Greek pilot and flight instructor Babis Anagnostopoulos, 33, confessed to killing his Anglo-Greek wife Caroline Crouch, 20, who died of suffocation on 11 May. The man initially claimed that the woman had been killed during a theft from their home on the outskirts of Athens. Revealing the inconsistencies in the pilot’s account was the analysis of data from a smartwatch worn by the victim, police investigators said. The man was indicted for murder. He was taken in handcuffs and a flak jacket to the Athens court where he will return next week to testify.
The case had kept Greece in suspense for weeks: the turning point after her husband’s confession made to the authorities shortly after attending a memorial service for his wife on the island of Alonissos, where the young woman had grown up. The BBC reports. It was Anagnostopoulos himself who had provided the police with the version of the attack at home, on 11 May last, by three burglars who, according to him, had also tied him up, while suffocating his wife Caroline and taking away 15 thousand euros in cash from the apartment, in the Athenian neighborhood of Glyka Nera, where the couple lived with their small child. A version that, however, had never fully convinced the investigators: there were no traces. Or in any case what was collected by the forensics did not coincide with the 33-year-old’s story. So it was technology that shed light on the incident: in the meantime, from Caroline’s smart watch it was possible to understand that the young woman’s heart was still beating at the time when her husband had declared that she had been killed. In addition, Anagnostopoulos’s phone activity tracker revealed that at the time he claimed to have been tied up and immobilized, he was instead wandering around the apartment. Sufficient indications to induce investigators to dig further, to insist, until the confession is obtained after eight hours of interrogation. However, the motive is not yet clear.