The group commonly called the “Attleboro Sect,” but known to its members as “The Body of Christ” or simply “The Body,” emerged through a Bible study group in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s. Its origins traced back to Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, originally the Radio Church of God, an offshoot of Adventism centered in part around Armstrong’s prediction of the Second Coming of Jesus in 1975.
When this prediction failed to come true, some members of Armstrong’s church left or created splinter groups. One such splinter group was led by Roland Robidoux, who had been ordained as a minister in Armstrong’s church in that fateful year. Robidoux and his wife Georgette did not immediately depart, but left two years later, along with another minister. The three formed the Church of God in Mansfield, Massachusetts, in 1977, moving several times before eventually settling permanently in North Attleboro in the mid-1980s.
The group had 19 adults and their children as members by 1995, its peak membership. It adopted a semi-communal lifestyle, with the various families in the church living in close proximity and intermarrying. The family of early member Roger Daneau became significant in the group, nearly on par with the Robidoux family.
In 1997, Roland Robidoux appointed his 23-year-old son Jacques as the co-leader of the group. Roland was just 56 at the time and remained active, but Jacques gradually began to eclipse him. In 1998, Jacques said that an “inner voice” had instructed him to abandon the outside world. He renamed the church The Body of Christ and began to isolate it from the larger Attleboro community, with which it had had a fairly open relationship until that time. The Body became insular, with Jacques teaching his followers that they were exclusively chosen by God.
Jacques turned the group away from traditional scriptural interpretation in favor of what he said were direct revelations to him from God. These revelations became the basis for everyday decision-making, with members giving up much of their free will to Jacques. He led the group in rejecting the “Seven Systems” of mainstream society: banking, education, entertainment, government, medicine, religion, and science. The Body believed that God would directly provide for all of their needs, making these “counterfeit” systems unnecessary. Members had no bank or credit card accounts and would not go to doctors, and some even stopped wearing their glasses.
In 1992, Carol Balizet, a former nurse who had founded a ministry in Florida, published Born in Zion, which strongly influenced Jacques Robidoux. Balizet advocated for an even more radical abandoning of the secular world than The Body had so far practiced. The group adopted Balizet’s call for home births without the supervision of trained midwives or any sort of medical intervention. At least one infant would be stillborn as a result of this practice. Members stopped celebrating birthdays and holidays, women adopted conservative cotton dresses, and men grew long beards. The Body also stopped all efforts to recruit new members, believing that those who had already joined represented the full extent of those who had been called to the community.
Balizet’s book also declared Maine to be the “New Jerusalem,” and in June 1998, Jacques ordered the group to begin a trek to the state they called their “Zion.” They brought no provisions and made no plans for food or shelter along the way or after their arrival, believing that God would provide. The journey failed and the group returned to North Attleboro.
In March 1999, Jacques Robidoux’s sister Michelle, whose husband had recently left the group, claimed that she had received a revelation that God had judged Jacques’s wife Karen Daneau Robidoux for vanity. She ordered Karen, who was pregnant at the time, to limit her diet to just one gallon of almond milk per day. She also directed that her 10-month-old son Samuel, who had already been introduced to solid foods, must henceforth subsist solely on his mother’s breast milk. When Karen rebelled against this edict, Jacques physically removed Samuel from her presence. After 52 days, the infant died of starvation. Jacques and Karen knelt over his body for a week praying for his resurrection.
Several months later, Michelle’s ex-husband Dennis Mingo came to visit his children, who had remained with their mother, and noticed that the infant was missing. He found Michelle’s diary, which detailed the dietary regimen imposed on Karen and Samuel and chronicled Samuel’s physical decline. After failing to persuade Michelle to leave The Body, he took the diary to the police.
In early November 1999, law enforcement arrived at the group’s residence along with social workers who removed 11 children and placed them into protective custody. A grand jury investigation into the death of Samuel Robidoux and the stillborn Jeremiah Corneau commenced in April 2000. Roland and Jacques Robidoux refused to cooperate with the investigation.
In October 2000, Jacques Robidoux was charged with first-degree murder by “directing the systematic withholding of nourishment” from Samuel, while Karen Robidoux was charged with second-degree murder and Michelle Mingo with accessory to murder. Roland and Jacques Robidoux refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court system.
In June 2002, Jacques Robidoux was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Karen Robidoux’s defense team argued in her trial that she been psychologically manipulated and “brainwashed,” and psychologists testified that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She was acquitted of second-degree murder but found guilty of assault and battery. Having already spent three years in custody, she was subsequently released. Michelle Mingo pleaded guilty to two counts of being an accessory to assault and battery and was released after serving four years in prison.
Karen filed for divorce from Jacques in 2003. In 2005, he appealed his conviction, claiming that he had also been brainwashed. The appeal reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court but was unsuccessful, and he remains in prison. In 2021 interview, he said, “I essentially became a compartmentalized sociopath. Once the realization came that ‘Holy God, I killed my own son. How did this even happen?’ So then everything begins to start. Everything begins to unravel.”
Roland Robidoux faced no charges in connection with the infants’ deaths. He died in 2006 at age 65.
Key Sources:
The Associated Press. (2002, June 14). Sect leader guilty in son’s murder.
Belz, E. (2019, June 19). When the fog lifts. World.
Linton, D. (2000, September 2). Cult wants total control. The Attleboro Sun Chronicle.
MSNBC. (2000, September 1). Cult expert explains Attleboro sect.
Ritchie, S. (2021, November 19). My hometown had a religious murder cult. Medium.
Wedge, D. (2000, September 3). Cultists convinced only God will provide. The Boston Herald.
Wedge, D. (2004, February 5). Cold-blooded cult: Journal shows sect let baby starve “in God’s hands.” The Boston Herald.
Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religious Movements 