The Ant Hill Kids ended in a courtroom, but the case has had a long second life in the study of coercive control. Roch Theriault, who had led his small commune from Quebec's Gaspe hills to rural Ontario, was first imprisoned in the 1980s over the death of a member during a brutal amateur surgery, and continued the commune on release.
In 1989 his follower Gabrielle Lavallee fled after mutilations that cost her a hand, and her testimony, together with that of other survivors, produced the 1993 prosecution in which Theriault pleaded guilty to murder and received a life sentence. He was killed by a fellow inmate in 2011. What keeps the case in the literature is the completeness of the control the survivors described: a leader who cut his followers off from kin, renamed them, monopolised food, marriage and belief, punished doubt on the body, and yet was experienced by members for years as a healer and prophet. Lavallee's memoir and the interviews given by former members, including children born inside the commune, became core testimony for Canadian studies of undue influence, cited in social work training and in debates over whether existing criminal law can reach domination of this kind before it produces corpses. The Ant Hill Kids are accordingly taught less as an exotic sect than as an extreme point on a continuum that includes domestic abuse, the small isolated group as a laboratory of what unchecked authority does.