True Crime With Caledonian Kitty

(Left: Roch Theriault. Top right: inside the cabin. Bottom left: a self portrait of Roch found in the cabin. Picture credit: thesun.co.uk)

Continued from part two...

Again, as I mentioned in my previous two posts, please be aware that some of the content I have included in my coverage of this case can be quite disturbing to read.

Roch allowed one of his female followers to leave the group on the condition that she take two of her young children with her and leave her eldest daughter behind because she was on the verge of reaching puberty and Roch wanted to marry her. The woman agreed and fled with her children but months later she tried to get her eldest daughter back and sought legal help. She made the authorities aware of what was happening with Roch and his followers, especially the children and the authorities were back on Roch's case again.

The woman, together with her two children told authorities some of the horrific details of how Roch would divide the children up into two groups and refer to the children who weren't his as ''slaves and animals''. The children were often starved, deprived of sleep, had poor dental hygiene and were often held over fires whilst Roch enjoyed watching their mothers cry and beg him to stop. The children were also forced to wash their mother's sanitary napkins. There would be rituals where Roch would sacrifice a goat and cover himself in the blood whilst the children were either forced to watch or take part and there would also be group sex with the children.

Apparently Roch's two sons from his first marriage were also involved with their father in molesting and torturing the children. Roch would also force the children to touch him in a sexual manner and order his followers to do similar. 

With all of this, the authorities still claimed that there was not enough evidence to press charges against Roch and the woman with the two children who shared these details with the police was too terrified to testify against Roch.

For whatever reason, Roch targeted one of his male followers during one of his mood swings one day and ordered the man to wrap an elastic band around his scrotum, he was told to keep it there all night to which this caused it to become inflamed. Roch carried out one of his sick operations on the man and cut open his scrotum with a razor before pressing a hot iron against his flesh. After this horrendous ordeal he held one of his mock court room performances with his followers to decide whether the man should be stoned to death or kept alive. He also threatened to open the man's stomach using an acetylene torch. The man managed to somehow get out of the situation by fleeing to the woods until Roch had sobered up.

In February of 1987, Roch threw a knife at Gisele in a drunken rage and it caused a deep cut to her thigh with began to bleed heavily, a few hours later a blood clot formed and Roch decided as always to take things into his own hands and operate. At first he poked at the wound with a hot rod and then poured boiling hot water over it. Surprisingly it seemed to help but a week later the wound became infected and Roch filled the wound with olive oil, salt and spruce gum. Once her leg had healed up she tried to escape but later returned.

The details of the hell that the followers of Roch had suffered is the stuff of nightmares and could take all day and night to fully list. He'd encourage his followers to hit each other in the legs with sledgehammers, pull out all of a female member's teeth with pliers, caused miscarriages by punching his pregnant wives, He'd use vice grips on some of the females nipples until they were bleeding and screaming in agony, he battered one of his horses to death and forced certain members to sit down on a hot stove, he would break people's ribs and shoot them in the shoulders, he'd force his followers to eat dead mice and feces, he burned a female members genitals with a torch...the list goes on and it is all sickening and horrendous.

One night in 1988, one of Roch's female followers complained that her stomach was hurting. After swallowing down a load of alcohol he told her that she would have to have an operation. He told her to lay down on a table and forced an enema which contained water, molasses and oil into her rectum. He then punched her stomach and forced a tube into her mouth which he asked the other followers to blow into. After this horrifying ordeal he cut her stomach open and removed some of her intestine. He ordered one of the other followers to sew up the wound and run her a bath. The woman died the next day. Roch was apparently distraught at her death and claimed that he could bring her back to life by drilling a hole into her skull and ejaculating into it. When this didn't work he told his followers to burn the body but to remove one of her ribs first (which he later wore as a necklace). After her body was burned and some of the fragments of bone were left, some of the followers kept some of the remains and Roch took the rest which he kept in a jar which he would regularly masturbate into as he believed he could still bring her back to life.

A year later, yet another sickening incident occurred where Roch had been drinking and he ordered a female follower to put her hand on the kitchen table because he remembered he had cut off part of her baby finger some time before. For some insane reason he wanted to stab her with a hunting knife in the same finger but was too drunk to pay attention and actually knifed her hand right through the table. He disappeared and left the woman there and later returned to see that she was trying to remain conscious but her hand and arm were turning blue. He decided to hack the whole arm off, the whole time this was going on, the woman had not made a sound. 

The next day she fled to a woman's refuge but rather than seek proper medical attention returned to Roch who decided that her wound was infected and proceeded to cut bits of flesh from the wound with a pair of scissors and also cut pieces of her breast before hitting her violently over the head with an axe. By some miracle she did not pass out and managed to flee but two days later returned again after she noticed that some insects were crawling in her wounds. 

When she returned, Roch was completely out of it drunk but insisted he perform an operation on her to which she gave him permission. He pressed a hot iron to her wounds but was so drunk and unsteady that he kept dropping the iron on her body burning more of her flesh. 

After this, she fled again and this time for good! She managed to get to a hospital but even there she was still trying to protect Roch by telling the doctors a fabricated story about what happened to her arm. The police knew who she was and straight away they didn't waste any time and tried to press charges for aggravated assault against Roch but by the time the police got to the cabin, Roch and his followers were nowhere to be seen.

Continued in part four...