The husband of Caroline Crouch was sentenced to life in jail on Monday for her premeditated murder by a court in Athens.
Following a six-day trial, a panel of three full-time judges and four jurors found that Babis Anagnostopoulos, 34, suffocated Caroline Crouch, aged nineteen, to death and had planned the crime in the hours leading up to it.
The court recognized no mitigating circumstances in serving him with the highest possible sentence while Anagnostopoulos was also served eleven years for killing his wife’s pet dog, Roxy, and six months for committing perjury several times. The sentences follow the leading prosecutor’s proposals. He was also fined 21,000 euros.
Anagnostopoulos had confessed to the murder but claimed he killed his wife, a young mother of nineteen, in a fit of rage on May 11, 2021. The prosecution, however, said he committed the crime with a clear mind and in a vindictive and premeditated manner, staging it to look like a robbery gone wrong.
Murder of Caroline Crouch stunned Greece
The court took just over an hour to reach its decision which was announced shortly before 5 pm local time.
Anagnostopoulos stared straight ahead dispassionately as the judge delivered the verdict.
The murder of the nineteen-year-old young mother, Caroline Crouch, on May 11, 2021, shocked the Greek public.
The prosecutor said that Anagnostopoulos, who has already confessed to the murder, was “in a calm frame of mind” and that his actions were vindictive and premeditated.
“He put the child to sleep on the couch then went up to kill [Caroline]. This refutes the claim of an agitated state of mind and shows premeditation,” the prosecutor said, highlighting the fact that the defendant had then placed the baby on the body of the dead mother when staging the supposed robbery in order to evoke sympathy.
The prosecutor cited evidence from the smartwatch that Caroline was wearing, which proved that she had been asleep when he started to choke her. The watch also provided evidence of how long it took Anagnostopoulos to kill Caroline Crouch.
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