◆Part 1: The Prophet
His name was Roch Thériault. He called himself Moses.
Born in 1947 in Saguenay, Quebec into a devoutly Catholic family. He was bright. He dropped out of school in the 7th grade and taught himself the Old Testament instead. He decided that was enough to found a religion.
He turned to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, drawn to its emphasis on health, clean living and the end of the world. He ran detox seminars. He gave motivational talks. He was passionate and persuasive and he had a way of looking at people like they were the only person in the room.
He spoke to people who were lost and made them feel found.
In 1977 he founded the Ant Hill Kids. In 1978 the church kicked him out. He kept the followers.
◆Part 2: The Commune
He told them the world was ending in February 1979. He told them God had appeared to him personally with the information. He told them their families were corrupt, their jobs were corrupt, and that everything they had built was about to burn.
He told them he was the only way out. They believed him.
They sold their possessions. They cut contact with their families. Thériault moved the group by hiking them to a mountainside in the Gaspé Peninsula that he named Eternal Mountain. 4 men, 9 women and 4 children marched into the wilderness of Quebec on the word of a man who had decided God ran on a different schedule than everyone else.
He was the only one who knew English. The rest were from Quebec and spoke only French. When they moved further into the bush this meant he was the only one who could interact with the outside world at all. He had not chosen this by accident.
February 1979 came. The world did not end. He explained this away by saying God and the world ran on different time zones. They stayed.
◆Part 3: The Rules
Once the commune was established the rules arrived.
Members were not permitted to speak to each other without Thériault present. He claimed God told him what people had said and done when he wasn't watching.
He impregnated every female member as a religious requirement. He fathered 26 children with 9 women who were his wives and concubines simultaneously. He was the only man permitted sexual access to any woman on the commune.
The punishments began with belts. Then he introduced hammers. Then the flat side of an axe. He made members sit on lit stoves. Shoot each other in the shoulders. Eat dead mice and feces. He held gladiator tournaments where he forced members to fight each other while he watched.
He drank constantly. Only he was permitted alcohol.
He called all of this discipline. He called all of it love.
◆Part 4: The Doctor
By the mid-1980s Thériault announced he was a healer. That God had gifted him with medical knowledge beyond what any trained surgeon possessed.
He had no equipment. No training. No anaesthesia. He had kitchen utensils, improvised tools, and followers who had been conditioned over years to submit.
He injected pure ethanol into a woman's stomach and called it a cure. He removed teeth with pliers. He broke a hypodermic needle off inside a follower's spine. He burned a woman's genitals with a blowtorch. He cut off fingers. He removed limbs.
He kept a rib he had removed from a follower in a leather pouch around his neck.
In 1989 a woman named Solange Boilard complained of a stomach ache. Thériault decided surgery was required. He laid her naked on a table, cut open her abdomen with a kitchen knife, and pulled out part of her intestines with his bare hands.
Boilard died the next day. Thériault announced he could bring her back. She did not come back to life. Her corpse was buried near the commune.
◆Part 5: The One Who Left
Gabrielle Lavallée had been with Thériault since 1977. She was a nurse. He invited her to leave her nursing career and help him construct his vision. She said yes.
In the years that followed he pulled out 8 of her teeth with pliers. He burned her genitals with a blowtorch. He broke a hypodermic needle off in her spine. He cut the tendon in her hand. He nailed her hand to a table.
She tried to leave 4 times. Each time she came back.
On July 26, 1989 Thériault pinned her hand to the kitchen table with a hunting knife. Then he amputated her arm. No anaesthesia. No surgical equipment. A hunting knife. She was conscious for the beginning of it. She survived.
On August 16, 1989 Gabrielle Lavallée walked out of the commune and into the bush. She hitchhiked to a hospital north of Toronto and walked in with the evidence of what had been happening in the Canadian wilderness carved into what was left of her body.
Doctors looked at the crude amputation and called the police immediately.
◆Part 6: The End
Thériault was caught hiding in a shelter about 2 miles from the old commune with 3 followers and 2 children. He pleaded guilty the same day he appeared in court 12 years for the assault on Lavallée.
Then investigators went back to the commune. They found the body of Solange Boilard buried in the ground. Thériault was charged with murder. He pleaded guilty. Life in prison. No parole before 2000.
During his imprisonment the women who had not left him moved to Kingston to be closer to the facility. He fathered 4 more children with them through conjugal visits.
On February 26, 2011, a fellow prisoner named Matthew Gerrard MacDonald walked up to the guard station at Dorchester Penitentiary. He handed over a knife and said: "That piece of shit is down on the range. Here's the knife, I've sliced him up."
Thériault was 63. He had been stabbed in the neck. He died at the scene.
The man who called himself Moses, who told his followers God ran on a different time zone, who removed a dead woman's rib and kept it in a pouch around his neck, died on a prison floor.
No resurrection attempt was made.