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IT WAS six months after Luke and Ryan Hart’s mother and sister had been murdered by their abusive father that they discovered there was a name for men like their dad.

It wasn’t a counsellor or therapist who told them about coercive control. They learned about it from a poster on the wall of a police station.

Luke, who was in Scotland last week to talk to campaign groups and activists, said: “There were all of our father’s characteristics listed like a personality profile. That’s what we were living for 25 years.

“Coercive control was a new phrase to us. We didn’t realise it was a thing people did on purpose.”

Luke and Ryan’s mother, Claire, and their 19-year-old sister Charlotte, were murdered on July 19, 2016, in the car park of Spalding swimming pool in Lincolnshire. Their father Lance then killed himself.

During the previous months, he had been googling stories of men who killed their families. He had been refining the murder note he left online for weeks.

Luke said: “He had been planning to kill his entire family for weeks before we even planned to move out, updating his justification for killing us each time.”

Luke and Ryan were both working abroad when the rest of their family died.

On July 11, they had moved their mother out of the family home into a rented house five miles away. Charlotte was on holiday with her boyfriend and got back on July 18.

Their father had been controlling their mother since they met. The police probe revealed a family history that explained a lot to the brothers who survived.

Luke said: “Dad was married when he first met our mother. He left his previous wife because she didn’t want children, immediately threw mum’s contraceptive pills away and insisted she was having his child. I was then born.”

Slowly, he and his brother pieced together the story. Luke said: “Our father moved our family to an isolated, rundown farm when I was three.

“Neither of our parents worked for a decade. I was told that it was because I had a life-threatening nut allergy.

“Before we moved I’d been rushed to hospital and saved. The move meant we could grow our own food so we’d always know what I was eating.

“But my allergy had already been diagnosed when my father fed me nuts. He did this as an act of control over my life, to intimidate my mother.

“Within three years, he had created isolation and dependency and reduced her to poverty. It was the perfect recipe for control.

“From this point on, our father simply had to operate these levers to keep our mother under his control.”

Luke and Ryan read the coverage of the murders with disbelief. They did not recognise this regular guy who cracked because his wife wanted a divorce.

“The media echoed our father’s voice,” Luke said. “We witnessed the eulogising of our murdering father. They described him as a nice guy.

“One report said what he did was ‘understandable’. It said divorce drove him to murder, implying we were responsible.”

Friends were not much better. A few asked if their mother was having an affair.

Luke said: “Some explained how difficult divorce can be, how he must be suffering. As if this was somehow to be expected in a marriage.”

As the brothers realised the extent of their father’s abuse, it became clear they were not the only children to suffer in this way. It undermined everything they had learned for their first 25 years.

Luke said: “We interpreted our father’s behaviour as disrespectful, aggressive and unpleasant but not dangerous.

“It was our personal problem, one that no one could help us with. As a child, this was all I’d known.

“It was only after the murders that we began to read about domestic abuse and the power and control that lies at the heart of abuse.

“It was then clear that our father’s control increased over our entire lives. His behaviour had been abusive our entire lives but neither we nor anyone else was looking for it.”

The brothers had got their mother and sister out of the family home to escape his control. They had no idea what he was planning next.

Luke said: “We’d always wanted to free our mother and sister from our father, not because we believed that he would kill them but because they could never live with our father. But murder is the ultimate act of control.”

Luke and Ryan now campaign against coercive control and domestic abuse.

They have written a book, Operation Lighthouse, named after the police investigation into the murders. They talk at