The six tell-tale signs that revealed Tracie Andrews was lying about her fiancé's death
All it took was eight words to tell criminologists and body language experts that British woman Tracie Andrews was lying about how her fiancé Lee Harvey had died.
Thirty-six hours after Harvey's brutal death in 1996, in which he was stabbed 42 times on the side of a Worcestershire Road, Andrews appeared in a televised press conference, looking bruised and battered as she held hands with Lee Harvey's devastated mother.
Andrews, 27 at the time, claimed her fiancé had been murdered by an enraged driver after a high speed chase along a quiet road in Alvechurch.
As she faced the gathered press, she said: 'I just tried to stop the bleeding really.'
Those eight words were a dead giveaway for body language experts, as a new UK documentary shows.
In the documentary, called Faking It: Tears of a Crime, speech and body language analyst Cliff Lansley claims those eight words gave off six separate tell-tale indications that Andrews, now 46, was lying:
She added the unnecessary word 'really' at the end of the sentence
She shrugged her shoulders slightly
She lowered her voice
She swallowed hard
She paused
She raised the pitch of her voice again
Forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes says Andrews gave an "Oscar-winning performance" at the press conference but these six signals alerted analyst to the fact that she was lying about what had happened.
"She comes on and she is, to all the world, the epitome of a woman who is battered, broken and in a terrible state," Daynes says.
"But what you find is, throughout the press conference, she seems to grow in confidence ... So the growing level of, 'ooh, actually, I'm doing a really good job of this, er, I'm being plausible, I'm getting away with this' is what is her ultimate downfall."
Andrews, a barmaid and part-time model, stabbed her partner in a frenzied attack after an argument, then claimed he was the victim of what we would now call a "road rage" incident at the hands of a man with "staring eyes".
The couple had met in 1994 when Andrews was a perfume seller and aspiring model and Harvey a bus driver.
When police began investigating Harvey's murder they uncovered the couple's volatile past in which Andrews would frequently fly into jealous rages.
Neighbours told police they had heard frequent arguments at the couple's house and that Andrews had physically attacked previous boyfriends.
Two years into her sentence she confessed to killing Harvey in a letter written to her lawyer but claimed she was acting in self-defence.
She was released in 2012 after serving a 14-year sentence.
