Watch the latest show

Lip reading has the ability to turn video footage into convincing evidence, but there are continuing questions about its reliability

Lip reading evidence

Lip reading *

Imagine you know someone who’s in trouble.

You go to see them but without your knowledge, you're being filmed.

Then you end up in jail yourself, facing serious criminal charges.

Can’t happen very often, can it?

You’d be surprised.

We’ve found three cases where that’s exactly what happened.

And they’ve all got something in common – lip reading evidence.

Protected witness

For more than ten years, Jessica Rees has been the country’s leading expert lipreader – but the accuracy of the evidence in three of her cases is under dispute.

Glenn Lucas - accused in a lip-reading case

We can’t show you her face, because she’s a protected witness.

Back in 2006, we told how Glenn Lucas, from Lincolnshire, was charged with conspiracy.

After he was filmed visiting a friend in prison, Jessica Rees claimed they’d been talking about disposing of a body.

Eventually, all charges against Glenn were dropped but, back with his wife and family, he was still fighting to clear his name.

We’ve found disturbing new evidence about two other cases involving lipreading evidence.

The Bill Mara case

Rumel Bakar had been murdered - it was a gruesome case.

He’d been dismembered, and parts of his body were buried in three different counties.

Police soon found the murderer, William Wharton, a convicted drug dealer.

He had an accomplice, Mark Falco, who helped him get rid of the body.

Rumel Bakar - the murder victim. Photo PA Images.

Both men were convicted – but they weren’t the only ones who ended up in prison.

Bill Mara is Mark Falco’s brother-in-law.

He’s a teacher in Lincoln, and he’d never been in serious trouble with the law.

One morning, he got an unexpected visit from the police.

They’d got a search warrant – and they were looking for blood and body parts.

Then Bill found out why he’d been arrested.

It was because he’d visited his brother-in-law in Lincoln Prison eight months before.

Bill and his wife were looking after Falco’s children while he was inside.

As well as Bill, two other men were visiting Falco that day.

One of them doesn’t want to be identified.

The other was Martin Barlow, who knew Falco because they were both interested in fishing.

Reading a conversation

So what were they talking about?

For Bill Mara and Martin Barlow it was a normal conversation.

But the video had been sent to expert lipreader Jessica Rees, who’d made a partial transcript.

In Jessica Rees's version, the men were having a detailed conversation about the dismembering and disposal of a body.

The two men couldn’t believe what they were hearing.

Bill Mara - subject of a lip-reading conversation

It looked like compelling evidence - but soon there were doubts - the video was shot at just four frames per second, less than a fifth of the normal speed.

Bill Mara’s defence team wondered - how could Jessica Rees be so sure?

Jessica Rees, though, is acknowledged as the best in her field, lip-reading conversations without background knowledge of the people involved.

In one recent test, she achieved an accuracy rate of more than 90 per cent.

She’s often been able to lip-read footage other lip-readers can’t work with.

In Bill Mara’s case, her partial transcript was backed by a leading independent expert.

The Kenyon case

Susan Bowen and Graham Kenyon were suspected of murdering Susan Bowen’s husband.

They were filmed meeting each other in prison.

A partial transcript from Jessica Rees suggested they were both involved in the killing.

In Jessica Rees’s version, Kenyon threatens to kill a teenage girl who witnessed him committing the murder.

Susan Bowen - shown here on camera footage

Bowen doesn’t seem surprised by what he says.

They say they only talked about family and friends.

They’ve always denied the killing and say their defence was hampered by the lip reading evidence.

Just before their trial, there was a surprise for the defence – a poor quality audio recording of one of their visits existed.

On the face of it, the audio contradicted Jessica Rees’s transcript.

But doubts were later raised about the way in which the audio material was obtained resulting in both the audio and the lip reading evidence being dropped.

Bowen and Kenyon were subsequently convicted of murder on the basis of other evidence.

Audio evidence

The audio was poor quality. But it raised questions about how the two transcripts could be so different.

In two letters to the police, Jessica Rees acknowledged the difficulties of her job

She says that, at one point, she’d "completely failed to grasp the gist of the conversation", and that she’d been at fault for taking on too much work:

"I can only apologise for this as I was genuinely unaware then of the dangers of trying to stretch myself too thinly however obvious it may look now."

All the charges against Bill Mara were dropped - but he still wants to clear his name.

The Rees case

Bill Mara isn’t the only one.

We visit the home of Glenn Lucas, accused in another case involving Jessica Rees.

He'd been charged with conspiracy after visiting a friend in prison and, according to Jessica Rees' lipreading transcript, talking about disposing of a body.

Police said this evidence, along with previous information they had, led to Glenn being charged.

Eventually, the case against Glenn was dropped because one of his co-defendants turned Queen's Evidence during the trial and testified that another man had acted alone in arranging the murder.

Glenn’s son Andrew is two-years-old. Sadly, his father isn’t here to see him.

Glenn died because of a blood clot in his heart.

His Russian wife Maya says he’d been determined to prove his innocence.

Jessica Rees didn’t want to take part in this film, but she stands by her work in all three cases.

Lip reading has the ability to turn video footage into convincing evidence, but there are continuing questions about its reliability and whether it should used on its own as evidence in court.

* This story has been the subject of a complaint to Ofcom which was partially upheld.
Read more about this ruling

Links relating to this story:

• BBC Inside Out Yorks & Lincs - Lip reading
• Lipreading.co.uk

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites