Data taken from murdered British mother Caroline Crouch’s smartwatch has revealed her pulse rocketed 50 per cent at 4.05am as her husband suffocated her with a pillow.
Babis Anagnostopoulos, 33, admitted killing 20-year-old Caroline in a fit of rage after she threatened to divorce him and take their baby daughter Lydia with her.
Caroline ‘died in agony’ as Babis suffocated her with a pillow for five minutes, a doctor told a coroner during the inquest into her death.
Babis said he ‘panicked’ when he saw she was dead and – once he realised hiding her body was not an option – he staged a fake robbery because he ‘wanted to raise’ their daughter out of prison.
Data from Caroline’s smartwatch foiled Babi’s ruse, as it revealed she died hours before she was allegedly killed by robbers. Now it has been revealed she was suffocated for five minutes after she was attacked while she was sleeping.
At 3.58am, a few minutes before her pulse abruptly increased at 4.05am, the mother-of-one’s heart rate reflected a person who was fast asleep, the coroner’s report stated according to Greek media site Amna.
A doctor said: ‘At 04:05 her pulse increases abruptly by 50 per cent up from a state of sleep. I think at that time the person was in an extreme state of mental or physical stress.’ They concluded ‘the death process took place from 4:05am to 4:11am’.
Black belt kickboxer Caroline fought her husband before she died, it was previously reported. In police interviews, Babis claimed the British mother was ‘aggressive’, telling police ‘you cannot imagine my love for this girl’. He claimed Caroline ‘threw the child in the crib’ and hit him, causing him to lose his temper on the night she was killed.
Harrowing diary entries made by Caroline – which form part of a 26-page police file – paint a picture of a violent and unhappy marriage, with her vowing to leave him at several points.
Babis also told police he killed the couple’s dog to make the robbery ruse more plausible because ‘no one would have thought that I could harm a dog’, Greek media reports.
Neighbours recalled hearing the animal – a seven-month-old husky puppy – crying at the time, but not barking, which alarmed them.
In his testimony to police, Babis said: ‘I thought of making one last attempt so that [Lydia] might at least grow up with her father.
‘I thought of disappearing [Caroline’s] body, but it was impossible for me to do so. Just looking at her, I cried.
‘The next thing I thought was to say that someone else did it. I would tell the police that robbers entered the house. I was in a panic. I did not know what to do. I thought that in order to look more plausible and to believe that rogue robbers had entered, I would have to hurt the dog.
‘No one would have thought that I could harm a dog. With heartache I hung the dog leash on the railings of the stairs.’
Mourners who gathered for a vigil wore black clothes and held candles in honour of Caroline Crouch in Syntagma Square, in front of the Greek Parliament in Athens on Saturday night
Police revealed her pilot husband’s grovelling murder confession just moments before he appeared in court (pictured) wearing a bullet-proof vest yesterday. There, he was charged with Caroline’s murder and the death of the family pet – a seven-month-old husky puppy that police say he drowned as part of his cover-up. He faces life in prison if convicted