Рок Терио: Канадский культовый лидер и убийца

Canadian cult leader and murderer (1947–2011)

Roch Thériault (ʁɔk te.ʁjo; May 16, 1947 – February 26, 2011) was a Canadian cult leader and convicted murderer. Thériault, a self proclaimed prophet under the name Moïse mɔ. iz, founded the Ant Hill Kids in 1977. They were a doomsday cult whose beliefs were based on Seventh day Adventist Church beliefs. In April 1978, Thériault was removed from the Seventh day Adventist Church. He maintained multiple wives and concubines, impregnating all female members as a religious requirement, and fathering 26 children. Thériault's followers, including 12 adults and 22 children, lived under his totalitarian rule in a commune and were subject to severe physical and sexual abuse. Thériault was arrested for assault in 1989, dissolving the cult, and in 1993 was convicted for the murder of follower Solange Boilard. He had previously killed an infant named Samuel Giguère, while two of his disciples, Geraldine Gagné Auclair and Gabrielle Nadeau, died following homeopathic treatments administered to them by Thériault. Thériault received a life sentence, which he was serving when he was murdered at Dorchester Penitentiary in 2011. Thériault, along with Robert Pickton, Clifford Olson and Paul Bernardo, has been considered one of Canada's most notorious criminals since the 1980s.

Roch Thériault was born on May 16, 1947 into a French Canadian family, and raised in Thetford Mines. As a child Thériault was considered to be very intelligent, but dropped out of school in the seventh grade and began to teach himself the Old Testament of the Bible. Thériault believed that the end of the world was near and would be brought on by the war between good and evil. Thériault converted from Catholicism to the Seventh day Adventist Church in January 1977,

In the mid 1970s, Thériault convinced a group of people to leave their jobs and homes to join him in a religious movement. Thériault formed the cult in 1977 in Sainte Marie, Quebec with the goal to form a commune where people could freely listen to his motivational speeches, live in unity and equality, and be free of sin. There, Thériault made the commune build their town while he relaxed, comparing them to ants working in an ant hill and naming the group the Ant Hill Kids. In February 1979, when the apocalypse did not occur, people started questioning Thériault's wisdom, but he defended himself by saying that time on Earth and in God's world were not parallel, and that therefore it was a miscalculation. To expand the community as well as keep the members devoted, Thériault married and impregnated all of the women in the commune, fathering over 20 children with 9 female members of the group. By the 1980s, there were nearly 40 members. Followers were made to wear identical tunics to represent equality and their devotion to the commune. In 1984, the group relocated from Quebec to a new site near Burnt River, a hamlet in Central Ontario which is now part of the city of Kawartha Lakes.

Following the cult's formation, Thériault began to move away from being a motivational leader as his drinking problem worsened, exerting an increasingly totalitarian control over the lives of his followers and becoming irrational in his beliefs. Members were not allowed to speak to each other when he was not present, nor to have sex with each other without his permission. The Ant Hill Kids raised money for living by selling baked goods, and members who did not bring in enough money were also punished. Over time, Thériault's punishments became increasingly extreme and violent, including making members break their own legs with sledgehammers, sit on lit stoves, shoot each other in the shoulders, and eat dead mice and feces. A follower would sometimes be asked to cut off another follower's toes with wire cutters to prove loyalty. The abuse extended to the cult's children, who were sexually abused, held over fires, or nailed to trees while other children threw stones at them. One of Thériault's wives left a newborn child, Eleazar Lavallée, outside to die in freezing temperatures to keep him away from the abuse. Thériault attempted to backtrack to the original religious mission of the commune, beginning to strongly believe in purifying his followers and ridding them of their sins through abusive purification sessions where the members would be completely nude as he whipped and beat them. Thériault claimed to be a holy being, and started performing unnecessary amateur surgical operations on sick members to demonstrate his healing powers. These "surgeries" included injecting a 94% ethanol solution into stomachs, or performing circumcisions on the children and adults of the group. In 1987, social workers removed 17 of the children from the commune. However, Thériault faced no repercussions for his abusive acts. In 1989, when follower Solange Boilard complained of an upset stomach, Thériault performed another amateur surgery without anaesthesia. He laid her naked on a table, and punched her in the stomach, then forced a plastic tube into her rectum to perform a crude enema with molasses and olive oil. He cut open her abdomen with a knife and ripped out part of her intestines with his bare hands. The Correctional Service of Canada prevented Theriault's works leaving Dorchester Penitentiary, and Stockwell Day, the Canadian federal Public Safety Minister at the time, wrote to the Correctional Service to express concern that the killer was benefiting from work in prison.

On February 26, 2011, at age 63, Thériault was found dead near his cell at Dorchester Penitentiary. His death is believed to be the result of an altercation with his cellmate, Matthew Gerrard MacDonald, a 60 year old convicted murderer from Port au Port, Newfoundland and Labrador, who was charged with the killing. MacDonald pleaded guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison, having already been serving a life sentence for a previous murder charge. MacDonald had stabbed Thériault in the neck with a shiv, walked to the guards' station, handed them the weapon, and proclaimed "That piece of shit is down on the range. Here's the knife, I've sliced him up." The 2002 film Savage Messiah depicts Thériault's crimes against his followers and the ensuing legal recourse. The film stars Luc Picard as Thériault, and Polly Walker as Paula Jackson, the social worker whose investigation revealed the crimes. Gabrielle Lavallée wrote a memoir of her life in the sect entitled L'alliance de la brebis ("Alliance of the Ewe"), .