CCTV image shows Caroline Crouch’s husband holding their baby just before taking his wife’s life 

Chilling CCTV has emerged showing Caroline Crouch’s husband cradling their baby daughter moments before strangling his wife to death in Greece.

Babis Anagnostopoulos, 33, is seen sitting on the sofa of the living room with his 11-month-old daughter Lydia in his arms while typing on his phone at 12.35am in the last image taken before the killing.

At 1.20am, he removed the memory card from the CCTV cameras, proving it was not destroyed by robbers as he had claimed, before he went on to carry out the brutal attack and stage the break-in.

Miss Crouch had returned to the bedroom of their maisonette near Athens but the couple continued to argue over text for two hours, calling each other ‘stupid’, police said.

The 20-year-old Briton eventually fell asleep, but data on her smartwatch shows a sudden burst of activity at 4.05am, the coroner revealed, showing she was smothered to death rather than throttled during a fight as Anagnostopoulos had claimed. 

In new testimony released by police, the husband says he lay down next to his wife in bed before ‘pressing the front of her face… to the pillow.’

Police have also released a photo showing the Monopoly box where the helicopter pilot said 15,000 Euros which he had hidden were stolen by the alleged robbers.

Police’s suspicions were aroused when they noticed the game pieces were neatly laid next to the box rather than scattered on the floor as they would expect from a robbery. 

After Anagnostopoulos’s confession, the pilot’s father broke his silence saying he feels as if he has now ‘lost two children’, but his focus is on Lydia whom he intends to raise together with Caroline’s family.

He said: ‘The baby is with us. All we care about right now is the luck of this baby and we want to be as focused on it as possible. 

‘As a father right now, I have lost two children. I will try to not give any more bad luck to a child who is not guilty of anything.’ 

Meanwhile an elderly neighbour revealed that the family is considering changing Caroline’s gravestone because it currently features a photo of her on her wedding day along with the inscription: ‘Our beloved mother, wife and daughter.’ 

Speaking at Miss Crouch’s grave on a hill overlooking the sparkling Aegean Sea, one elderly neighbour sobbed and pointed to the cruel irony of the inscription.

She said: ‘He did not love his wife. This stone will have to be changed.’   

Further details have emerged of Anagnostopoulos’s account to police of the night Miss Crouch, 20, was suffocated in front of the couple’s baby daughter Lydia.

Anagnostopoulos had claimed to detectives as part of his burglary fiction that masked raiders had been after £10,000 in cash hidden in the house that was due to pay for building work on a plot of land the couple had bought.

However, police now say there was never any cash in the house – the detail had simply been invented by Anagnostopoulos to give a motive for the robbery. 

Police also revealed harrowing diary entries written by Miss Crouch about the bitter fights between the pair, who lived a seemingly idyllic life in a wealthy Athens suburb.

When pregnant, in December 2019, she wrote: ‘I fought with Babi again. This time it was serious. I hit him, I cursed at him and he broke down the door… I am thinking of leaving.’

Initially, Anagnostopoulos cynically staged a robbery – even strangling the family dog – before leading detectives on a merry dance and playing the tearful widower for five weeks, weeping at her funeral and hugging her grieving mother Susan.

He finally confessed last week after police nailed him with data from her fitness tracker which recorded that her pulse had stopped an hour before he claimed robbers had burst in.

Having first claimed the couple had a blazing row and that ‘she pushed me and punched me… she threw the child inside the crib’, Anagnostopoulos now admits she was ‘sleeping… with her face resting on the pillow’, according to an extract of his police interview made public yesterday.

Anagnostopoulos confessed: ‘I laid down next to her, trying to tell her that what she did to Lydia was very bad. I pressed the front of her face, that is, her mouth, nose and eyes, to the pillow.

‘I think I was pressing her head with the weight of my body. While I was pushing her I told her two or three times: “You will not hit the little one again”.

‘This must have lasted for about five minutes, until I realised that Caroline had stopped moving. Then I panicked.’

The coroner said former schoolteacher Miss Crouch’s pulse data showed her asleep until 4.05am, on May 11, when her tracker suddenly recorded a sharp burst of heart activity. 

A struggle went on for six minutes, until her heart flatlined at 4.11am.

Hours earlier, Anagnostopoulos had removed the memory cards from security cameras.  

More testimony given to police by Anagnostopoulos also reveals how he praised Caroline to detectives, describing her as ‘smart, very creative with humor and imagination’ adding that ‘everyone liked her’ in an attempt to paint the pair as a happy couple.

‘My wife and I had a happy family and we were happy to be in our own house in a short time, but this tragedy that happened to us destroyed us,’ Greek site Protothema reports. 

‘She was a girl who, despite her young age, took initiatives, found solutions and was active. 

‘I had a dream to get married on the beach and we decided that we wanted the wedding to take place in Portugal. 

‘80% of it she organized over the phone. Caroline had taken care of it and did everything perfectly.’

Only 100 yards from the cemetery where Miss Crouch is buried, on the island of Alonnisos, Susan and David Crouch, living at their retirement home, mourn their daughter.

Family friends say they are so shellshocked by their son-in-law’s ‘evil betrayal’, they have not even felt able to make the short walk to her grave since the funeral.

Family friend Kostas Mavrikis said: ‘I was crying with Babis when he gave his speech at her funeral. Imagine how betrayed Susan feels – she used to trust him, he was hugging her at the funeral. 

‘It’s like she died twice: once when her daughter died and again when she learnt who killed her.’

Meanwhile, the killer ate a hearty meal and ‘slept like a baby’ in his first night behind bars, according to Greek media. 

He requested his brother bring him a book by geophysicist David Bercovici titled The Origins of Everything. 

Another friend, Kiki Anagnostou, said: ‘His behaviour at her funeral was bordering on cold-blooded. I remember he held the baby in his arms the whole time.’

Baby Lydia faces a tug of love over who will bring her up, now that her mother is dead and her father faces being jailed until she is in her 20s.

Her fate will be decided by a court in about 90 days. In the meantime, a prosecutor must decide whether the 11-month-old should stay with her father’s parents in Athens, go to her mother’s parents on Alonnisos, or be placed with social services.

Anagnostopoulos has begged that his daughter grow up ‘in the family’, telling his lawyer Alexandros Papaioannidis: ‘I am devastated and everything I did, I did with my child in mind.’

Tomorrow in Athens, he faces another court hearing, following an initial appearance last Friday. 

His lawyer said: ‘He will speak the truth to the court, without hiding anything. Unfortunately, his life was ruined.’