Further reading for Roch Theriault and the Ant Hill Kids
Roch Theriault is a real Last Podcast on the Left hat trick, to coin an appropriately Canadian phrase. Theriault was a vicious sexual sadist along the lines of the Toybox Killer, David Parker Ray; a cult leader on par with Jim Jones and The People’s Temple (albeit with a significantly smaller body count), and a remorseless murderer like Henry Lee Lucas, all the while looking an awful lot like Leonard Lake. He was a gigantic loser who, like a lot of these cult leader criminals, also managed to somehow wield an astonishing degree of charisma.
Theriault was the miserable son of Catholic fascist family in one of Quebec’s most depressing mining towns where the main export was fucking asbestos! Though, he grew up with nothing but resentment toward his family’s chosen religious path, Roch eventually drifted into the halls of the Seventh Day Adventist church, itself a mainstream sect of Christianity with one foot in the world of doomsday cults and within this structure began to distinguish himself as a man with all the answers, eventually drawing into his influence a small crew of spiritually broken people who, for reasons I’ll never understand, were just looking for a man to submit themselves to. As if following a map, Roch made all the common cult leader plays to break his followers and draw them closer to himself and it wasn’t until the children were seized by Canadian authorities and placed in foster homes that the cracks began to show.
Unlike most cults, one of Roch’s own people turned on him after she’d had enough, and fled Roch’s remote forest commune, minus one of her arms which had been removed with a chainsaw as punishment for attempting to leave once before. And that’s not even the worst of it. Theriault received a 12 year sentence for assault, a sentence which seems light given the degree of horror of his crimes, crimes which are, even by Last Podcast standards, unbelievably shocking and sickening and was later sentenced to life after further investigations.
In 2011, Theriault’s cellmate did the entire world a favor and stabbed Roch repeatedly in the neck with a shiv, thus ending his life.
Episodes: 434-436
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