‘We want to be everything that our father wasn’t’
Luke and Ryan Hart’s new book is a tragic portrait of familial emotional abuse that ended in murder. Elizabeth Grice reports
‘We all like spectacular stories about evil,” says Luke Hart, “but evil is quite mundane. Every day, it was just work for my father; what he was doing to us.” Luke and his brother Ryan are the sole survivors of their father’s obsessive control over his family – the deadly culmination of which was one of the most horrific manifestations of domestic abuse in recent years.
On July 19 2016, four days after the brothers had helped their mother and sister escape the family home, the two women went for a swim in Spalding, Lincs. As they returned to the car park, a man stepped out, aimed a shotgun at them and fired – before turning it on himself. It was their father.
The 13-page letter he left behind
– the brothers refuse to call it a suicide note and never refer to their father, a builder’s merchant, by name – was a self-pitying catalogue of perceived slights. He had been writing it for weeks, long before killing his wife of 26 years, Claire Hart, 50, and Charlotte, 19.
“It reads like an ultra-masculine fundamentalist manifesto. The sort of thing a terrorist might leave,” Luke says. “He had spent months reading about men who killed their families and listening to misogynistic rants online.”
It had taken a monumental effort to save up enough to secretly move their mum and sister into a flat. The boys were exceptional students, driving themselves to excel with the aim of funding the escape. “We lived for the future,” says Ryan. “It was the only way to survive misery in the present.”
They got first class degrees in mechanical engineering. Luke, 29, now
works in digital technology; Ryan, 28, is an engineer in the oil industry and spends every other month on a rig in Qatar. Charlotte, a bright, adventurous girl, was about to train as a teacher when she was murdered.
Both brothers are in little doubt that if they had not been away at the time, it would have been a mass killing. “He saw it as an Alpha male battle – we were the young lions, he was the old,” says Ryan. “He always hated us.”
As their father never actually hit them, the siblings had never seen him as a physical threat.
“We didn’t make the connection,” says Luke. “We didn’t realise that 75 per cent of women murdered by their partners are killed after leaving.”
It was only afterwards, sat in Spalding police station, that they saw a poster listing the characteristics of coercive control, which had been made a crime in 2015: rigid rules, financial control and stalking. It was a lightbulb moment and perfectly described the prison they had been living in.
That definition has now become the focus of their lives. The brothers, who share a house in Surrey, have founded Coercion and Control Awareness, to educate others about dangerous patterns of behaviour. They believe the landmark release of Sally Challen last week – who served nine years in jail for killing her tyrannical husband – is a sign that “society is also beginning to recognise the dynamics of power and control that lie behind domestic abuse”.
Mrs Challen, 65, had suffered years of coercion and humiliation. Her son, David, described it as “an undercurrent of abuse… a drip, drip, drip”.
“Domestic abuse is not simply the accumulation of assaults,” agrees Luke. “Abusers use constraining and isolating
‘In pain you have to find purpose. We are using our experience in a constructive way’
tactics that do not require violence.”
A book self-published by the Hart brothers last year has now been expanded into a memoir, Remembered Forever. “In pain, you have to find purpose,” says Luke. “My recovery has come from using everything that has happened in a constructive way. Our speaking, the book, everything we do, takes the narrative from [our father] and gives it to Mum and Charlotte.”
It could not come at a more apposite time. The annual cost of domestic abuse in Britain is reported to be £66billion. One in four women will suffer it in their lifetime and two are killed each week by a partner or ex. The Government has just announced a package of support, including secure accommodation, for victims. A forthcoming Domestic Abuse Bill will also bring economic abuse under the definition of domestic abuse – which will have its own commissioner.
The brothers, who regularly consult with the police and Crown Prosecution Service, are disappointed the burden remains on women to flee, and think too little is being done to tackle perpetrators. “I think they are terrified to admit that domestic abuse is a gendered crime,” says Luke. “We can’t ignore the fact that men are disproportionately perpetrators and women are disproportionately victims.”
They were incensed by reports describing their father as “a good man” who “flipped”. His emotional thuggery was deliberate, they say. He took pleasure in fear.
From the outside, the Harts seemed like a close unit – with a large house, children who were A-grade students, and a daughter who loved horse riding. But, behind closed doors, no opportunity was missed by their father to punish them. He confiscated Claire’s passport and restricted her access to money so, with only a part-time wage from Morrisons, she couldn’t leave. He would follow her to work, monitor her phone calls, and make daily lists of jobs for her, so she had no free time. When he found out that she had taken Ryan for coffee, spending £3.50 without his say-so, he said that she was lucky to get off with a reprimand, as “other men would have beaten you”.
He knew how to inflict pain on Claire – triggering a nerve associated with her multiple sclerosis. When Luke was a toddler, he fed him peanut butter, knowing that he had an allergy. He bullied Charlotte over the £10 a week she spent on agility training for their dogs, until she stopped. When the boys went to university, he would charge them a nightly fee to come home and check on their mum and sister. Meanwhile, he spent thousands on an extension to make the family appear wealthy.
The boys always regretted standing up to him, as it would lead to further punishment, so they worked hard and saved up. “We had been giving our Mum really hard-fought freedoms,” says Luke. “Swimming, a phone. We thought they were liberating her, but our father escalated his behaviour.”
The brothers have now lost the two people they held most dear. Ryan, the shyer of the two, is still in therapy but rebuilding his confidence through sport, including skydiving: “I proved to myself that I wanted to live because I kept opening the parachute.”
He used to avoid relationships as it would compromise his ability to look after his mother and sister, and didn’t think he “deserved” a girlfriend. “I have met someone, but it’s still new for me,” he says. Luke, meanwhile, can’t countenance marriage. “I want to be everything my father wasn’t.”
Fatherhood has been ruined for both. “I don’t want to be a father,” Ryan says. “The word ‘dad’ sends shivers down my spine. I couldn’t ever be called that by a child. It would remind me too much of the past.”
Remembered Forever by Luke and Ryan Hart, published by Orion Publishing, is available for £7.99 from books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514 Information: cocoawareness.co.uk