DOUBLE MURDER IN GREECE

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28742, 13 November 1958, Page 8

DOUBLE MURDER IN GREECE

Police Baffled By Lack Of Clues (From a Reuter Correspondent) ATHENS. More than two months after a double murder was committed in an Athens suburb, Greek police are still baffled by what the press has come to describe as “the perfect crime.” The police have now’ applied to Interpol (the International Criminal Police Commission) for help in tracing the murderer or murderers in case they managed to escape abroad. A reward of 100,000 drachmas (about £1191) has been offered for information leading to an arrest. The mystery began u'hen one morning last July an unknown caller telephoned the police and told them of “some trouble” in the house of w’ealthy Stavro Kourousis in the suburb of Nea Smyrni.

Two police officers w’ent there. They found Stavro, aged 62, a former Chicago waiter, lying with fatal head injuries caused by a pointed instrument while his sister, Mrs Dimitra Karyoti, aged 60, had been strangled with her own scarf.

Stavro died a few days later in hospital, without giving any clue to the identity of his assailant.

Robbery was apparently the motive. The killer or killers entered the house through a back door, hit Stavro on the head while he was still in bed, then strangled the old woman as she came back from the market From a cupboard they took 1500 gold sovereigns (worth about £5400) and 2000 American dollars. They missed, however, valuable jewellery hidden nearby. They washed their bloodstained hands in the kitchen sink, wiped them on a towel which they soaked in water, and departed the way they had come—unnoticed and without leaving a single fingerprint. Nearly 300 police stations in Greece were alerted. More than 10,000 persons were rounded up for questioning, including all the known characters of the Athens: “underworld.” All proved alibis. Some professional burglars with long police records said their “pride” had been hurt by the suspicions levelled against them. They ocered their help in tracing the killers. Police at airports, harbours and raliway stations were asked to look out for suspicious persons leaving the country. Police artists drew tentative sketches of the possible killers. Seven thousand copies of these were circulated to Greek police stations and contacts abroad.

Day after day newspaper columns were filled with descriptions of the crime and accounts of the investigations going on. It was the talk in Athens for many weeks, and one newspaper cartoon depicted Athenians looking suspiciously at each other. The United States police were asked to probe into the background and source of wealth of Stavro, who as a young man had left his native Greece to make a fortune across the Atlantic.

This move followed reports that whereas Stavro had returned from America on a 60-dollar pension as a retired waiter, he had recently transferred a “huge sum” of dollars which he had turned into gold sovereigns in Athens. One fantastic report printed in a newspaper that serialised the murders claimed they had been committed by a “gangsters’ syndicate” searching for a “fabulous diamond” reportedly bought by Stavro at a low price because it brought bad luck to its owners. Meanwhile, the chase for the killers goes on. Several innocent persons have been arrested and questioned on suspicion. Even Miss Agatha Christie has been brought into the picture.

As the celebrated author of crime stories was passing through Athens on a Mediterranean cruise, she was asked by reporters whether she was interested in writing a story on the "perfect crime” in Athens. But Miss Christie was not interested. She said she was accompanying her husband, Mr M. Mallowan, a noted archaeologist, on a pilgrimage to the Acropolis.