Roch Thériault | The Ant Hill Kids
Roch Thériault was born on May 16, 1947, into a French- Canadian family. Roch was considered to be very intelligent, but he dropped out of school in 7th grade and began to teach himself the Old Testament of the Bible. He started believing that the end of the world was near and it would be brought on by a war between good and evil. He ended up ditching his family’s Catholicism for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (like Christianity, but they believe that Jesus will soon return to earth). He decided that he wanted to make sure that the apocalypse was at hand and that is where the Ant Hill Kids cult started.
In the mid 1970s, Roch became a self-proclaimed prophet and, using the help of his charisma, convinced many of the Seventh-Day Adventists to break off and follow him. He forbade his followers from eating meat, unhealthy foods and consuming tobacco, but the drinking habit that he had continued. His main goal was to establish a commune where people could freely listen to his motivational speeches, live in unity and equality, and be free of sin… and he did just that. After prohibiting the members of his group from contacting their families or the Seventh-day Adventist Church, he told them that God had warned him that the end of the world would come in February 1979. He said that he wanted to build a commune to prepare for it. With that, in 1978, one year before the 'end of the world’ was supposed to happen, Roch moved his commune by hiking to a mountainside, he called it the "Eternal Mountain", in Saint-Jogues, Quebec. He claimed that in this “Eternal Mountain”, they could all be saved. There, while he relaxed and the others built their town, he found himself comparing the members of the cult to ants working in an ant hill. He named the ground the Ant Hill Kids. Soon, February 1979 came and went and the apocalypse did not occur. Members started questioning Roch's wisdom, but he defended himself saying that time on Earth and in God's world were not parallel, and that it was a miscalculation. People more or less believed his story.
At this point, Roch probably realized that he had to take action before the members completely lost faith in him, so he did that by marrying and impregnating all of the women, fathering as many as 26 children with 9 female members of the group, and by the 1980s there were nearly 40 members. Roch figured that this would expand the community as well as keep the members devoted. He also made the embers wear identical clothes to represent equality and their devotion to the commune. In 1984, the group moved from Quebec to a new site near Burnt River, Ontario.
After they moved, Roch’s drinking problem worsened… and with it, the control. The members weren’t allowed to engage in sexual relations- and even talk- to each other without Roch’s permission. Roch would also spy on the members and then tell them that God had told him what they had done. He would also perform unnecessary surgeries on the victims. These "surgeries" would include injecting a 94% ethanol (alcohol) solution into stomachs, or performing circumcisions on the children and adults of the group. If members wanted to leave, Roch would hit them with belts and hammers, suspend them from the ceiling and pluck each of their body hairs one at a time. He would even defecate on them. The Ant Hill Kids would make money by selling baked goods and when a member did not make enough money for the day, they would also be punished. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Roch’s punishments became more violent over time. He would make the members break their own legs with sledgehammers. The members were forced to sit on lit stoves, shoot each other in the shoulders, and eat dead mice and feces. They would sometimes cut off another member's toes with wire cutters to prove their loyalty. And this didn’t only limit to the adults. The children, who were already sexually abused, were held over fires and nailed to trees while others threw rocks at them. Some of the children even died: an infant, believed to be Roch’s own, died after being ordered to stay outside in freezing temperatures. Another child died when Thériault performed an unnecessary surgery on him. To try and move the blame from himself, Roch castrated the man who originally injured the kid. I guess that then Roch realized that he was getting way off track so in order to rid members of their ‘sins’, Roch would strip them naked and beat them. In 1987, social workers removed 17 of the children from the commune. They couldn't do much for the adults though, because the cult was still officially labeled as a part of the Seventh Day Church. Roch faced no consequences for his acts.
In 1989, a member named Solange Boilard complained of a stomach ache. That was enough of an excuse for Roch to perform another surgery on her. Without the use of anaesthesia, Roch striped her naked, laid her on a table and punched her stomach repeatedly. He then forced a plastic tube into her rectum and poured a mixture of molasses and olive oil into it. Using a knife, he cut open her abdomen and tore off part of her intestines with his bare hands. Then he forced another member, Gabrielle Lavallée, to stitch her up using a needle and thread, and had the other women shove a tube down her throat and blow through it. Solange died the next day. That wasn’t the worst of it though. Roch claimed that he had the power of resurrection, drilled a hole into Solange's skull and then he and some other males of the group ejaculated into the cavity. Of course, Solange did not return to life, so her corpse was buried a short distance from the Ant Hill Kids' commune. This was when members finally started to really second guess their choice of being in the cult.
About around the same time that the Solange Boilard torture took place, Gabrielle Lavallée was also being heavily abused. Remember, Gabrielle was the one who was forced to stitch up Solange. Well, she was going through torture of her own: she suffering welding torch burns to her genitals, a hypodermic needle breaking off in her back, and eight of her teeth being forcibly removed. Finally, Gabrielle managed to escape after Roch cut off parts of her breast and smashed her head in with the blunt side of an axe, but she returned and he punished her by removing one of her fingers with wire cutters, pinning her hand to a wooden table with a hunting knife, and then using a chainsaw to amputate her arm. Later that year, Gabrielle managed to escape again, this time contacting authorities and finally, Roch was arrested. And luckily, he lost a lot of followers after that.
Roch was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for the amputation of Gabrielle’s arm. As I said, a lot of the followers left, but Roch fathered four more kids with the female members who stayed during conjugal visits. Gabrielle Lavallée reported about Solange Boilard’s murder and after a few years of investigation, in 1993, Roch pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the death of Solange Boilard. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2000, Thériault was transferred to Dorchester Penitentiary, a medium-security prison in Dorchester, New Brunswick. In 2002, Thériault was rejected for parole as he was considered too high a risk to reoffend, and he never applied again.
2009, Roch made headlines yet again when he tried to sell his drawing and poetry on a United States-based website MurderAuction.com, which was a ‘true crime auction house’. The Correctional Service of Canada prevented Roch's works from leaving Dorchester Penitentiary, and Stockwell Day because they didn’t want a killer making money from prison. On February 26, 2011, 63-year-old Roch Thériault was found dead near his cell at Dorchester Penitentiary after his cellmate, Matthew Gerrard MacDonald (who hated Roch for the crimes that he committed), a 60-year-old convicted murderer stabbed Thériault in the neck with a shiv. Matthew later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison, having already been serving a life sentence for a previous murder charge. Apparently, after stabbing Roch, Matthew walked to the guards' station, handed them the weapon, and said, "That piece of sh*t is down on the range. Here's the knife, I've sliced him up."
This is one of the most gruesome cases that I have heard. It is so sad too, all the torture. I think that Roch got away for what he did for so long because of his looks. Again, he was said to be very charismatic and people trusted him for it. If you search him up on google, he does actually look very innocent and like a person who wouldn't hurt a fly. But, obviously, look what he did. I guess that we can learn from this case that no one is really what they claim to be. This guy said that he would save people when the end of the world came, but that was just a whole lot of crap. Anyways, guys, stay safe out there, its a wild world and I will see you next week. Bye!