joy that she brought to Susan and me when she was that age.”
Most read in News
He said that one small consolation is that Anagnostopoulos “will be incarcerated with fellow murderers, but also perverts of every stripe” in a hellhole prison.
Anagnostopoulos claimed his family had been targeted by an Albanian gang and even hung the family dog by his leash from a banister in an attempt to stage a fictional crime scene.
But his sick cover-up was rumbled after police pulled together a stack of digital evidence that disrupted his timeline of the alleged botched robbery.
They found that Anagnostopoulos had in fact been active during the time he was supposedly tied up and Caroline’s heart had stopped beating hours before he claimed the gang had broken in.
Detectives also revealed the security camera had been tampered with earlier than the pilot claimed, the couple had been arguing on that fateful night, and Caroline had tried to book a hotel to flee.
But the 34-year-old was still desperate to fool the court throughout the harrowing six-day trial which has entranced the world.
During his debut in the dock, he insisted that everything happened “in the heat of the moment” and claimed he “still loves his wife.”
3
