The Greek Pilot

Caroline Crouch had a British father and a Filipina mother and grew up on the island of Alonnisos. She was fifteen when she met Babis Anagnostopoulos, a helicopter pilot twelve years older. They married in Portugal days after her eighteenth birthday in 2019, and their daughter Lydia was born the following June. By the spring of 2021 Caroline had told a therapist she wanted out and was quietly planning to leave with the baby.

In the early hours of May 11, 2021, at the couple’s house in the Athens suburb of Glyka Nera, Anagnostopoulos smothered her with a pillow while their baby was in the room. He then built a robbery around it: he hanged the family’s puppy from a banister, ransacked the house, bound himself with rope and tape, and called police to report masked intruders. For five weeks he played the widower for the cameras and carried Caroline’s coffin on Alonnisos.

The story failed on data. Caroline’s smart watch recorded her heart stopping at about 4:11 a.m., more than an hour before the time he gave. The home camera’s memory card had been pulled out at 1:20 a.m., and his phone showed activity while he claimed to be tied up. He confessed on June 17, 2021. An Athens court convicted him of premeditated murder in May 2022, and an appeals court upheld the verdict in September 2023.