by Ray Black
Samuel had been severely mistreated by Roch, who was angry because the boy was not his own son. If he cried, his father was instructed to roll him in the snow. One night in March, 1981, the drunk Roch decided to circumsize Samuel, and to prepare him, poured ethanol into his mouth. Samuel was found dead the next morning. The blame was instantly passed to Guy Veer. Roch claimed that he had punched the young boy over and over again to stop him crying. A mock court, set up by Roch months later, also came to this conclusion. Guy’s punishment for murdering Samuel was castration, for which Guy even signed a consent form. Roch gave Guy some alcohol, and wound an elastic band around his genitals to perform the operation.
Guy Veer eventually went to the police, and on December 9, 1981, after having received Veer’s statement, the police made another visit to the commune. They arrested four members, including Moses, concerning the death of the child. They were convicted of criminal responsibility and child abandonment. Further, Gabrielle Lavallée was also convicted for having helped Moses with the castration, despite being a nurse and knowing that this operation could have resulted in death.
On December 23, the judge sent an eviction notice to the members still in the commune, and on January 18, 1982, the members still at the commune were evacuated by forest guards.
On September 28, 1982, the four accused members were all found guilty of practising illegal medicine which caused the death of the child. They all received prison sentences, ranging from between nine months to one year. During his time in prison, Moses wrote a book about the life of the commune in the Gaspe forest.
On his release from prison, Roch moved his community to Burnt River, an area just north of Toronto. The locals and authorities were very suspicious of Roch and his followers and treated them very warily. They were caught shop-lifting, and consequently banned, from local stores and they were not granted welfare from the social services, on the basis that they were not a family.
In order to raise some money, Roch set up his own business making and selling bread and pastries door to door. He called the company ‘The Ant Hill Kids’ because of how hard they worked together. With a little more money coming in, Roch began drinking again. His stomach condition worsened, but every time he felt pain, he sent one of his followers to buy him a case of beer to ease it.
In June 1985, the Ontario Provincial Police were alerted to distress calls which had been made from the commune. They arrived to find a drunken Roch, totally naked, clinging to a tree calling ‘Mayday’ into a two-way radio. The other commune members, who had been told that the day had of judgement had finally arrived and to prepare themselves for the end of the world, were found cringing in a shelter.
PUNISHMENT
Roch became increasingly violent. In drunken rages, he would proclaim that all the members of the commune were evil and that he had to strike the devil from them. Mostly, the punishments were humiliating. Sometimes Roch would order his followers to lie down while he urinated on them, other times he ordered them to wipe their faces with each other’s excrement.
When one of the members could take no more of such rituals, he hit Roch in the face, smacking him against the wall. The punishment for this outburst? Circumcision. A small comfort was that Roch ordered another member of the commune to carry out the procedure. Had Roch done it himself, it would have been much worse.
One of the children, who could bear life in the commune no longer having been severely beaten by Roch, fled from the camp. He went to the police and told them that Moses had sexually abused him.
CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY
The commune was visited by social workers from the Children’s Aid Society, and they remarked how subservient the women of the commune were. None dared to speak unless given permission from Roch.
Roch told the social workers that only one of the women was his wife. The others were just his lovers. He was asked if the eldest girl in the commune, aged nine years, would eventually become his lover, to which he replied that he hoped so.
The Children’s Aid Society kept a close eye on Roch and the commune, and made frequent visits which he greatly disliked. One woman spoke to the CAS workers and told them of Roch’s division of the children into the chosen ones and mere slaves. The ‘slaves’ were used to gratify him sexually, or served as punchbags when he had been drinking and become violent. He would throw them against trees or into the lake. One boy, whom Roch particularly disliked because his droopy eyes were the mark of the devil, was left outside in a wheelbarrow for two hours – the temperature being –10°C. An ambulance was called but the boy had already died by the time it arrived.
Seventeen children were removed from the commune, under warrants issued by the CAS, and placed in foster homes. Their carers reported very unusual behaviour. One boy was scared of men with beards, another terrified by a light being turned on. One eight-year-old child told his foster parents how it had been his job to wash the commune women’s sanitary towels.
More horrific stories emerged from the commune. Roch, seemingly always drunk, used to suspend babies by their ankles above the fire, and ask of their crying mothers which one should be dropped first. Having thrown a child into the lake to cleanse it of the devil, he would not allow the mother to swim out and rescue her drowning baby until it had bobbed up at least three times.
Outside of the commune and in the safety of caring homes, the children were assessed psychologically. All, the reports showed, had been subjected to sexual acts too early in their development. They spoke naively of having had to masturbate Roch, one girl having been forced to do so at the same time as her mother.
Yet despite such intervention and the constant supervision of the police, still the strange practices did not stop. On September 29, 1988, one of the women, Solange Boilard, died after being operated on by Moses. The aim of the procedure was to relieve her of stomach aches, but Roch partially disembowelled her with a kitchen knife during the gruesome operation. The group buried the body, but it was later exhumed. This was repeated three times before they finally left her in peace. Moses took a small piece of her bone which he kept beneath his beard.
GABRIELLE LAVALLÉE
On November 5, 1988, Moses tore out eight of Gabrielle’s teeth with pliers as punishment for a reduction in bread sales. After this, Gabrielle fled, but she returned to the group a few days later. She repeated this a couple of times more, leaving but always coming back. She was scared of Moses, but admitted she couldn’t live without him.
Moses noticed that Gabrielle had a paralysed finger and ordered her to show it to him. As she held it out, he cut into it with a hunting knife. He told her she needed to have her hand amputated, explaining that there was a risk of gangrene. He then cut her arm off and attempted to cauterize the wound using a steel rod heated with a blow torch. After this, Gabrielle waited for the right time to leave the group again.
On August 14, Gabrielle left for good. As soon as she arrived in the village she was hospitalized. In hospital, she told a police officer about the treatment she had been subjected to in the commune and disclosed details of Solange Boilard’s ‘operation’. After her statement the police went looking for Moses. Five days later, Moses, two wives and two children were arrested as they prepared to flee Canada for the US.
In October 1990, he was charged with many counts of assault on Gabrielle, and for having caused the death of Solange Boilard. For the latter, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years.
He admitted that many things had happened at Burnt River, and that his alcoholism had brought on his psychological imbalance. He said he would never be able to forgive himself for Solange’s death.
IMPRISONED
Roch Theriault is still in prison. Since his imprisonment in 1989, he has been moved from different prisons across Canada. Yet he still casts a spell over some of his disciples. In each prison, he has received visits from three female members of the group, and has fathered a total of four children by them during this time.
In July 2002, an appeal was launched for his release. This was refused on the grounds that he was still considered a danger to society, and still had drug and alcohol problems. Unusually, Roch welcomed the verdict. Prior to the actual hearing he had even asked not to be released as he had begun to fear the treatment which he anticipated would be waiting for him on the outside.
Gabrielle Lavallée campaigns constantly to keep Roch Theriault in prison. She has written a book about the ordeals she suffered, testified at his parole hearing, and believes that he is a ‘monster’ who should stay behind bars for the rest of his life.
Francisco Bezerra De Morais
Toto and his prophecies of death
Brazilian, francisco bezerra de Morais was 35 when he and his followers murdered six people in order to ‘wipe out the enemies of God’.
Morais was the leader of a religious sect deep in the Amazon rain forest which was an off shoot group of the United Pentecostal Church of Brazil.
Even though Brazil’s largest religion is Catholicism, over the years there has been a vast increase in other religions and sects that have been influenced by Christianity and Ancient African spirituality.
On November 17, 1998, Morais, known to his followers as Toto, commanded for murders to take place after he started receiving prophecies from God ordering him to kill certain people within his church community.
The voices were said to state that Satanical people had become members of his congregation, and these evil people needed to be wiped out as soon as possible.
Six members of the 30-strong sect were arrested at a rubber plantation, which had been the site of the ritualistic murders.
Leader, Toto, had been helped by his wife and four other men after the three children and three adults had started to turn into demons. One of Toto’s followers, Francisco Lopes da Silva killed his own 13-year-old child after the boy apparently ‘transformed into a demon in front of a large crowd’. Lopes took his son to the rubber plantation and inflicted a ritualistic beating upon him, which ended in his death. The beatings took place using a number of different weapons such as bare knuckles, wooden clubs and metal chains whilst a continual chant of ‘Out, Satan!’ was cried.
Another father, Adalberto Taviera de Souza was also arrested for the murder of his two young children aged three and five. He killed them by repeatedly stamping on their heads after they had ‘turned into monsters with wide faces, fat legs and long fingernails.’
Souza then calmly watched his wife be murdered by Toto. Toto believed that it was necessary for her to be killed as she had given birth to the two miscreated children, so it was more than likely that she also had monstrous, demonic tendencies.
The other adults who were killed on Toto’s orders were two men who had apparently performed miracles such as changing the colours of the sun.
Toto believed that nearly all of his followers were ‘infected’ by demons and marked for death by God. It was his job whilst here on Earth to cleanse his congregation of the evil within.
Toto and his wife were arrested two weeks after the first murder had taken place when a former leader of the church who had been left for dead after an obligatory beating had raised the alarm. Francisco Oliviera de Franca had pretended to be dead as Toto’s followers beat him with sticks and chains. As soon as the men and women had left him to rot away, he mustered up enough strength and courage to get to his feet. The former minister was then confronted with a three-day hike through the Amazon before he reached a town where he was able to notify the local police force of the events that were occuring in the jungle.
When the police arrived at the scene they were met with the foul smell of decomposing flesh. The bodies had not even been disposed of. They still lay where they had taken their final breath and were rapidly rotting, with chunks of missing flesh where wild animals had eaten from them.
If de Franca, had not survived his beating, who is to say how many more murders would have been committed?
Toto is still adamant that there is nothing wrong with him or with his actions. The only thing he did was to act upon orders given to him by God and what can be so wrong with that? Whilst being held in a secure unit in a town close to the Peruvian unit Toto stated:
These were the words of God. I have been communicating with him since the age of eight. This is in God’s hands and he will tell me what to do next.
Yahweh Ben Yahweh
God, the son of God
Yahweh Ben Yahweh proclaims himself, and is believed by his followers, to be the Black Christ. He founded the ‘Nation of Yahweh’, also known as the Temple of Love, in 1979, with the intention of leading the blacks out of oppression and into the promised land. He is now serving the last stretch of his 18-year prison sentence in Lewisburg Federal Prison.
Yahweh Ben Yahweh, born Hulon Mitchell, Jr., in Oklahoma in 1935, believes that the black people are the lost tribe of Israel. They are the true Jews, and God and Jesus are black. White people are devils, and need to be eliminated in his prophesised race war.
Mitchell moved to Miami in 1979, and began to circulate his beliefs. He demanded that those who follow him should give up their ‘slave’ names, and assume Hebrew names. He established the Nation of Yahweh, and the laws which governed its members. He instructed them to cut their ties with their families and instead offer complete loyalty and devotion to him. Allegiance to this sect grew, and by 1980, Mitchell was able to purchase a property in Miami which he named The Temple of Love. He set up businesses inside the building, including a supermarket and beauty parlour, and used the Temple’s members as full-time workers. Those who lived and worked within the temple worked without payment and donated all their possessions to Mitchell and the Temple.
EXPANSION OF THE TEMPLE
As the Temple flourished in the early 1980s, Mitchell declared himself to be the son of God, and thus renamed himself ‘Yahweh Ben Yahweh’, meaning ‘God, son of God’. He established a new, standardized dress code for his followers, consisting of white robes and turbans, and he became much stricter on the Temple members’ contact with non-believers. He placed security guards at the entrance to the Temple who were ordered to search all who entered. These guards were named ‘The Circle of Ten’ and, armed with clubs and machetes, they were told that anyone who attempted to enter the Temple without an invitation should be prevented, using whatever means necessary. This Circle of Ten also served as Ben Yahweh’s personal bodyguards and swore allegiance to him and to his protection.
The Nation of Yahweh began to expand in the years which followed. Trusted elders were sent out to distribute pamphlets and to set up temples elsewhere. By the mid-80s several new temples had been established in some of the larger cities in the US.
The expectations Ben Yahweh placed on his followers, and his subsequent control of them, also increased. He used sleep deprivation and malnutrition to control all members. Weakened, and unable to protest, they were forced to work long hours to earn more money for the Temple. Anyone who disobeyed his orders, either intentionally or unintentionally, was subjected to ridicule and beatings. Although he happily intimidated and humiliated those who dared to rebel against him, Ben Yahweh didn’t conduct the physical punishment himself. Rather, one of his other more ‘loyal’ followers, who were keen to show their devotion and please their leader, administered the beatings.
RACE WAR
Ben Yahweh went one step further in his test of the Temple members’ allegiance. At meetings he repeatedly instructed them that they should be prepared to fight and die for God and the Nation of Yahweh, and they responded by shouting back their enthusiasm and complete acceptance of both these requirements. Ben Yahweh’s insistence on his members’ acceptance of these requirements began to increase at the same time as his beliefs and prophecies were becoming more and more radical, violent and racist. He prophesied a race war – the will of the one true, terrible, black God. Members were told that God had cursed ‘white America’ and that it was the mission of the blacks, the ‘death
angels’, to wipe the ‘white devils’ from existence. Perhaps some of them agreed in principle, but thought that it was something they would never actually be asked to do. Others however, who had been in attendance at secondary, sinister, and strictly confidential meetings of an elite group called ‘The Brotherhood’ held a very different, and much more informed, opinion.
THE BROTHERHOOD
The Brotherhood were Ben Yahweh’s private assassins, and they performed every task he gave them. Initiation into the Brotherhood involved the slaughter of a white person, and the consequent presentation to the group of evidence of this murder – usually the head. Although the white devils were the primary target of The Brotherhood, they were also charged to kill any of the misguided, sinful blacks who stood in the way of Ben Yahweh or the collection of funds for the Temple. This deathly force was sent out into Miami on countless occasions to do Ben Yahweh’s bidding.
Conflict grew between the Temple of Love and the residents of Miami, who viewed Ben Yahweh’s activities with suspicion. Ben Yahweh was now in charge of a multi-million dollar enterprise and there were rumours of fire-bombing, extortion and murder. Eventually, on November 7, 1990, 300 law enforcement agents raided the Temple and arrested Ben Yahweh and a group of Temple members.
One of the most fearful members of The Brotherhood was former National Football League player, Robert Rozier. His Hebrew name was Neariah Israel, meaning ‘Child of God’, and Ben Yahweh placed him in charge of the Newark Temple. He was eventually captured in 1992 and convicted of the murder of a homeless white man whom he had stabbed to death in a ritual sacrifice in preparation for Ben Yahweh’s visit.
IMPRISONMENT
Ben Yahweh was convicted of the murders of 14 individuals. Twelve other Temple members were charged with the same offences, and it was also alleged that they were planning to bomb federal buildings.
