Caroline Crouch: Parents of murdered young mother speak of fury and grief at her death

The parents of Caroline Crouch, the British mother murdered by her husband in Athens, have spoken for the first time of their grief.

Susan and David Crouch said they were now caring for their one-year-old granddaughter Lydia, who was found lying beside the strangled body of Ms Crouch in the home she shared with her husband Babis Anagnostopoulos.

Helicopter pilot Mr Anagnostopoulos has been charged with killing his 20-year-old wife on 11 May and police said after a month of insisting she was suffocated by burglars who broke into their home he had now confessed to the crime.

Mr Crouch told The Daily Mail his wife Susan was interacting with baby Lydia just like she had raised Caroline herself two decades earlier.

“She plays with her continually when she is awake and is alert to the slightest sound when she is asleep. The household is centred on Lydia,” he said from his house on the Greek island of Alonissos.

“The comfort afforded to us by Lydia’s presence in the house is the one mitigating factor in this whole tragic affair.”

Liverpool-born Mr Crouch, who is 78, said his memory of finding out his daughter had been killed was still fresh.

“We had just finished breakfast when there was a loud hammering on the front door,’ he recalled.

“Several of our Greek friends were there in a state of great distress. It was at first difficult to understand what they were saying but eventually we made sense of them.

“It was as if an icy hand had reached into my chest and grabbed my heart. From then on I was virtually paralysed.”

Since Anagnostopoulos’s cover story of Ms Crouch dying during a violent robbery collapsed, Greeks have been speculating on the real motive for strangling his young wife.

The 33-year-old initially claimed he had snapped during an argument, but police later established he had tried hard to cover his tracks by disabling cameras in advance and murdered her while she was asleep.

Mr Crouch said: “I only want justice for my beautiful daughter who was killed in a most cowardly act.

“He knew that he was no match for her physically. She was young, fit and an accomplished kickboxer, so he took the memory card out of the internal CCTV system and suffocated her while she slept.

“I imagine that he will have a fine time explaining that to the killers he will be incarcerated with in Korydallos Prison, reputedly the worst jail in Europe.”