by Ray Black
The Thugs also had their own language called ‘Ramasee’ which even members in the remotest parts of India were knowledgeable of.
THE RITUAL OF DEATH
To begin with the Thugs did everything in a ritualistic manner. The ritual would start out with the ‘sothaees’ becoming involved with the group of travellers that they wished to prey on. The Thugs were excellent cooks and it would not take long before they were entertaining the people they wished to murder and mug, with their victims soon becoming off-guard and relaxed in the Thugs’ company.
Once the travellers were enjoying eating, drinking and dancing with the Thugs a code phrase of ‘Bring the Tobacco’ would be uttered. This code meant that it was time to begin the slaughter. Each Thug would move towards a male member of the travelling party and then another coded order would be issued. Each Thug would then pull a long silk scarf, called an ‘arm’, out of their pockets which had a copper coin tied in the middle of it. In a matter of seconds the scarf would be around the victims neck with the copper coin positioned over the neck bone. With one powerful tug the victim would start to suffocate and then have a broken neck due to the pressure of the coin on the bone. Within a few minutes the strangled man would be dead.
The Thugs would then tie up all women and children, take anything of value from the dead men and then dedicate the corpses to Kali. The women and children would be left unharmed. The whole ritual was extremely silent and clean, not a drop of blood was ever spilled. As soon as they put their scarves away they would look no different from the next man who was to pass.
STEALING FROM THE RICH
The Thugs were seen by some as holy people whose destiny it was to follow such a path. They followed the command of Kali, who came to them through a series of omens, or as an inner God and told them to perform the sacrifices in her honour. To murder for monetary gain was a religious duty for them, in which the morality of the act was never thought about. In the eyes of the Thugs they were part of an honourable profession in which doing something for a higher power was of much more importance than the lives of mere mortals.
Over the years the Thugs’ ceremonial acts became slack and it was soon just murder for money in the style of Robin Hood. Although they were still sacrificing the Brahams for Kali, bodies were not buried and could be seen scattered around the Indian countryside.
They went for years performing their murderous operation and due to their tight-knit community and the security of their work they managed to practise their craft well into the 20th Century. They were tax-payers and under the banner of religion it was hard for the governments over the years to do anything about it.
Many Indians, due to the caste system, knew that they were not to fear as they were too poor to be affected, but the Brahams lived in constant fear of attack by this silent group of murderers who disappeared as quickly as they had arrived – without a leaving a trace.
Maybe the Thugs were just as much a group angry about class division as they were about pleasing their Goddess?
In the 1830s the British rulers in India managed to stop a lot of the Thug action that had been going on. A British man called William Sleeman started the witch-hunt which consisted of profiling, detective intelligence and execution.
A lot of mystery still surrounds the history of the Thuggee, it is even believed that they may have just been a bunch of highway-men who were demonized by the British in order to get the Indians on side when they were taking power and it helped them secure Indian loyalty to the British Raj.
The word Thuggee came from the Sanskrit word ‘sthaga’ which means to conceal, and is usually used in conjunction with fraudulent concealment. Why would the Indian people have named the Thugs so if they were in fact a group of heartless murderers? Would they not have been named something that showed the extent of their crimes?
It is believed that the Thuggee cult were responsible for over one and a half million deaths but it is hard to know what is propaganda and what is fact when the history of the country is hugely written by the colonizer. Maybe the British Raj feared this group as they were anti-class and anti-imperialism, two things that the British Raj relied heavily upon when colonizing India.
But if the colonizers have written the truth then the Thuggee cult holds the record for the most murders committed by one group of people.
Roch Theriault
The Ant Hill Kids Commune
One of Canada’s most disturbing criminals, Roch Theriault abused the members of his commune physically, sexually and psychologically. He led a staggering reign of fear, which involved torturing, castrating and killing. A polygamist, he took 12 wives, one of whom he killed, and one he disabled by hacking off her arm with a meat cleaver. Roch Theriault believed that God had charged him with a mission to help construct a better world. God had told him that the apocalypse was approaching, and that it was his task to guide God’s followers out of the despair to a new beginning.
Over a period of 12 years, approximately 20 people left their friends and families in order to follow Roch Theriault and to lead what they believed to be an existence outside of sin and temptation. Beginning with the desire to rid themselves of their dependances, their reasons for joining the group soon changed and became more of a need to help Roch achieve his divine mission.
During this period the group members lived their dream – being the people elected by God. For some, the experience was sometimes difficult, yet generally satisfactory. For others, the pursuit of this ideal became a nightmare. Some suffered greatly as they strove to be recognized as faithful servants and dignified of being accepted into the kingdom of God. They suffered daily physical and psychological abuse, and gave away all their money and possessions to belong in the group.
Roch’s view of the world was of a universe split into two: the good and the bad; rule-abiding members, and rule-breaking members; members and non-members. Using this vision, he isolated his followers from the outside world. They were not permitted to speak to non-members for fear they may become corrupted, influenced, and therefore impure, through contact with them.
Roch believed that he was God’s representative on Earth. He was different from everyone else, and had been elected by God. His followers were spiritually inferior to him. That is why they could not accompany him right to the top. He was the last prophet on Earth, and God spoke to him as he had done to his ancestor, Moses.
ROCH THERIAULT
Born in Chicoutimi, Quebec, in 1947, Theriault showed signs of abnormal behaviour from a young age. This could perhaps be attributed to his lack of a particularly healthy role-model to set him an example. His father was a member of the ‘White Berets’, a radical and fanatical Catholic group. One of his favourite pastimes was to gather his young son, with his three brothers, to sit together at the table and play a game called ‘bone’. This involved kicking each other’s shins as hard as possible, wearing heavy boots, until one of them finally gave in.
Roch Theriault claims to have spent a lot of time in the Quebec bush as a boy. It was here, he says, that he first learned to talk to the trees and the animals. Not long after his eighth birthday, he discovered another talent – he was able to heal the sick. His first patient was a friend who had broken his teeth, and from there he moved on to performing the castration of farm animals, which after a while he was able to achieve without causing any bleeding whatsoever.
He joined a Catholic group called the ‘Aramis Club’, but quickly went about trying to re-direct their worship, telling members to wear the image of Satan on their backs. The group was not comfortable with Roch Theriault, and so he was asked to leave.
Roch went instead to the Seventh Day Adventist church, where he found the existing members much more willing to listen to his views and beliefs. Only two months after joining the Adventists, the charismatic Theriault had already attracted the attention of six women and two men who saw him as their religious teacher. Possessed by a desire to help the population to rid themselves of their dependencies on drugs
and cigarettes, he decided to hold sessions, across Quebec, on health and how to give up smoking. The sessions were a programme of five days, and focused on a healthy diet, psychology and group therapy. He claimed these delivered excellent results. A strict vegetarian himself, he also held vegetarian banquets to promote a healthier diet.
EXPULSION
When Roch indirectly caused the death of a woman suffering from Leukemia, by persuading her husband that he should take her away from hospital and let Roch heal her with a healthy diet, he was asked to leave the church. He took his following, which now consisted of six men, 12 women and two children, with him.
Although Roch’s original mission was not to establish a group or a commune, several of those who had joined him decided to live with him and to follow him in his mission. According to Roch, the creation of the commune was more of a fortuitous development than a planned occurrence. He claimed that, originally, the arrival of these volunteers posed a serious organizational problem. They had all left paid jobs to devote themselves full time to this new work. Given that the sessions were free and that those who attended gave only as much as they wanted to at the end of each one, it was impossible for Roch to put any of his helpers on a fixed salary. That is why they decided to embark on communal living.
After several months, the progressive disinterest of the Quebec citizens for the detox programmes Roch offered led the group to retreat into their own isolated part of Quebec.
GASPE REGION
On 5 June, 1978, several of the members went out to research the Gaspe region in east Quebec, looking for a new residence. Roch had decided to leave Beauce in the south. The group had been living together for almost one year when the decision to move was taken. He claimed that the group was unified in this decision, and that although he had been at the heart of the creation of the group, all big decisions were made with the consent of the whole group. Without hesitation apparently, they all agreed to leave for the mountains of Gaspe, where they settled in July, 1978.
MOSES
Shortly after their arrival in Gaspe, Roch consigned a new name to each of the members in order to mark their new departure. He wrote biblical names on pieces of paper, and one by one, each member chose. When they all had their names, they decided on a name for Roch. He was to be known as Moses. At the same time, and again on Roch’s instructions, the members adopted identical tunic uniforms.
Roch, who felt that the world was becoming intransigent towards the group, ordered his members to reduce contact with their families and friends. He backed up this order with the Bible’s instructions to keep evil far away. This command was just one of a set of guidelines which Roch established for them to follow in their daily lives. He expected them to:
Live the lives of the first Christians
Live without sin
Release their goods and all their possessions
Spend their time working for the community
Eat as little as possible to avoid the sin of greed
Attend community confessions
Consult Moses before every decision
Respect Moses’s dress-code
He instructed them to build a commune, the construction of which he oversaw, rather than participated in as he was suffering from stomach problems and cancer which, he claimed, did not permit him to help. His followers toiled on the building for long hours every day.
In the Autumn of the first year in the Gaspe region, Roch married each of his 12 women followers. This was necessary, he claimed, in order to create large families as the biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon had done before him. But with 12 women now at his every beck and call, his attentions were diverted from his pure and healthy lifestyle, and concentrated more on sexual gratification.
On January 3, 1979, Moses’s first child was born in the commune. Over the whole 12 years which the group existed, over 20 children, from five different women, were born into the group. Moses was the father of most of them.
FEBRUARY 17, 1979
Roch foretold of impending disaster based on the biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelation. He forecast this doomsday for February 17, 1979, but he told his followers not to fear, for he had been chosen by God to lead them away from the wickedness of the world and to form a new social order which would embrace God’s 1,000-year reign.
The day came, and nothing happened. To explain this hiccup, Roch told his members that although God had given him this date, nothing was certain. He explained that one second in the life of God could equate to 40 years of life on Earth, and conversely, one second of time on Earth could represent 40 years of God’s existence. It is likely therefore, that the calculations were inaccurate. The members were not disillusioned by this error in Roch’s prediction. They were fixed on their sole objective – to help Roch in his divine mission.
HYPOCRISY
Over time, Roch either forgot, or chose to ignore, the vegetarian diet he had previously advocated and began regularly to eat large quantities of meat, washed down with ‘Pepsi Cola’. His attitude to his followers however, did not slacken at all. He still made them work ceaselessly, now on minimal amounts of food. There was no breakfast, and only a small lunch. No one dared to complain because they knew this meant that the portions would decrease further. One of the women, pregnant at the time, was so hungry that she stole two pancakes – a crime for which Roch hit her so hard that he broke two of her ribs.
Moses justified any deviation from his original rules as part of the secret nature of his role in the group, and therefore he was unable to give away too many details. He did explain his new diet by saying that fresh foods had a bad effect on his body, and that by eating them, he was forcing himself to suffer, not indulging in greed. He also explained that he was allowed to have sexual relations with whomever he chose as he was God’s representative and was sowing God’s seed on earth. Members who wanted to have a sex life had to receive Moses’s blessing first. He had to approve of any procreation, and he decided with whom the members were allowed to have sexual relations.
However, no one was allowed to question Moses anyway. Members had to follow his every word. They should not think for themselves, or query anything he said. Any private thought they had, encouraging them to speak up, was the voice of the devil.
POLICE INTERVENTION
Following an agreed radio interview given by Roch, the police became interested in the group and issued a court order which insisted that one member of the group be taken to hospital for psychiatric tests. The police also took Roch and three other members to the police station to answer further enquiries.
All members were free to go shortly afterwards, but Roch was accused of keeping the members at the commune against their will, when he refused to let one of the group be taken to the hospital for a mental health assessment. Following a psychiatric evaluation however, Roch was deemed unfit to undergo trial. He was transmitted to a psychiatric institution in the Quebec region. After a second evaluation, he was deemed fit, and went to trial. He was found guilty of the charges and given a suspended sentence. Roch returned to the commune on April 27, 1979.
INCREASED VIOLENCE
Shortly after Roch’s return, the violence at the commune greatly increased. Gabrielle Lavallée was punched by him for falling asleep during one of his speeches. After this, the punishments became more frequent. He also began drinking heavily. He would keep the already exhausted group members up throughout the night, and anybody who fell asleep would be beaten with a wooden club.
It was not only he who conducted this violence, the members themselves were forced to impose punishments on each other. Moses would get members to admit that they were worthless and that he had to punish them. He would then instruct the other followers to administer the punishment, kicking, punching and hair-pulling.
On one occasion, Roch ordered one commune member to cut off the toe of his wife, as a punishment for disobedience. He told the sobbing man that he had to learn how to discipline her in order to keep her under
control. The man could not bring himself to do the deed, but knew that if he didn’t, then Roch would do it himself and with much less accuracy and compassion. So, with tears in his eyes, he brought the axe down on his poor wife’s delicate foot.
During one of his punishment sessions, he ordered two of his followers to go out into the winter air, totally naked. One protested, telling him that they would freeze outside and fall ill. He told them that they would not fall ill as long as he decided so. He told them that nothing happened at the commune without his express endorsement, which was the will of God. He ordered them outside.
Moses saw himself as the enforcer of purity and of making the members respect the rules. Sinners were punished by him, or by other members of the group. Moreover, it was a privilege to be punished by Moses himself. Completely naked, they were beaten by him until they bled.
Through punishment, the members would find the inspiration to record their faults in The Diary of the Children of Israel – the reference book of the community.
Roch went some way towards explaining his insistence on complete submission by saying that he had to prepare them to obey him. When the end of the world arrives, they will need a guide. The Hebrews could not have escaped Egyptian slavery without Moses, and now he was there for them. Even if he did not understand God’s will, as he was not chosen to be an interpreter, he would guide them. If his members chose to follow him, then they had to follow him to his word, and not criticize him – no matter what may come. He was not acting on his will, but on that of God. They were not following him, but through him they were following God.
Roch Theriault began to see himself as more and more powerful. He even began to believe that he had shaman and healing powers and began to treat his followers when they fell ill.
GUY VEER
In November 1980, the commune was joined by Guy Veer, a mental patient who had had enough of society and had heard about Roch Theriault’s group on ‘Eternal Mountain’. He joined, and was sent by Roch to sleep in the storage shed, along with one of the other member’s son, Samuel.