Sweet-faced Lydia Crouch, dressed as a Greek goddess and smiling shyly for the camera, is the image of her late mum Caroline.
It is a profound relief to her maternal grandparents that she also shares her mother’s kind heart and caring personality.
‘She seems to have inherited Caroline’s intrinsic goodness and this is all I care about,’ says her grandfather, retired engineer David Crouch.
‘Nothing will ever assuage the pain of my daughter’s death but I have great hopes for Lydia. She is sustaining us through a bleak and empty future.’
Lydia recently turned five years old – she celebrated this small milestone with a pool party for all her classmates – and with her sunny disposition she is as happy and popular as she is blissfully unaware of the unspeakable tragedy that overshadows her young life.
Just over four years ago, on May 11, 2021, her father, Greek helicopter pilot Babis Anagnostopoulos, suffocated his wife – Lydia’s mother – as she slept in their home in an exclusive enclave in Athens. It was a murder so abhorrent, so cowardly, so cynically orchestrated, that it shocked the world.
Anagnostopoulos, 37, now serving 27 years in a Greek jail for his crime, protested his innocence for more than a month, claiming robbers had broken into their home, killing the family dog, stealing £10,000 cash and £20,000 worth of jewellery, then suffocating Caroline.
In fact, Anagnostopoulos faked the break-in, hanging their rescue puppy Roxy by its lead before smothering his wife. He then placed 11-month-old Lydia on the bed beside her mother’s lifeless body before binding his own hands and covering his mouth with duct tape.
Caroline Crouch with her baby daughter, Lydia, and her husband and killer, Babis Anagnostopoulos
Lydia now lives with her grandmother and is close to her extended family
Today, British-born David, 82, who lives on the Greek island of Alonnisos where he and his Filipina wife Susan, 60, raised Caroline – just 19 when her promising young life was so cruelly cut short – sheds fresh light on the possible motive for his daughter’s murder, which Anagnostopoulos has always attributed, improbably, to a ‘brain storm’.
Instead, David believes his daughter’s killer was involved with a gang of ruthless drug-traffickers.
His evidence is a letter he says Anagnostopoulos wrote to Susan – begging forgiveness and explaining how he got involved with the gang – which his parents smuggled out of the prison where their son is incarcerated.
And as David releases his adorable photo of his ‘little treasure’ Lydia, exclusively to the Royale, he also sends heartfelt thanks to our generous readers, as well as to EasyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, for helping to fund her education at a private school near to her home, through many hundreds of donations.
Lydia was still just a toddler when David and Susan, granted care of their granddaughter after Caroline’s murder, decided she should be raised in Susan’s native Philippines.
It is there – in the small seaside town where Susan herself grew up, far removed from Greece and its painful associations – that Lydia now lives with her grandmother, surrounded by her loving extended family of great aunts, aunts (Caroline’s half-sisters, to whom she was close) and young cousins.
That David is not also with Lydia is a profound sadness to him. Since Caroline’s death, the enormity of the Crouches’ shared tragedy has put an intolerable strain on their marriage. Susan is now estranged from him but he hopes the separation is temporary and they remain in communication about Lydia.
But their mourning took different forms. David wanted to talk and shared his memories of Caroline with me in an interview soon after her murder. He was voluble about the daughter who was sporty and academic, and who brought so much joy to his retirement.
‘She was presented with the scholar-of-the-year award by the island’s mayor so often it became quite embarrassing,’ he tells me.
Susan, meanwhile, retreated into silence. She has always been too consumed by her sorrow to contemplate talking about it. Her life has revolved round the care of Lydia.
She drew comfort from her granddaughter’s proximity, sleeping with her in Caroline’s girlhood bed each night when she was a toddler, posters of her favourite band, One Direction, looking over them.
Lydia, in those early months, ‘clung to her grandmother like a limpet’. Now she is a lively, independent schoolgirl. Attending lessons in the Philippines with pupils drawn from a large international community, she has been told she was born in Greece, and only that her mother has died.
‘She has no concept of what that means and accepts it without comment,’ says David.
Anagnostopoulos speaks to the press after his wife was found dead in their home
He suffocated Caroline as she slept in their home in an exclusive enclave in Athens
A few months back, her class celebrated the United Nations, inviting pupils to come to school in the traditional dress of their country.
‘Neither Susan nor I had any idea what the traditional Greek dress for a girl might be but we had seen plenty of pictures of Greek goddesses. So that is how Lydia dressed for her photo, and to avoid confusion with goddesses from any other part of the world, she wore a sash saying ‘Greece’,’ he says.
He describes the little girl’s daily rituals: ‘She walks to school with Susan every day unless it’s raining, when Susan drives her. She expresses no curiosity as to why she looks different from other children in the town – who have straight, jet-black hair, while hers is mid-brown and wavy – any more than do the other children at her school.
‘Nor does she express any wonder at the fuss shopkeepers and other locals make over her because of her light hair and complexion.’
Ever-present, however, is the shadow of Caroline’s murder and the harrowing fact that Lydia’s father killed her. As she grows up, enveloped by love, David is acutely aware that these stark, unbearable truths will inevitably intrude on her young life at some point.
He is frankly at a loss as to how the subject will be raised.
‘At some time in the future she is going to have to be told the truth about her mother’s demise and her father’s part in it. I can’t imagine how that subject can possibly be broached, other than slowly and with the greatest sensitivity.
‘My only consolation is that she will never meet her father. I will ensure she never does.’
He is adamant about this. ‘He will be required to serve at least another 24 years in prison before he can be considered for parole, but I hope he will rot there.’
The question of a motive for the murder has always hovered, unresolved, behind the faked robbery intended to put police off the scent.
Anagnostopoulos had initially played the grieving widower, crying so copiously and convincingly at Caroline’s memorial service that David felt acutely sorry for him.
But even as he wept and pretended to comfort Susan, police, realising his alibi was contradicted by data on Caroline’s smartphone, were gathering evidence that he was the perpetrator. He was arrested during the service.
David reveals now that in the interval between Anagnostopoulos’s conviction in 2022 and his appeal in September 2023 – which upheld the verdict – he wrote a letter to Susan from his high-security prison, smuggled out on a memory stick and printed by his parents.
‘It was delivered to my door by his father,’ David recalls. ‘It was the letter of a coward, a weak man begging for forgiveness; someone who only had the balls to attack my daughter when she was asleep.
‘In the letter, he attempted to apologise for killing our daughter and he also explained how he had become involved with a gang trafficking drugs, and the tragic consequences when he tried to extricate himself from their clutches.’
Anagnostopoulos was a helicopter pilot whose principal job was flying people around the Greek islands – but he said he was lured by the offer of big money to courier a consignment of drugs.
‘In the early part of 2021 he was introduced to members of a drug-trafficking gang by the owner of a local restaurant,’ says David. ‘They told him that they needed him to do one job for them for which he would be highly paid and Anagnostopoulos, not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, didn’t realise that with this type of a deal, once you are in, you are in for life.
‘When he got home that night he immediately boasted to Caroline about how he was going to make them both rich. Caroline, of course, went crazy. She wanted nothing to do with drugs or any money that might be earned trafficking them.
‘She told him that he must contact the gang and tell them that his wife had forbidden him to have anything more to do with them. If he didn’t do this, she would take their daughter Lydia and go to the live with her sister in the Philippines and he would see neither of them again.
‘He duly contacted the gang and told them this. They explained to him that in their business, once you were in, you were in for ever. And they said he must silence his wife, permanently. If he didn’t, the gang would kill the whole family, including him and baby Lydia.
‘So he came up with his plan [to murder his wife and claim robbers had done it]. It was a plan that only someone as stupid as him would countenance.’
The owner of the restaurant who had allegedly introduced Anagnostopoulos to the gang, was found dead from a gunshot wound, a pistol by his body, at about the same time. Police said it was suicide – David has always believed he was murdered.
Anagnostopoulos has denied writing the letter or having it sent to the Crouches’ home, while his parents have also sworn they had no part in its delivery, claiming that David – delusional with grief – made it up.
He, however, stands resolutely by the truth of it.
The memories with which he lives, mingle intense happiness with the worst level of trauma. It will always be an uncomfortable juxtaposition. He is comforted by the memorial service, held annually on the anniversary of Caroline’s death at her graveside, bedecked with white blooms.
The marble grave, overlooking the sea, is in a small cemetery just 80 yards from his home.
The Crouches had built their home on the island and moved there in 2003 when Caroline – a British citizen born in Athens – was a toddler.
She spent a blissful childhood there, in their whitewashed villa with its wide, shaded veranda and views of the glittering Aegean Sea.
Originally from Liverpool, David thought sleepy Alonnisos, with its steep cobbled streets, shady tavernas and slow pace of life would be a safe haven. Now its beauty has been soured.
‘This summer I shall put my house back on the market; with sadness,’ David says. ‘It holds many beautiful memories for me. I will move to mainland Greece, by the sea.’
He will still keep up with Lydia’s progress through Susan.
His tender memories cannot be erased but the aching loss he feels – although mitigated by his bright and beautiful granddaughter – will never really lift.
