The Ant Hill Kids

We’re going to be discussing this not so happy hop down the hippy hill on February the 26th a full moon.

Roch Thériault was the leader of a doomsday cult in Ontario, Canada between 1977 and 1989, brandishing total malevolence over around twelve grown-ups and at least 26 kids, most of them his own offspring fathered by the nine women.

Roch had been removed from the Seventh Day Adventists, and had grown his recruits with the help of detoxification lectures for people trying to stop cigarettes or alcohol. He cajoled several of them to leave their jobs and abandon their families to live with him in the wild, naming them the Ant Hill Kids because of how hard he commanded them to toil – and when I say command, I mean he forced them to break their own legs with sledgehammers if they refused.

Though he failed to predict the end of the world in 1979, Thériault successfully became a sadistic cult leader, demanding absolute loyalty and punishing rebels and dissenters. He nailed children to trees, made his followers eat their own feces, and when angered, he’d strip them down and bat them, pluck their hairs out one-by-one, and many other forms of abuse. He also refused to take anyone to the doctor, instead performing surgeries himself (without anesthetics), which resulted in one woman’s death from pulling out her intestines. He also killed a child during a failed circumcision, and one more died after being left outside during a blizzard as punishment. Having teeth and even limbs removed was part of daily life for the 12 adults and 22 children under Theriault’s hypnotic spell.

But the terrifying truth of what was happening at Burnt River, Ontario, was only laid bare when, physically broken and brutally abused, one of his followers escaped and alerted authorities to the horrors of life as an ant hill kid.

It was as late as 1989 that Gabrielle Lavallée, having been brutally mutilated by Thériault on more than one occasion, finally escaped and contacted authorities. Thériault was given a life sentence, but he was killed in 2011 by his cellmate. Still, a good portion of his followers never recovered from their abuse, and have continued to obey his teachings.