‘I helped my mum and sister escape our controlling dad – then he murdered them’

Five days after Luke Hart and his younger brother Ryan had secretly moved their mum, Claire, and sister, Charlotte, into a rented house in Spalding, Luke received a distressed phone call.

‘Ryan was in tears, asking if I had seen the news,’ the 36-year-old tells Metro. ‘He said three people had been shot in Spalding.’

Luke remembers that Ryan had a horrible feeling the murders somehow involved their mum and sister, but even so, the pair tried desperately to keep calm until they knew more.  

‘But Ryan couldn’t get through to mum and Charlotte,’ Luke recalls. ‘After calling the police with our details, they soon rang back to break the news that the people killed were our mum, dad, and Charlotte. 

‘It took ages for that to sink in.’

As the brothers were both working outside the country at the time – Ryan in Holland and Luke in Aberdeen – police met them at Heathrow airport, and the griefstricken pair spent the next month piecing together information with the authorities to figure out what had happened that day 10 years ago on 19 July, 2016.

It transpired that Claire, 50, and 19-year-old Charlotte had agreed to meet Luke’s dad, Lance, in the carpark of the Castle Sport Complex in Spalding, Lincolnshire, after their morning swim. 

At the meeting spot, he got out an unregistered single-barrel shotgun and murdered Claire and Charlotte, before killing himself.

The shooting hadn’t come out of the blue – Lance had been seeking power and control over his family for years, explains Luke: ‘Control had been growing and murder is the ultimate act of control.’

‘We all had to be careful around dad’

The eldest of the three Hart children, Luke had spent his early childhood in Cambridgeshire. 

‘We had seven acres of land with sheep, pigs, chickens, and geese, and we grew our own food,’ he says. ‘Our dad pretty much built our house, and I do remember some fond memories like him getting out PVC sheets and covering them in Fairy liquid and water for us to slide on in the summer.

‘My memories of those 10 years consist of running feral around the farm, climbing trees, digging holes, feeding sheep, and scaring chickens. Life was idyllic, although our parents seemed somewhat distant.’

He can remember an obvious shift in his dad’s behavior, after the family moved to Moulton in Lincolnshire to be closer to a grammar school Luke and Ryan had got a place at.

Having worked in the building industry, Lance initially struggled to find work. When he finally did get a job, he found it difficult to accept the hierarchy of working for someone, rather than for himself. 

‘Dad was really smart although he never disciplined his intelligence. I think he knew deep down how capable he was but he became more and more angry because his unrealised potential rotted and festered within him. He was resentful because he always thought he could do everything better than everyone else,’ recalls Luke.

He adds: ‘We all had to be careful around our father. It felt dangerous to misbehave or to say something he didn’t like. We had to manage him. All of us started withdrawing into ourselves.’

Lance’s control over his wife and children got tighter as Luke became a teenager.

‘I remember he was always on his laptop,’ he says. ‘He kept fading further away from us, becoming angry, looking for any excuse to blame us and vent. He required perfection – everything had to be exactly how he wanted.’

Luke distinctly recalls one occasion when he arrived home 10 minutes late from school because the bus was delayed.

‘Dad cooked us food but then left it to get cold after the bus was late,’ he says. ‘Then he huffed and puffed and blamed us that our food was cold. Anytime things didn’t go exactly how he wanted, we’d get blamed. He couldn’t control himself, but felt he could at least control his environment – us.’

When Lance’s grip on his family started to ‘fall apart’ as the boys exerted their own will getting closer to adulthood, ‘he destabilised,’ Luke says. His father became increasingly annoyed if his routine was disrupted in any way.

‘He criticised everything and constantly discouraged us, taking control over trivial things,’ heexplains. ‘Dad would often storm around the house, giving us the same demeaning lectures over and over again. We were always walking on eggshells because he was looking for any excuse to explode.’

‘He just wanted mum to himself’

Eventually Luke escaped to Warwick University to study engineering, while Ryan followed a year later, heading to Durham to do the same, leaving Claire and Charlotte alone with Lance. 

‘Looking back, I think dad just wanted to have mum to himself, and in response, was very unpleasant to Charlotte,’ Luke says.

‘His control over Mum grew a lot at the end. He took her keys, passport, and driver’s license, and kept them in a safe chained up in the garage. He rang her constantly when she was at work and kept her under constant surveillance.’

Luke admits that he hadn’t known just how abusive Lance had become until he left the family home.

‘I was shattered by it all, exhausted,’ Luke says. ‘I just wanted to get away. Ryan stayed more connected to home, going back for visits on the weekends.’ 

Even so, life away from his mum and sister was hard.

‘Although it was a relief to leave, we hadn’t really been taught how to live at home,’ explains Luke. ‘I was in survival mode, feeling confused and overhwelmed. I struggled with socialising as I hadn’t had healthy relationships modelled to me and didn’t understand how to interact with people.’

The brothers were also concerned for their mother’s wellbeing and often spoke to Claire, who had multiple sclerosis, about leaving the family home with Charlotte. It was something she was desperate to do, but with Lance controlling her money, there was no way she could just go.

Instead, they began to secretly save money so the mum and daughter could bide their time and set up somewhere new. 

On one occasion, Claire decided to tell her husband she was going to leave – his response was to threaten to burn down the house.

So, the family carried on planning their escape in secret, and on Wednesday 14 July, after Lance had gone to work, the brothers turned up at the house with a removal van. 

‘Mum was finally ready to leave,’ Luke says. 

Quickly, they loaded the van, got their dogs – a cockapoodle called Indi and Bella, a jack russell – and made their way to the rentalin nearby Spalding, which would be Claire and Charlotte’s new home.

‘Suddenly, I could see evil everywhere’

Less than five days into their life away from Lance, he took their lives, then his own.

Leaving a 12-page suicide note, he wrote: ‘revenge is a dish served cold’. 

Luke says that in the days that followed their murders, he felt like he was living in a version of The Truman Show – ‘like my life had become this surreal television program’ and suddenly everything would be unveiled as unreal. Then he would be hit with waves of grief and anger as the truth sank in.

‘I was angry with my dad and the evil in the world,’ he remembers. ‘The traumas had shattered me and severed my connection to everything. I was no longer the person I’d been.

‘It was like I was in the Matrix, and life before, and all around me, seemed to be an illusion. Suddenly I could see evil and danger everywhere, and that alienated me from people who couldn’t see the same reality.’

For a year, the brothers stayed in the rental they had got for their mother and sister, along with their dogs, until work forced them to move away.

Luke adds that because their mum and Charlotte always sought to do good in every circumstance in their lives it inspired the brothers to create a legacy for them and ‘do some good through the evil our dad had done’. 

They set up a company called CoCo Awareness to help professionals across the world understand coercive control and domestic abuse,sharing their own family’s devastating story.

After all, even though Claire had kept a diary of all the controlling behavior and  terror Lance had put through – as there had been no physical violence, the family never felt it was something they could take to the police. They thought, without bruises, did it even count as domestic abuse? 

Since Charlotte and Claire’s deaths Luke says that have definitely been ‘gains’ in the understanding of the issue, however more work needs to be done. 

‘We’re starting to understand the patterns and dynamics of coercive control, and its centrality in domestic abuse,’ he says. ‘The challenge is that coercive control is very hard to prove, except for retrospectively.’

A more immediate practical measure Luke envisions could be helping people would be after-care.

‘Survivors need more than temporary stop gaps. How do we provide long-term solutions?’ he asks. ‘They have to be clearly laid out – a pathway to freedom from domestic abuse.’

Today, Luke, who has a son, lives in West London, as does his brother Ryan. ‘We have our separate lives, but we still see each other frequently. Indi passed away a couple of years ago, but we continue to look after Bella together.’

Luke has also found solace in a Christian faith, which has helped him cope with his trauma.

‘I’ve had to find a way to live in the aftermath – to live in a way that wasn’t blind to what happened, but also not overcome by it,’ he explains. ‘It has been a painful but healing ten years and I’ve finally found peace.’