Imagine joining a religious commune because you think you've finally found a place where you can escape the outside world.

You give up your family, your friends, your old life.

You follow a charismatic man into the mountains because he promises salvation.

And then, slowly, the rules change.

First, you can't talk to your family.

Then you can't talk to other members without permission.

Then people start getting hurt.

And somehow, you're still there.

This was the Ant Hill Kids, one of the most disturbing cults in Canadian history.

And its leader, Roch Thériault, would spend years turning religious devotion into absolute control.

Roch Thériault was born in Quebec in 1947 and became obsessed with the Old Testament and doomsday prophecies.

By the 1970s, he was approaching people in churches, bars and restaurants, talking about his faith and presenting himself as someone with a special connection to God.

He was charismatic.

He was persuasive.

And he was apparently very comfortable bending the truth about his past to make himself seem more interesting or miraculous.

Eventually, he began gathering followers.

He told them they could escape the corruption of the outside world by living together in a commune.

Then came the big announcement:

God would return in February 1979 and destroy the Earth.

So the group moved into the mountains.

At the time, there were four men, nine women and four children.

They built cabins.

They built communal housing.

They worked.

Roch watched.

He eventually called them the Ant Hill Kids, comparing his followers to ants working tirelessly for their queen.

Guess who the queen was.

Welcome to another episode of The Crime Times, your weekly dose of chilling crimes, bizarre mysteries, and stories that will make you question everything.

Keep your lights off, wear your detective hat and let’s get back to this week’s case.

When followers asked Roch why the apocalypse hadn't happened, he had an answer.

God's time wasn't their time.

Maybe he'd misunderstood the calendar.

Maybe he'd calculated something incorrectly.

Basically: the prophecy was still happening, just... later.

And they needed more followers.

Conveniently, Roch also began marrying women in the group and eventually fathered 20 children 💀

But he wasn't just their religious leader.

He claimed he was a healer.

And that became a problem.

Two-year-old Samuel Girard was having trouble urinating.

Roch said he knew exactly what to do.

He took a scalpel and cut the child open.

Samuel screamed.

Roch ordered another follower, Guy Veer, to punish him for crying.

During the punishment, Samuel died.

Now they had a dead two-year-old.

So the group tried to burn his body.

It didn't work.

They buried him instead.

The police were suspicious, but Roch was remarkably good at charming people.

One psychiatrist who evaluated him reportedly considered him safe enough to have children in his care, even continuing to defend him after more of his actions became known.

And this is what makes the story so frightening.

Roch didn't need everyone to believe something obviously insane.

He needed them to trust him one decision at a time.

And the worst part? He was succeeding.

The group eventually moved to Burnt River, Ontario.

By then, the rules had become much more extreme.

Members were forbidden from talking to outsiders.

They couldn't communicate freely with one another.

Everyone except Roch wore matching tunics.

And Roch began staging what he called gladiator tournaments, forcing members to fight each other until he called for them to stop.

Broken noses.

Broken bones.

People getting beaten because their leader told them to.

Then the punishment escalated.

Members who tried to leave could be tied to the ceiling while their body hair was pulled out.

Roch reportedly defecated on them.

One person was ordered to prove his loyalty by breaking his own legs with a sledgehammer.

What the actual hell?????

Others were forced to sit on lit stoves, shoot each other in the shoulder, or have parts of their bodies mutilated.

Children were abused too.

Some were reportedly nailed to trees while other children threw rocks at them.

And somehow, Roch could still return to being the charismatic, caring man his followers had originally trusted.

That cycle, cruelty, then kindness, then cruelty again, helped keep people trapped.

The cage wasn't built all at once.

It was built one rule at a time.

In 1987, one woman finally tried to escape.

During a blizzard, she left her two-month-old baby outside, where the child froze to death.

The discovery triggered a serious investigation into the commune.

Authorities eventually removed all the children.

Roch was left with only a small group of adult followers.

And without the children around, the violence became even worse.

One male follower was castrated using a rubber band. Roch also began burning people's genitals with soldering irons.

Then came Solange.

In September 1988, Solange Boilard complained of stomach pain.

Roch told her he could help.

He laid her on a kitchen table.

Punched her in the stomach.

Inserted a plastic tube into her lower intestine and induced an enema using oil and molasses.

Then he cut open her abdomen, pulled out part of her intestine and tore a piece off with his bare hands before putting the rest back inside.

He stitched her up.

Members were then ordered to insert a tube down her throat and blow into it to inflate her digestive tract.

....

(wait. I don't have words right now)

Solange survived the night.

She died the next day.

And Roch still wasn't finished.

He claimed he could resurrect her.

(what the actual helll!)

He cut open her body, removed her uterus and drilled into her skull.

He then ordered the men in the group to abuse her corpse.

He eventually removed one of her ribs and wore it as a necklace, invoking the biblical story of Eve being created from Adam's rib.

Her body was buried near the commune.

One of Roch's followers, Gabriela Lavallée, had already endured years of abuse.

After complaining about a toothache, eight of her teeth were pulled.

She was subjected to other torture, including having a hypodermic needle broken off in her back.

After witnessing what happened to Solange, Gabriela decided to escape.

In July 1989, she tried.

Roch caught her.

He pinned her arm to a wall with a hunting knife.

Then amputated it with a chainsaw.

And somehow, Gabriela tried again.

A month later, she escaped for real.

She hitchhiked to a hospital near Toronto.

At first, she was still so afraid that she told people her arm had been injured and Roch had amputated it to help her.

Eventually, she told the truth.

And that changed everything.

Roch was arrested in August 1989 for aggravated assault and unlawful bodily harm.

He pleaded guilty and received 12 years.

ONLY TWELVE FREAKING YEARS???!!

But once he was removed from the group, members began turning against him.

One eventually showed authorities where Solange's body was buried.

Roch was convicted of her murder too and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Even prison didn't completely break his influence.

Women from the group continued visiting him during conjugal visits, and he fathered four more children while incarcerated 💀💀💀

Then, on February 26, 2011, Roch was killed in prison by his cellmate, Matthew McDonald.

McDonald reportedly handed the weapon to a guard and said:

“That piece of shi is down on the range. Here's the knife. I've sliced him up.”

He received another life sentence.

And that was finally the end of Roch Thériault.

The Ant Hill Kids cult is horrifying because of what one man was capable of.

But maybe the most unsettling part is how slowly it happened.

Nobody joined a commune thinking, I'm going to let someone torture me.

They joined because they trusted someone.

Then the rules changed.

Then the boundaries moved.

Then leaving became terrifying.

And by the time the water was boiling, they were already inside the pot.

And that's the horrific part that stays with you.

Now detectives, we have a question for you. If you had joined the Ant Hill Kids in the beginning, at what point do you think you would’ve realized something was seriously wrong, and do you think you would’ve been able to leave?

Hit reply. We are waiting for your reply.

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