In the latest part of our series, we highlight the lack of official support in the UK for traumatised youngsters and those left to pick up the pieces. But, amid the grief, is there still hope for the future?
Susan Dela Cuesta, 57, and her partner, David Crouch, 78, will soon know if they have full custody of their one-year-old granddaughter. The child’s mother, 20-year-old Caroline Crouch, was killed on 11 May this year, by her husband, Charalambos Anagnostopoulos, 33. Initially, he had claimed that intruders had murdered his wife. “One thing that makes me even more sad than her death is the fact that our daughter will grow up without remembering her beautiful mother,” he said, before his arrest, at Crouch’s funeral.
Her diaries revealed that she had been in an abusive, controlling relationship. Now, it seems likely that the little girl will grow up not in Athens but on the island of Alonissos, her maternal grandparents’ retirement home. “There,” her grandmother said, “she will not be known as a killer’s daughter.”
