Elizabeth Perard is a Secondary 2 student at Alexander Galt Regional High School. She was the cycle one winner of the Peter Jennings Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction for the inaugural Galt Creative Awards.
In 1977, a cult was formed. A man named Roch Theriault was responsible for this. Roch Theriault was born on May 16, 1947 in Thetford Mines, Quebec. He was allegedly raised by an abusive and overly-Catholic father, but none of his siblings would ever confirm this. Because of his father’s passion for religion, Roch started to hate the Catholic Church.
Roch was a manipulative child. He would often steal money and cigarettes from his parents, then blame it on one of his six siblings. His neighbors said that Roch was a very convincing liar. Roch was also said to be very smart, but he dropped out of school in the 7th grade. After he dropped out, Roch started teaching himself the Old Testament of the Bible. He soon converted from Catholicism to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which promoted the banishment of unhealthy foods, tobacco and alcohol.
As a teenager in the 1960s, Roch jumped from job to job until he met Francine Grenier, his soon-to-be wife. By then, they both had enough money to buy and own a small house. Francine and Roch got married in 1967, when they were both just 20 years old. They then moved to Montreal and had two kids.
In the mid 1970s, Roch managed to convince a group of older teens and young adults to cut off ties with their families and to leave school to be a part of his Commune. He told them that the end of the world was near, and that God would only save them if they joined. It was in 1977 that the cult was first formed.
At first, it was only a group of seven people, including his wife and children. They all lived in a house where Roch would recite the Old Testament and make them do mental and physical exercises. Roch told the cult that these exercises would help them make it to Heaven. He told them it was the only way to stay safe from "the war between good and evil," which he said would happen in February of 1979. He told the cult that this war was going to be the final war between Heaven and Hell, and that no matter who won, every human would die and they would go to either of these places.
Soon after the cult was formed, more people started to join. Most of these members were women. Roch impregnated most of the female members. Over the course of his life, he had fathered around 30 children. After most of his members were impregnated, he decided to move his cult out to a mountainside. There, he would make all the cult members do the hard work of making that place a home, while he watched. He compared them to ants working on a hill, hence the name "Ant Hill Kids."
When the "war between good and evil" did not happen, Roch justified himself by saying that time moves differently on Heaven and earth. By then, there were almost 40 members in the cult, so he moved to a site near Burnt River in central Ontario.
Soon thereafter, the abuse started. He had a drinking problem, which only got worse as time went on. He also didn’t allow the other cult members to speak to each other without him there. After a while, he started implementing punishments on those he thought were straying from the cult. He would stalk them before punishing them, saying that God told him what they were doing, when in reality, he saw what the member did. He would punish these people by beating them, plucking hairs individually off their body, hanging them from a ceiling or defecating on them.
His punishments got more severe as time went on, and he started having less tolerance for those who’ve stepped out of line. He even started torturing the children. They would be abused sexually, held over fires, or tied to trees while other children threw rocks at the child.
Roch also did what he called "purification." He would strip a member, then whip them for their sins. He also started surgical operations to prove to the other members that he was "holy and healing." He would choose members and operate on them without any sort of anesthesia. Roch would work on them with blowtorches, kitchen utensils, pliers, and more. Many people lost limbs, fingers, teeth and toes to him.
In 1987, social workers removed over half of the children from the cult, but Roch got no repercussions for his actions. The police suspected abuse was going on, but since their site was a registered church, they couldn’t do any legal investigation on the matter.
In 1989, when the cult member Solange Boilard was complaining of an upset stomach, Roch performed surgery without anesthesia. He laid her naked on a table and punched her in the stomach before cutting her open. He then forced a plastic tube into her rectum to perform an enema with olive oil and molasses. After that, he had all of the women blow into the tube. When Roch was done, he had one of the women stitch her up. Boilard suffered for hours before she died, nearly seven hours later.
Roch claimed he had the power of resurrection. To prove this, he made the cult members dig up Solange Boilard’s body. He cut off her skull and made every male member ejaculate onto her brain. When it did not work, they reburied her disturbingly close to their commune.
One specific cult member named Gabrielle Lavallee suffered more abuse than anyone else. She suffered welding torch burns on her genitals, eight of her teeth being forcibly removed, a hypodermic needle breaking off in her back, along with much more. She decided to leave the cult, but soon realized she "couldn’t live without the cult," so she went back. Roch took this as an excuse to cut off her finger, nail her hand to a table and then removed her entire arm with a hunting knife. Gabrielle did not leave the cult after this. It took parts of her breast being removed and having her head smashed with the blunt part of an ax for her to leave and contact the authorities.
In 1989, the cult was raided by the authorities and Roch was arrested. He was served a life-sentence to prison, but he did not complete it alive. In 2011, Roch’s cell-mate ended up killing him, then confessed to Roch’s murder to a nearby guard. “That piece of shit is down on the range. Here’s the knife, I’ve sliced him up,” were his exact words. He was charged another life sentence on top of his first for murder.
But even after his death, some of Roch’s cult members tried to continue his practices, but nothing came of it. Now, there is no trace of the Ant Hill Kids anywhere. They’ve died out, and all members are now dead or elderly. But although the Ant Hill Kids have dispersed, there are still many unhealthy and dangerous cults at large. It’s important to make sure you can recognize the signs of a dangerous and unhealthy cult, and to know when you should leave and contact authorities.
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