To outsiders, the kooky bunch of men and women selling baked goods to raise money for their church may have seemed harmless, if a little odd.

They might have even turned a blind eye to their gaunt eyes, their dirty clothes and the deep scars that ran across their bodies. 

But these outsiders could never have understood the wretched hell cult leader Roch Thériault put them through. 

His group, the Ant Hill Kids - so called due to the punishing work they undertook while their charismatic leader lounged about all day - was one of the most brutal ever to blemish the world. 

Thériault's pitiful followers were forced to break their own legs, sit on lit stoves, shoot each other and eat dead mice and human waste to prove their devotion to the utterly terrifying man who led them. 

Thériault formed the cult in Sainte-Marie, Quebec, in 1977, having spent a number of years with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. 

Born of the incestuous rape of his mother by his maternal grandfather in 1947, he was shunned by his family, and joined the church following a sorry upbringing, having dropped out of school at a young age. 

He spent years in homeless shelters across Quebec and worked a series of odd jobs before finally forming his own woodworking business, teaching himself the bible in the process. 

Thériault (pictured, centre) formed the cult in Sainte-Marie, Quebec, in 1977, having spent a number of years with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

Thériault fathered an additional four children with ex-members of his cult during conjugal visits

Thériault quickly cut all members of his cult off from their loved ones

It was at the Seventh-Day Adventist Church that he was inspired to take on many of their tenets, including eschewing vices like tobacco, unhealthy foods, alcohol and drugs. 

From the Adventists, he poached members, convincing them to leave their homes, jobs and families to join his religious movement and live free from sin in equality, unity and peace. 

But he quickly cut all members off from their loved ones, as well as the Adventists. 

And he refused to go by Roch, instead giving himself the name 'Moses' - God's most famous prophet, said to have had the Ten Commandments bestowed on him on the peak of Mount Sinai. 

Followers were told that God himself had warned Roch that Armageddon, the biblical final war between all good and evil, would be brought about in February 1979, and that it was their job to prepare as best they could for its coming. 

The year before the prophesied end of the world, he moved his commune to an rural area he called 'Eternal Mountain', where he made his followers build their own homes to form a ramshackle town. 

But as his cult members toiled away, the date of his Armageddon came and went with no fire nor brimstone falling from the sky.