Almost a year after Caroline Crouch was found dead in the couple’s maisonette, her husband, who had initially tried to accuse the murder of rogue “foreign thieves”, will appear before a mixed court in the Greek capital. It will be the first time that Babis Anagnostopoulos, 33, appears in public after his alleged confession to a crime that has taken over the nation. “We were waiting for this moment,” the Krauts’s lawyer, Thanassis Charamanis, told the Guardian. “We are confident that justice will prevail.” In a trial that is likely to be both dramatic and lengthy, a trained aviator in the UK could take a position within hours of the start of the hearing. Caroline Crouch, who was strangled in her home in May 2021. Photo: Rex / Shutterstock For the first time in Greek legal history, the accused, who is accused of premeditated murder and attempting to distort justice by lying to the police, also faces the charge of killing an animal, according to pioneering legislation passed last year. The pilot allegedly admitted to using a leash to hang Crouch’s seven-month-old puppy, Roxy, from the railing of the couple’s house on the outskirts of Athens to make the burglary look more realistic. Investigators found the drowned pet before finding Caroline’s body next to her crying daughter, Lydia, on the upper level of the maisonette. “He will do everything he can to reduce his sentence and convince the court that Caroline’s death was not premeditated,” Charamanis said. “But he also faces the prospect of 10 years or more in prison for killing Caroline’s puppy.” Roxy, a stray dog ​​adopted just months before the May 11 murder, received a separate legal representation, paid by an animal welfare group that urged members to protest outside the court along with the women’s organizations outraged by the murder. of the 17 female homicides in Greece last year. For 37 days, Anagnostopoulos claimed that the death of his wife was the result of a bad burglary, during which he gave a moving eulogy at her funeral on the island of Alonissos, where 20-year-old Crouch was raised. Only after eight hours of police interrogation – after his arrest at her memorial – did investigators claim he had confessed to the crime. Police, who had encouraged the government to take the rare step of announcing a € 300,000 reward for information leading to the perpetrators, said they had been deceived by a man they described as a “top actor”. Anagnostopoulos, who is being held in Kourdallos prison in Athens, said through his lawyers that his wife’s “narcissistic and aggressive behavior” was responsible for the outburst of anger that prompted him to commit the crime. But in a 24-page report, George Noulis, the prosecutor assigned to the case, argued otherwise, saying the pilot was in a “calm state of mind” when he chose to kill the student. “He had no hesitation in doing so despite the fact that she was the mother of his child,” the judge was quoted as saying in the report, excerpts of which were published in the Greek press. “The victim was only 20 years old, while he was 13 years older and he should have been her protector.” The daughter of a retired oil executive who settled in Alonissos, Krauts slept for more than two hours before her murder. Investigators, combining a series of events based on a handwritten diary that spoke of an increasingly abusive relationship, believe he threatened the pilot with divorce during an intense brawl earlier that night. Her death was described as “competitive” by a medical examiner, who estimated after examining her body that the suffocation “lasted five to six minutes”. Greek media reports describe Anagnostopoulos spending months studying legal textbooks in an effort to perfect his defense. At least four witnesses from the “wider social circle” of the couple will testify in his defense, said before the trial his lawyer, Alexandros Papaioannidis. Charamanis said it was unclear whether Crouch’s parents, who now have custody of Lydia, would attend the proceedings. “Her mother still can not believe that she was comforted by the man who took her beloved daughter,” she said. “I do not know if they could bear to be in the same room with him.”