Killer pilot’s macabre charade for police

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Officers found Caroline Crouch dead on a bed in the pair’s home with her hands tied behind her back. The couple’s 11-month-old daughter Lydia was touching her body and staring silently, the court was told.

Husband Babis Anagnostopoulos sat in a chair, his hands and legs tied in front with tape over his eyes and mouth.

He claimed that thieves had strangled his wife, hanged her dog Roxy and fled with £13,000.

The court was told Caroline was smothered with a pillow after she threatened to divorce him.

The Greek flier posed as a grieving widower for weeks then confessed in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Police officer Christos Vardikos told the Athens court he went to the home in the smart Glyka Nera suburb last May. He said: “The woman had her arms tied behind her back.

“As soon as the defendant was untied, the first thing he did was sit on the bed, poking the woman and asked, ‘Honey, are you OK?'”.

The policeman checked Caroline, 20, and told Anagnostopoulos: “It’s over, she’s dead”. The pilot hugged Lydia but officers took her back as “he was rocking her too hard”.

Police were struck by the helicopter pilot’s demeanour. Mr Vardikos said he was “too calm. Something did not feel right.We told him not to touch Caroline but he kept on poking her. It was as if he was acting.

“In my 20 years of experience, I have never come across anything like this. But I never thought that he had made the whole thing up at that stage.”

His police colleague Kleanthis Antonopoulos added: “His reactions were very cold. We were more shocked than he was.”

The death of Liverpool-born Caroline stunned Greece. Its government offered a £250,000 reward for the arrest of her killers.

But a fitness tracker revealed her heart had stopped before the alleged break-in.

Other devices in the home showed Anagnostopoulos, 33, had moved from the cellar to the attic at a time when he claimed to be tied up.

The flier admitted killing Caroline in a “crime of passion”.

He is charged with premeditated murder, two counts of perverting the course of justice and Greece’s first-ever charge of animal murder, and faces up to 10 years in jail if convicted.

The hearing continues.

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