Coercively controlled
‘We want to be the opposite of our father’
Asun-beaten swimming pool car park in Spalding, Lincolnshire, was the unlikely setting for the catastrophe that would unravel Luke and Ryan Hart’s lives. On the morning of July 19 2016, their mother and sister were returning to their blue Toyota, having enjoyed a pre-work swim, when a man stepped out from behind the car and aimed at them with a single-barrel shotgun.
Claire Hart, 50, raised a pleading arm towards him. The man was Lance Hart, her husband of 26 years, whom she had walked out on days earlier, after years of emotional abuse. Ignoring her protestations, Lance, 57, fired three shots, killing his wife and daughter before turning the gun on himself. A pool attendant, hearing the bangs, ran out in time to catch 19-year-old Charlotte Hart’s final words: “It was my dad who shot me.” She died on the tarmac next to the bodies of her mother and father.
“We always knew our father was a bad person,” says Luke. “We were controlled and repressed – but thought we were safe physically.”
On the second anniversary of the deaths, Luke, 28, and Ryan, 27, are sitting in the living room of their new home in Surrey. The television stand is cluttered with family photos that show Charlotte horse riding and Claire beaming alongside her. On the mantelpiece is a china model of a fireplace over which five Christmas stockings hang; one for each of the children and their two dogs – who are clambering on and off the sofas as we talk. Lance is nowhere to be seen.
To commemorate their mother and sister, Ryan and Luke have written a book, Operation Lighthouse, which has helped them to process how their family ended up in such an unimaginable situation. They now understand that they, too, were victims. It wasn’t until the brothers were in Spalding police station, following the murders, that they realised the warning signs had been there all along.
Sat there, in a state of extreme distress, they spotted a poster about coercive and controlling behaviour, a form of domestic abuse that had become a criminal offence six months earlier, in December 2015. Even now, it is still too often not recognised as a crucial element of domestic abuse, and some police forces are ill-equipped to deal with it. Conviction rates have been low, although a number of cases have seen prison sentences handed down, such as 24-year-old Matthew Bailey, who was jailed for six months this week for the “psychological abuse” of his girlfriend, whom he had banned from using social media, told what to wear, harassed with phone calls and threatened to kill her family if she broke up with him.
All are telltale signs of coercive and controlling behaviour.
“We saw a number of characteristics on that poster, like the rigid and arbitrary enforcement of rules, financial control, turning up at your place of work and stealing phone records,” explains Luke. “It was the perfect description of what we had been living under our entire lives.”
To those who knew them, the Harts were a wholesome family. They had a large house and seemed to adore one another. The boys were diligent A* students. Charlotte was a keen horse rider. Claire, who worked at Morrisons, was her best friend. But behind closed doors, the family was under Lance’s nightmarish control. “If you see a kid who never breaks a rule, that’s weird,” says Luke. “If you see a family that’s never apart, that’s not normal. There’s something wrong.
“All these things that, on the outside, seem to show cohesion were actually coercion.”
Lance, a builder’s merchant, had a volatile temper. He was never violent, but could inflict upon Claire – the main target of his abuse – agonising pain, by triggering a nerve associated with her multiple sclerosis. He drove recklessly – going 70mph in a 30mph zone – to scare them.
“Our lives meant nothing to him,” says Ryan. On one occasion, when Luke was a toddler, Lance almost killed him – something he didn’t find out until after the funeral. “My father knew I had a peanut allergy, but fed me peanut butter to demonstrate control over my mother,” he says.
Another marker of emotional abuse was Lance’s strict financial control. Charlotte used to enjoy taking the dogs to agility training, but Lance badgered her about the £10 weekly fee until she stopped. Meanwhile, he spent thousands of pounds building an extension to make the family appear wealthy. “It was like an everconstricting prison, until the point that you’re crushed,” says Luke.
When they went to university (Luke to Warwick and Ryan to Durham, both to study engineering), the brothers returned home every weekend to check on their mother and sister. Ryan avoided having anything more than “semi-friends”, let alone girlfriends, over because he didn’t want to compromise his ability to look after them. Lance charged the brothers a nightly fee in an attempt to stop them from saving enough money to liberate Charlotte and Claire. “It was more expensive to go home than to stay in a hotel,” Ryan recalls.
Every so often, one of the brothers would stand up to their father – but always regretted it. Withholding his reaction at the time, Lance would mete out cruel punishments later. “He would feed the dogs food he knew to be poisonous,” says Ryan. “We knew the more we challenged him, the more he would do it.”
They felt powerless. “What could we do? We hoped he would die when he got skin cancer, then prostate cancer. Everything would have been easier,” says Luke. “We didn’t feel empowered to act against him, so we got our heads down, worked really hard and saved up to get our Mum and sister out.”
It was four days after the brothers were finally able to move Charlotte and their mother out of the family home and into a rented flat nearby, that Lance killed them.
“We hadn’t understood the danger, because there hadn’t been any violence,” says Luke. “We didn’t realise most people are killed after leaving.” They now know that, on average, two women in England and Wales are killed each week at the hands of a partner or ex.
Lance started researching men who kill their wives weeks before Claire had walked out. He left a 12page suicide note. Two years after their ordeal, Luke and Ryan have tried to move on with their lives and talk animatedly about having found some meaning amid the pain.
Sharing their experience has helped save lives, they say. Their story encouraged one woman to leave her husband who, police later discovered, had been plotting to kill her. “I love to think we’re ruining the lives of these narcissistic, horrible men,” says Luke. Ryan, who spends every other month on an oil rig in Qatar as an engineer for Shell, has learnt to play the piano as an emotional release. Luke works for BP in Surrey, and looks after the dogs.
Their father still haunts them. “Relationships? Still working on it,” says Ryan. “But I’m not one for marriage, after seeing how it restricted our mum and held her prisoner. If I ever have a serious relationship, I don’t want there to be any barriers to her leaving if she wants to.”
“We want to be the opposite of our father,” adds Luke. “We don’t need control to feel like men.”
For more, go to whiteribbon.org.uk