Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / The Ant Hill Kids Cult

Transcript

The Ant Hill Kids Cult · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:18
  It's honestly hard to believe that one person could have enough charisma or riz.
• 0:24
  As the kids are saying now, it's hard to believe that one person could
• 0:27
  have enough riz and power to manipulate an entire group of people into doing what
• 0:32
  they say, no matter the cost. On May sixteenth, nineteen forty seven,
• 0:37
  Roke Throat was born in Quebec, Canada. For the first two years
• 0:41
  of his childhood, Roke was more or less a normal kid, although he
• 0:45
  was thought to have above average intelligence, and it was this intelligence which led
• 0:50
  a preteen Roke into a deep fascination with the Bible, in particular the Old
• 0:56
  Testament, which he became devoted to studying. In the seventh grade, Roke
• 1:00
  dropped out of school and studying the Bible became his obsession. He held a
• 1:06
  firm belief that the world was currently stricken with a war between the forces of
• 1:11
  good and evil, which would eventually lead to the end of days. At
• 1:15
  first, Roke identified as a Catholic, but quickly converted to Seventh Day Adventist
• 1:21
  Church, which was more in line with his own beliefs. Seventh Day at
• 1:26
  Venice believed that there will be a second coming of Jesus Christ, resulting in
• 1:30
  the righteous people being resurrected from the dead into a better world. In short,
• 1:34
  there was everything that Roke wanted. By the nineteen seventies, Roke was
• 1:38
  no longer content to worship like everybody else. He wanted to create a miniature
• 1:44
  society full of righteous people. But more than that, he wanted a consistent
• 1:49
  audience who would listen to his preaching and applaud his speeches. Roke was persuasive,
• 1:55
  and by the mid nineteen seventies he had a small group of followers who
• 1:57
  agreed to leave their lives mind and live in commune in Saint Marie, Quebec.
• 2:04
  From the day Roke's religious commune began in nineteen seventy seven, it had
• 2:08
  all the key characteristics of a cult. His followers were banned from reaching out
• 2:14
  to their families, and they became isolated from the Seventh Day had finished church
• 2:17
  that they had all once been loyal members of. Roke told his followers that
• 2:22
  he had received a warning from God telling them that the world would end in
• 2:27
  early nineteen seventy nine. Spoiler alert didn't happen. As that day approached,
• 2:32
  though, Roke became more and more paranoid and unstable, he decided to relocate
• 2:38
  the cult to a remote area of the mountain side, which he named Eternal
• 2:43
  Mountain. While the members of the cults slaved away to build their new home
• 2:46
  on Eternal Mountain, Roke simply sat back and watched them work. They had
• 2:52
  to wear identical tunics to symbolize that all members of the cult were equal,
• 2:55
  but of course Roke made himself exempt from the rule. From a distance,
• 3:01
  he noted that his followers looked like tiny ants working to build an ant hill,
• 3:07
  and this is how the now notorious nickname for the commune was created.
• 3:10
  From then on, they were referred to as the ant Hill Kids. February
• 3:15
  nineteen seventy nine, the month when Rokee had assured everybody that the world would
• 3:21
  come to an end, It came and went the world continued to turn.
• 3:25
  After spending so long working and fearing the end of days, some members of
• 3:30
  the ant Hill Kids began to question where their Rokee had received a warning from
• 3:34
  God at all. Roke's response was that he had a miscalculation due to the
• 3:38
  fact that time didn't work the same way on Earth as it did in God's
• 3:42
  domain, So for the time being, the ant Hill Kids were reassured.
• 3:46
  Roche now had a new focus. As well as making sure all of the
• 3:50
  ant Hill Kids remained devoted to him, he needed to make their community larger
• 3:54
  and more powerful. In his opinion, the simplest way to do this wasn't
• 3:59
  to crute more followers from the outside world. Now they was to personally impregnate
• 4:04
  as many of the female cult members as possible. Roche performed this task with
• 4:10
  Gusto, marrying all eligible women in the ant Hill Kids and fathering more than
• 4:15
  twenty children by different mothers. By the time the early nineteen eighties came around,
• 4:19
  the population of the ant Hill Kids was now at more than forty They
• 4:24
  relocated again, this time to Central Ontario, and once again wrote continued to
• 4:30
  follow the typical pattern familiar to anyone that's researched the formation and escalation of cult
• 4:35
  leaders. His initial charisma and kindness began to fade and turned into a cruel,
• 4:42
  totalitarian attitude. He banned the ant Hill Kids from having conversations with each
• 4:47
  other. He was the only person in the cult allowed to have sexual intercourse
• 4:51
  without permission, telling his followers that God would inform him if they had misbehaved
• 4:57
  or been disloyal, he set about punishing people who he believed had sinned.
• 5:01
  Like the rest of Roque's behavior, his punishments followed a continued pattern of escalation.
• 5:06
  If anyone told them that they wanted to leave the Anthill Kids, or
• 5:11
  even if he just suspected they were straying, he would beat them, hang
• 5:15
  them from the ceiling, defecate on their bodies, or spend hours painstakingly plucking
• 5:19
  every single hair from their body. It just depended on his mood at the
• 5:24
  time. Before long, he was causing permanent, severe bodily harm, and
• 5:28
  it wasn't just inflicting punishments himself, but he was also forcing other cult members
• 5:32
  to punish victims for him, or making the victims physically harm themselves while he
• 5:39
  watched. Roque's followers were ordered to shoot each other in the arm, break
• 5:44
  their own legs, eat human feces, and cut off each other's toes.
• 5:48
  The children Roque had fathered were no longer safe. Even the youngest members of
• 5:53
  the cult were systematically sexually abused, nailed to trees, pelted with rocks,
• 5:58
  and held above open flames. Eliza Levie, one of Roke's many wives decided
• 6:03
  to protect her newborn child from Roke's abuse by leaving the baby outside to freeze
• 6:09
  to death, thinking that it was possibly a kinder fate than he would have
• 6:13
  met had he been allowed to live under Rogue's rule. In the late nineteen
• 6:16
  eighties, almost twenty of the children were removed from the cult by social workers.
• 6:21
  However, there was no further investigation into Roke or the safety of the
• 6:26
  adult members of his cult. Around this time, Roke started believing that he
• 6:30
  genuinely had holy powers, which would allow him to heal cult members by performing
• 6:36
  amateur surgeries. One of his followers, Solange Ballard, had an upset stomach
• 6:42
  in nineteen eighty nine. Rokee decided to treat her complaint with anaesthesia free abdominal
• 6:47
  surgery, and the surgery he punched her in the gut, gave her an
• 6:51
  enema with olive oil and syrup, and then tore out some of her intestines
• 6:57
  with his hands. You don't have to be a doctor to that. That
• 7:00
  didn't fix Solange's stomach pain, and she died the following day. Roke told
• 7:05
  his followers that he would resurrect her through the unusual method of drilling a hole
• 7:10
  into her skull and ejaculating into her brain. When Solange apparently had the audacity
• 7:16
  to remain dead, Roke finally gave up and buried her body. One of
• 7:20
  the Anhill kids was able to escape and alert the authorities about this. It
• 7:26
  was Elazar, the same woman who had left her baby to freeze to death
• 7:30
  as an act of mercy, but now she was in such poor physical condition
• 7:34
  that she was lucky to be alive herself. Eight of her teeth had been
• 7:39
  pulled out, her genitals had been burned with a welding torch, parts of
• 7:43
  her breast and cut off, and Roque had amputated one of her arms with
• 7:46
  a cleaver after restraining her by stabbing her with a knife through her hand into
• 7:51
  a table. The fact that none of these injuries had caused her death is
• 7:55
  a testament to both luck and human determination. She just refused to die,
• 8:01
  and because of that, she was the one to take the ant Hill Kids
• 8:05
  down. Local authorities had always suspected that abuse was taking place in the cult,
• 8:09
  but because Roque had registered the community as a church, an investigation had
• 8:13
  not been able to legally take place. But with the escapees, testimony and
• 8:20
  the severe injuries that had been inflicted upon her. Rokee Thorote was placed under
• 8:24
  arrest. He was given a twelve year sentence for assault, and consequently most
• 8:28
  of the ant Hill Kids members fled. However, Rope did still have a
• 8:33
  few loyal female supporters, with whom he was able to father four more children
• 8:39
  during his time in jail. That is, until investigators gathered more evidence and
• 8:43
  sentenced him to life in prison for Solange's murder. His application for parole was
• 8:50
  justifiably rejected, and he never reapplied. At the age of sixty three,
• 8:56
  Roke died in prison by being stabbed to death by his cell mate Matthew McDonald.
• 9:01
  After killing Roke, Matthew turned himself over to the guards immediately and handed
• 9:07
  them the murder weapon. He said, here's the knife. I've sliced him
• 9:11
  up. And Roke's last moments, after a life spent slicing up so many
• 9:16
  of his own followers, he got a taste of his own medicine, and
• 9:20
  no, he was not resurrected. That is ten minute murder for today Brief
• 9:33
  and binge able True Crime. I'm Joe the host, and I really appreciate
• 9:37
  you listening, and I know what you're thinking, Joe, that story,
• 9:43
  could you make it more graphic? It was really it was really graphic today,
• 9:46
  and unusually more graphic than the ten minute murder stories usually are. And
• 9:52
  I can't apologize for it because without the details of the story, there's not
• 9:56
  a lot to tell. Normally, I will avoid a lot of the gory
• 10:01
  graphic stuff talking about it in detail, and I'll mention some of it usually,
• 10:05
  but then other times be a little bit vague because we're adults here,
• 10:09
  right, You know what I'm saying without me going into detail about what it
• 10:11
  is exactly. But stories like today, I feel like you need to know
• 10:16
  more of the information to really grasp exactly what was going on, because on
• 10:20
  the outside looking in, you could just say, well, why don't they
• 10:22
  just leave this cult? Because they were scared to death. That's why they
• 10:26
  couldn't just leave, no matter what they did, no matter what they said.
• 10:30
  They were afraid of being murdered at any moment, being tortured at any
• 10:33
  moments, having their arms cut off at any moment, having their literal guts
• 10:37
  ripped out at any moment. So without the details, I don't think I
• 10:41
  could effectively portray exactly how dangerous this cult was for the people in the cult.
• 10:46
  All right, so if this is your first time listening to ten Minute
• 10:50
  Murder, please subscribe now so that you can catch up on all the back
• 10:52
  episodes and never miss any of the new ones. Connect with me on social
• 10:56
  media see the visuals that we're talking about here in the podcast. By the
• 11:00
  way, it will not be showing the visuals for this story in graphic detail.
• 11:05
  I'll show as many pictures as I can without being graphic, but you
• 11:07
  can find all that on the social media pages of ten Minute Murder. If
• 11:11
  you like this episode, please leave a rating and review on Apple or any
• 11:15
  place that's possible. Your positive feedback is appreciated. Go to ten minute murder
• 11:20
  dot com for all things ten minute Murder. And if you're still listening at
• 11:24
  this point, I feel like I should tell you that since I move the
• 11:28
  beginning part to the end, you know this part that we're enjoying together right
• 11:31
  now. I have no idea how to end this podcast. I could just
• 11:35
  say goodbye, but it sounds super plain and I don't know what to do.
• 11:41
  But today I will give you a piece of advice. Don't let the
• 11:43
  impulsive thoughts win I have this bad habit when I go to Mexican restaurants where
• 11:50
  they put the plate down and they say, be careful, it's hot,
• 11:52
  but I have to touch it. I don't know why they say it's hot.
• 11:56
  They tell me it's hot. They've got a potholder in their hand when
• 11:58
  they put it down on my table in front of me, and they tell
• 12:01
  me not to touch it. It's hot, don't touch it, but I
• 12:05
  have to. And it's usually like just like a bump. I'll just bump
• 12:09
  it a little bit, and every now and then they see me do it
• 12:11
  and they just look at me, like, are you the stupidest human on
• 12:13
  the face of this earth? I just said don't touch it. So I
• 12:16
  guess this is advice to not just you, but to me. Also,
• 12:20
  don't let the impulse of thoughts win. Have a good night.