The Gruesome Fate of the Ant Hill Kids

On this day in 1988, Roch Thériault, leader of a cult known as the Ant Hill Kids, murdered one of his followers by performing "surgery" on her intestines. Thériault, who was obsessed with anatomy and medicine but had no medical training, sliced open the abdomen of cult member Solange Boilard and ripped out a piece of her intestines with his bare hands. He then had another cult member, Gabrielle Lavallée, stitch her up with a needle and thread. All of this was done to Boilard without any anesthesia and she also had a plastic tube filled with molasses and olive oil stuck up her rectum to act as an enema. Another tube was shoved down her throat and cult members were instructed to blow into it. All of this was done because Boilard had complained of an upset stomach and Roch Thériault saw himself as a healer.

After Solange Boilard died from her injuries, Roch Thériault, claiming that he could resurrect her, proceeded to drill a hole in her head in which he and other male cult members ejaculated. Her body was then buried near the Ant Hill Kid's commune in Burnt River, Ontario, Canada.

Roch Thériault was born in Saguenay, Quebec, Canada, on May 16, 1947. By all accounts, he was a very intelligent child but by the time he reached 7th grade, he had dropped out and began studying the Old Testament. He started to believe that the end of the world was near and converted from Catholicism to the Seventh-Adventist Day Church. In 1977, he formed a cult in Sainte-Marie, Quebec. He told his followers that God had sent him a revelation that the world would end in February 1979 and ordered them to start building a commune in Saint-Jogues, Quebec. He called them the Ant Hill Kids because they were like ants working on a hill.

Thériault's followers began to question him when the world did not end in February 1979 but he explained to them that the Earth's time and God's time were not parallel. He ended up marrying and impregnating all of the cult's female members and by the 1980s there were 40 members of the Ant Hill Kids. As time went on Roch Thériault began drinking heavily and transformed from a motivational leader to a totalitarian who would not even allow his followers to have sex with each other without his permission. He also started to abuse them by hitting them with belts and hammers, plucking out their hair, and suspending them from the ceiling.

As Thériault's drinking problem worsened, so did the abuse. He made his followers break their own legs with a sledgehammer and to prove loyalty, members would be forced to cut off each other's toes with wire cutters. The children were both physically and sexually abused to such extremes that one of Thériault's wives left her newborn baby outside in the freezing cold, where the child died so that the child would not be abused. Thériault claimed that the abuse would purify them of their sins. In 1987, due to the abuse and amateur surgeries that Thériault had begun to perform on his followers to prove his healing powers, 17 children were removed from the commune, which by this time had relocated to Burnt River. Thériault himself, however, was not punished for the abusive acts and continued with them until they culminated in Solange Boilard's death.

Authorities became aware of Boilard's murder after Gabrielle Lavallée, the member who had been ordered to sew up Boilard's "surgical" wounds, fled the commune and contacted them. Lavallée herself had suffered torture at the hands of Thériault. Her genitals had been burned with a welding torch, some of her teeth had been pulled out, part of her breast had been cut off, and her arm had been amputated with a chainsaw. Thériault was found guilty of assault for that amputation and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. While most cult members had abandoned him following his arrest, he did manage to impregnate female members during conjugal visits. In 1993, Thériault pled guilty to second-degree murder for the death of Solange Boilard and he was given a life sentence.

Roch Thériault was found dead in his prison cell on February 26, 2011, after an altercation with his cellmate. Matthew Gerrard MacDonald, who was already serving a life sentence for murder, stabbed Thériault in the neck with a shiv, walked to the guard station and proclaimed, "That piece of shit is down on the range. Here's the knife, I've sliced him up."

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