Friday 20 May 2022 10:37 PM Father of murdered Caroline Crouch reveals his heartbreak trends now
Visitors to the whitewashed villa with its views over the Aegean Sea still speak in whispers.
The sadness is pervasive. Laughter has been silenced. It is as if melancholy has seeped into the fabric of the house.
The only spark of joy comes from a young child who remains oblivious to the anguish. Her delight in everything around her is still unsullied by the awful truth.
‘Papoo,’ she calls, addressing her British grandfather David Crouch in Greek, and hugging him. David and wife Susan’s love for their sweet-faced granddaughter Lydia is the only reason they get up in the morning to face an otherwise ‘bleak and empty’ future.
For it is now a year since their daughter Caroline, 19, a British citizen, was murdered by her husband, helicopter pilot Babis Anagnostopoulos, 34, at their home in an upmarket Athens suburb.
This week, Anagnostopoulos was sentenced to 27 years for suffocating her as she slept next to their baby daughter Lydia, then faking a burglary during which he killed the family’s pet dog in an effort to cover up his heinous crime.
It is now a year since their daughter Caroline, 19, a British citizen, was murdered by her husband, helicopter pilot Babis Anagnostopoulos, 34, at their home in an upmarket Athens suburb
‘Now he has been sentenced to a long prison term, although it will not bring back my beautiful daughter,’ says David, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail. ‘A small consolation is the fact that his sentence will be served in Korydallos prison, the most squalid of prisons which makes Belmarsh in London seem like the Ritz.
‘He will be incarcerated with fellow murderers, but also perverts of every stripe. His polished manners and middle-class background will not serve him well in this cockroach- and rat-infested hellhole.’
Since the awful day last May when Caroline was murdered, Lydia has been the sole source of solace for Liverpool-born David, 79, a retired engineer, and Susan, 58, who are now raising her at their home on the remote Greek island of Alonnisos, where Caroline also grew up.
Her grandparents intend, as far as is possible, to eradicate Anagnostopoulos from Lydia’s life.
‘Soon Lydia will be old enough to start at the island nursery school, the same school that her mother attended,’ says David. ‘However, before that, I’ll change her last name to Caroline’s so she will never be associated with the murderous Anagnostopoulos. I’ll also ensure that he will never see his daughter again.’
However, the truth cannot be obliterated and he is steeling himself for the day when he has to tell his granddaughter the devastating facts about her mother’s death.
‘Someday, Lydia is going to ask where her mother is; it is a day that I am dreading. 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,’ he tells me.
Meanwhile, Lydia — 11 months old when her mother was murdered and now nearly two years old — remains a bittersweet blessing: everything about her reminds David of the daughter he lost.
‘When I look at her running around the house I’m transported back in time almost 20 years,’ he says. ‘That was about the time Caroline was starting to assert her independence. A feisty little girl, she always knew what she wanted, but she had the sweetest nature imaginable.
‘The physical resemblance is uncanny: a pretty face with the biggest dark eyes I’ve ever seen, inherited from her mother, just as Caroline inherited her eyes from her mother.
I wonder if he and Susan will raise Lydia to be as independent and resourceful as her spirited mother was. Caroline was fluent in Greek, French and Tagalog — her Filipina mother’s native language — and spoke ‘perfect, unaccented English’, says David
‘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. It makes me so sad that Caroline will never have the joy that she brought to Susan and me when she was that age.
‘Lydia chatters constantly, almost exclusively in Greek. She sleeps in Caroline’s old room in her cot. Unfortunately, she resolutely refuses to sleep alone, so Susan sleeps in the room with her in Caroline’s old bed. A poster of her mum’s favourite boy band, One Direction, still looks down on her.’
The reverberations of their loss are unimaginable. Susan suffers debilitating depression and does not talk at all about Caroline’s death.
Indeed, she barely speaks except to her granddaughter, around whom her whole life pivots.
She still gets up early every morning to pray at Caroline’s grave — just 80 yards away in the churchyard overlooking the sea next to the little chapel where Lydia was christened earlier this year — before returning home to immerse herself in the care of her granddaughter.
The daily rituals of bathing and feeding, playing and conversing with the little girl are what sustains her now.
‘Susan lavishes almost unbelievable care and attention on Lydia,’ David tells me. ‘I have had to hire a full-time maid to take care of all the other things that need doing around the house.’
He adds: ‘I am afraid that the Susan I’d known for almost 30 years is gone for ever. Caroline was the most important thing in her life, someone for whom she would have laid down her life in an instant.’
For David, grief has manifested itself as a physical pain, a dull, persistent ache.
‘The sickness that afflicts me is of the heart. It is broken over the loss of my daughter. When I first heard that she had been murdered — we thought then by robbers — it was as if an icy hand had reached into my chest and grabbed my heart. From then on I was virtually paralysed.’
Since then, he has also suffered a skin complaint so unnerving and incapacitating — it was as if all the skin on his back had been flayed — that it prevented him from attending the court case in Athens.
‘The doctor said she had seen nothing like it and arranged for me to go to hospital. I knocked that on the head straight away; hospitals are full of sick people,’ he tells me.
‘Besides, if I am going to die I want to go in my own house; looking out over the bright blue Aegean Sea, not in some miserable hospital ward full of old codgers.’
He still preserves his gallows humour. During the year since Caroline’s murder, David and I have kept up an intermittent correspondence, extracts from which, with his permission, I recount here.
Over the months he has oscillated between delight in Lydia, searing grief and regret that Caroline will never share the joy of her child, and
