I Want To Believe Notes

The Ant Hill Kids

Roch Thériault was a Seventh Day Adventist. Like many cult leaders, he was a very charming and persuasive man. Persuasive enough to be able to convince other Seventh Day Adventists to quit their jobs and join his commune in 1977 which would be called "The Ant Hill Kids" after their hard work.

 The commune held values such as equality and community and was "free of sin". Therieault also changed his name in true cult leader fashion to a religious figure. In this case it was Moses. It ran fairly smoothly as they made money selling baked goods until the proper Seventh Day Adventists kicked out these weirdos for being weird and the rules of the cult became more strict. 

Members weren't allowed contact with their families and could only speak to one another when Moses was not present. Moses developed a drinking problem which is a big no no in the Adventist religion.

He once married four women at that same time.

Moses became paranoid and would spy on his followers and punish them if they tried to leave or if he believed they weren't loyal enough to him. 

He would hit these people with belts, hammers, pluck all the hairs out of a persons' body one by on, he would suspend them from the ceiling and even defecate on them.

In 1979 Moses became convinced that the world was going to end. He moved all of his communed out to the Canadian wilderness. As we are currently living and breathing we can tell that the world did not come. Roch's excuse? 

Well you see, God's time is different to our time. Surprisingly, his followers believed this and the cult continued on. His female followers assisted in the birth of 26 Roch babies. However after emotional and physical abuse his children were taken away one by one by the authorities. 

Now that he was out of children to abuse the monster moved on to all of the other followers. He would take on the role as doctor and use things found around the house such as kitchen utensils, blowtorches and pliers. If that's not creepy enough, the patient would be awake and held down by other members of the cult. 

"Most followers lost limbs, teeth, fingers and toes to this practice".

"There were many other disciplinary practices Thériault used. He forced commune members to break their own legs with sledgehammers, to shoot each other in the shoulders, eating their own – and other's – feces, insects and rats. He would nail children to a tree and force other children to throw rocks at them. He would forcibly remove teeth and nails. He would burn his followers by making them sit on lit stoves. He would cut off arms and legs without warning. He made them sit naked in the cold and whip and beat them. Nothing was too cruel a punishment.

However, Thériault's pièce de résistance came when one of his followers complained of pain the abdomen. Thériault forced her to undress, laid her on the kitchen table, punched her in the stomach, performed an enema by shoving a tube up her rectum and filled her up with olive oil. Then he cut her stomach open, ripped out parts of her intestines with his bare hands, and he forced another member to stitch her up. Then, he shoved a tube down her throat and made the other women blow air into it. Unsurprisingly, the woman died the next day. Of course, Thériault as a prophet had the powers of resurrection. This resurrection consisted of drilling a hole in the dead woman's skull and having every male member ejaculate into it. The woman remained dead."

"Other victims of Roch consisted of two of his own children, one of which he murdered during a failed circumcision, and the other died when Roch left him outside in the middle of a blizzard.

It took the near-death experience of Gabrielle Lavallée to bring to light all these horrible crimes against humanity. Gabrielle had endured blow-torches held to her genitals, eight of her teeth taken out, and a hypodermic needle breaking off in her spine. She had tried to escape, but could not live without the cult and went back. Roch took this as a good reason to cut off one of her fingers, nail her hand to a table and amputate her entire arm. With a hunting knife. Of course, Gabrielle did not see this as enough reason to actually leave. It took Roch amputating parts of her breasts and smashing her head in with an axe for her to actually flee and contact the authorities."

Roch was given a life sentence in 1989 and in 2011, at the age 63, he was murdered by his cell mate. The cell mate apparently handed the knife he used on Roch to a guard and said "That piece of shit is down on the range. Here's the knife, I've sliced him up." 

Even after that Roch continued to have a small following.

http://www.cvltnation.com/ant-hill-kids-break-legs-sledgehammer-go-hell/