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.
The Shooting at Castle Sport Complex
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.'
A Childhood of Control
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.'
He can remember an obvious shift in his dad's behaviour, 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.'
Escalating Abuse and Escape
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.'
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.'
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 rental in nearby Spalding, which would be Claire and Charlotte's new home.
Aftermath and Legacy
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 programme' and suddenly everything would be unveiled as unreal.
'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.
Since Charlotte and Claire's deaths Luke says that there 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.'
What is Coercive Control?
A term coined by Professor Evan Stark in 2007, he described coercive control as 'the perpetrator establishing in the mind of the victim, the price of her resistance', and doesn't always include physical violence. 'Sometimes, it may include physical violence only once and the victim knows the repercussions of not conforming to the control,' Frank Mullane, CEO of Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse, tells Metro. 'The success of coercive control is based on the fear it imposes on the victim.'
Coercive control was made a criminal offence in England and Wales in 2015, and since then, nearly all those convicted (more than 45,500 in the year ending March 2025) have been men. Research has shown that the links between coercive control and domestic homicide are very clear, and coercive control's presence is a much better indicator of risk than things like physical violence.
