W hen it was over in 2025, officials toured the dimly lit building in rural Saskatchewan. Tarps covered the windows and doors, blocking the sun. The air was so foul that an officer ran outside gagging.
For the previous two years, about 20 members of a group known as the Kingdom of Canada had been living inside the decommissioned school, claiming they had taken over the country. They operated under their own principles, issued their own laws, and threatened the surrounding village with “publicly broadcast executions.” They slept in classrooms and, without running water, used five-gallon buckets as toilets.
Their leader — a woman known as the “Queen of Canada” — had been sleeping in a primary classroom, where her purse and water jugs labeled with her name still sat. A hole had been cut through a concrete wall and concealed with a cabinet that opened like a secret door. On the other side was the queen’s private bathroom with an elaborate shower.
There were more tarps on the roof that covered stashes of firewood and fuel containers. The fire chief, Gene Perreault, who was there during the walk-through, tells me the piles puzzled investigators.
“Where these fire caches are, it makes absolutely no sense,” he says as we sit in the firehouse looking at photos of the caches. “Maybe this was part of their last stand or some fucking thing.”
One theory, according to Perreault, was that the Kingdom had been planning to burn the building down, Waco-style, if the government intervened.
Romana Didulo and her followers took over a decommissioned school in Saskatchewan and painted it purple. Zander Sherman “Royal” Beginnings
The queen was Romana Didulo. Born in the Philippines in 1974, she later claimed that her social class was the “modern equivalent of [the] Royal Family” — a claim that hasn’t been confirmed. Like much of Didulo’s story, the details of her upbringing are fuzzy. We know that when her parents died in her teens, she moved to British Columbia to live with family. Little is known about her life from 1999 to 2005. After that, Didulo’s digital footprint begins to reveal more about her — that she’s an intense introvert who seems to swing between grandiosity and asceticism. On her 2006 Blogger profile, Didulo listed The Secret, about the power of manifestation, as her favorite movie and Trump’s The Art of the Deal as one of her favorite books. (Didulo couldn’t be reached for this story. Neither could her “press secretary,” Darlene Ondi.)
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Later in life, Didulo seemed especially concerned with — and sensitive to — housing justice. In a 2024 livestream called Queen Romana Tell Real Vision, she talks emotionally about “the mental anguish of someone who doesn’t know where his or her head is going to be laid in the evening.” The anecdote is part of an impassioned monologue about wanting to replace food banks with free grocery stores. Later, as the Queen of Canada, she repeatedly made housing a key issue, proposing $1.5 trillion in housing spending.
In 2020, at age 46, Didulo claimed to take office as prime minister. She created her own political party called “Canada1st Party of Canada.” There is no indication it was registered, meaning Didulo could never have received any votes, and she appears to have been the only official member. In videos posted to YouTube, she echoed alt-right and anti-globalist views, saying Canada withdrew from the United Nations and World Health Organization. She explained that she was sent to Earth to save her followers. “I’m not a dictator,” she says in one video. “I am sent here by the highest divine beings. And I am here to deliver peace and prosperity.”
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But Didulo’s main issue was Covid-19. In the 2020 videos, she appears small, with a round face, short, graying hair, and an unblinking expression while standing in front of a rumpled Canadian flag. Speaking in a monotone voice, she claims the pandemic is really a “plandemic” organized by “the global economic reset team and their agents.”
Didulo speaks in a 2020 video. “Number one, [they want] to control every single country’s natural resources,” she says in a YouTube video. “Number two, [they want] to control every citizen in the world.”
After finishing an explanation about why compliance with the masking mandate amounts to tyranny and “enslavement,” Didulo holds her hands off screen, focuses her gaze intensely for a few seconds — and calmly holds up a flaming surgical mask.
As QAnon conspiracy theories took hold with people from around the world and tensions around policies to prevent the spread of Covid reached a boiling point, this previously unknown woman became the unlikely answer some in Canada were searching for. Her videos were outrageous and conspiratorial, and the more elaborate and bizarre her stories became, the more people online were drawn to her. But her following didn’t just stay there.
The Queen’s Followers
In February 2021, Didulo joined Telegram, a platform popular with conservative users who felt censored from mainstream sites. She began posting well-known QAnon tropes, including that “elites” harvest adrenochrome — a naturally occurring compound produced by adrenaline — from children for supposed anti-aging benefits. In fact, she claimed she had personally put an end to the production of adrenochrome in secret underground tunnels.
Didulo continued to claim she was prime minister and credited with her ascension the “white hats,” the same secretive forces she claimed had propelled Donald Trump to the American presidency. She claimed the Canadian government was a “bankrupt corporation,” that Queen Elizabeth II — the British monarch and Canada’s head of state at the time — was dead, and she was replacing her. (Queen Elizabeth was, in fact, alive; she died in 2022.) Instead of civil and criminal law, there was now “natural law,” a universal code of right and wrong. All these changes were ushered in under the banner of the Kingdom of Canada: Didulo’s new name for the country that included 10 provinces, three territories, and more than 40 million people. By the end of 2021, Didulo had more than 70,000 Telegram subscribers.
In one post after another — each with its own number and title — Didulo wrote the Kingdom’s lawbook: Decree No. 1 banned the teaching of critical race theory (that racism is systemic) in all private and public schools. Decree No. 4 upped the age of consent for marriage to 24 and punished offenders to 30 years in prison “without bail or parole.” Eventually, she abolished all debt and said there was no need to pay mortgages or make credit card payments. Anyone who tried to enforce the law or collect money on behalf of a lender would face a “military tribunal”: code for execution.
Along with the legal revolution was a technological one. QAnon followers believed in “medbeds” and “replicators,” fictitious medical devices supposedly derived from alien technology. Believers insisted they existed and could cure any illness, regenerate limbs, and even grant immortality. But — because there was always a but — the technology had been “suppressed” by elites and was available only to the ultra-wealthy. Didulo claimed she had been given access to medbeds through her connection to the Intergalactic Federation of Light Beings. That was because, Didulo said, she was not human but actually an alien from the star Arcturus, incarnating in human form to save the rest of us. Her proclamations sounded like something out of science fiction — but, to her followers, she was their only hope.
“It’s weird to us outsiders, but the stranger her message, the more esoteric her appearance and manner, the more she … becomes a convincing, appealing person,” explains Canadian scholar Donald Netolitzky. “If you believe the Hidden Hand controls everything mainstream, then what truth remains is in the outliers. And Didulo is certainly an outlier.”
The institutional void created by the pandemic was “extremely responsible” for Didulo’s rise, says Queen’s University doctoral student Camden MacKenzie, who studied Didulo. Churches were closed and unable to take strong vaccine positions without alienating their members. So people went online, where figures like Didulo mixed spirituality, conspiracy, and politics into a new kind of authority. “It was really a perfect storm.”
Many of Didulo’s followers found her through her videos and other social media channels. Peterborough Siege
Around the time Didulo was joining Telegram, the Ontario government announced it was awarding a thermoplastic injection moulding company called Merit Precision $1 million to boost the production of hand-sanitizer bottles. A disgruntled 54-year-old factory worker there named Frank Curtin was skeptical of the official narrative surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic and had evidently stumbled across Didulo’s videos online. (Curtin didn’t respond to interview requests but was interviewed by the Kingdom of Canada during a Covid protest and is active on social media.)
Sometime before August 2022, Curtin quit his job, then served a “cease-and-desist” letter to his boss. Similar notices were soon plastered on schools, offices, retail businesses, and restaurants across Canada. Signed in Didulo’s name, they ordered the recipients to stop complying with Covid restrictions or face “military tribunal.” Didulo’s far-out messaging had jumped from online to real life.
In June 2021, Curtin walked into a police station in Peterborough and slid one of the letters under the glass partition.
“We have a new commander-in-chief,” he said in a video later uploaded to YouTube. “It’s pretty self-explanatory.”
While the uniformed officer behind the desk went to get a colleague, Curtin wandered over to a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, who had recently died.
“Oh, look who it is,” Curtin said. “The devils themselves.”
Like other Didulo followers, Curtin believed the world was controlled by an elite cabal of wealthy pedophiles. To him, the British royals appeared black-eyed in the portrait — which he viewed as confirmation of a soullessness.
“God doesn’t look [kindly] on people who harm children,” he mused.
When the officer returned with a colleague, Curtin was asked for his name and identification.
“If you need my name, you can get it through Romana,” he replied. “She’s the new commander and chief.”
Curtin returned to the same police station in July. He had heard that the police chief had been arrested for crimes against humanity, and wanted to see for himself if it was true. When he got there, he was told that the chief had not been seen for a couple of weeks.
“That’s confirmation for me, ma’am,” he said to the officer behind the desk.
But the chief was never arrested. And when the police station was still functioning weeks later, Curtin was fuming. In August 2022, he and a group of around 20 followers returned to the station one morning. They tried to enter the building and perform citizen’s arrests on officers for continuing to enforce Covid restrictions. Instead, six followers including Curtin were arrested for charges that included assaulting a police officer. Didulo had not participated, instead remaining in a nearby RV.
Red Flags
Though Didulo had declared herself the Queen of Canada, her life was far from regal. In early 2021, she was renting a room in Victoria beside a car garage, and spent her days employed by an English-language school. That June, as Canadian police agencies received reports of the cease-and-desist letters being distributed throughout the country, city police went to her door. They noticed a Canada1st Party of Canada flag and a sign reading, “Smile you are on camera.” Didulo wasn’t home, so they left a card and talked to her landlord and boss, and spent a couple of days doing surveillance. Later that summer, they shut their investigation down, citing “mental health was a factor,” according to their search warrant.
Even as the authorities began to circle, Didulo continued to post online and grow her in-person collective. And the group’s threats became even more significant. Her followers referred to themselves as “We the People” (to contrast with the elites they railed against). Some members eventually had their own uniform: white baseball hats and custom windbreakers with “QR” stitched on them for Queen Romana. Each was known as His or Her Excellency, and had a specific job — security, chauffeur, media relations. A subset of her most devoted and extreme followers were known as “duck hunters,” because they were prepared to enact violence, according to the search warrant. On Telegram later that fall, Didulo ordered them to “shoot to kill” health care workers who injected children with a Covid vaccine. The operation was supposed to begin at 6 a.m. on Nov. 21, 2021. Around the same time, according to media reports, a 42-year-old “duck hunter” in Quebec was arrested after making shooting threats aimed at his daughter’s school.
After that, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, which had been monitoring Didulo for months, obtained a search warrant for her home, computer, smartphones, and digital video recorder. The warrant was based on evidence that Didulo had been “counseling” others to commit murder.
On Nov. 27, Didulo was apprehended under B.C.’s Mental Health Act, a law that allows authorities to treat people with severe mental illness without their consent. She was sent to a hospital for evaluation and released later that day, telling followers in a livestream she was “not insane.” No charges were filed.
Freedom Convoy
On Jan. 30, 2022, Didulo announced on Telegram that she would be attending the “Freedom Convoy” — a major anti-Covid demonstration in the Canadian capital of Ottawa. About a dozen hardcore followers showed up on her door. Among them was a middle-aged woman known as “Raven Moonstone,” who became Didulo’s second-in-command and is seen in many of Didulo’s YouTube videos. In videos, she wears pigtail braids and describes herself as a “truth seeker and light worker,” and a “beginner investigative journalist and professional artist.”
Didulo speaks at a protest of Covid vaccine mandates on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Feb. 3, 2022. Patrick Doyle/REUTERS In two hours, Didulo’s announcement raised more than $16,000 in donations. Eventually, she raised more than $100,000. Later that day, her most devout followers rented a fleet of RVs, picked Didulo up from her apartment, and began driving across the country. From that point on, Didulo and her traveling convoy led what they called a “mobile government.”
Even before the group’s arrival, someone painted a mural of Didulo on a giant white banner. Didulo’s team booked Ottawa hotel rooms for Vladimir Putin and Tucker Carlson. (Didulo has claimed to be on friendly terms with the Russian president, but there’s no evidence of that.)
On Feb. 3, Didulo walked through a procession of supporters, making her grand public entrance as the Queen of Canada dressed in a white coat, with purple gloves and a black toque. Standing in front of the Canadian parliament buildings, Didulo gave a speech about how all Covid restrictions had been lifted, and her royal decrees now carried the full weight of the law. Then, like she’d done with the mask, she tried to burn the Canadian flag — only this time she was met with boos from the crowd.
From then on, Ontario police closely monitored the Freedom Convoy, creating persons-of-interest profiles on 87 organizers and influential participants. In its 14-page report on Didulo, they called her a “Canadian conspiracy theorist with an affiliation with QAnon” and said her followers were the “true threat.” The so-called duck hunters had access to firearms, had demonstrated a willingness to mobilize, and appeared to be willing to carry out Didulo’s orders. In just over a year, the Kingdom had progressed from a group of self-proclaimed “digital soldiers” — consisting of QAnon believers, sovereign citizens, and pandemic skeptics — to a real-world army that seemed ready to commit murder. Experts considered them one of the most dangerous extremist groups in North America.
Ashley St. Germaine is a senior investigative officer with the RCMP in Regina, Saskatchewan. In her first one-on-one interview, inspector Ashley St. Germaine, a senior investigative officer with the RCMP in Regina, Saskatchewan, tells me the Peterborough police siege was the moment Didulo’s rhetoric turned into “actual physical … action,” and represented a significant escalation where followers demonstrated a “desire to follow through” on the threats issued in her decrees.
RV Days
Throughout 2022, Didulo and her inner circle headed to the East Coast. Along the way, they stopped at parking lots for meet-and-greets and parked their RVs on the private property of supporters. Followers made Didulo’s meals, planned her speeches, and did her laundry.
While Queen Romana projected the image of a supreme ruler who alternated between benevolence and tyranny, Didulo the person was all too human. She struggled with recording equipment, yelled to assert dominance, and posted videos of herself and her followers searching their RVs for hidden trackers. She also imposed extreme living conditions, including limiting access to showers, and playing a version of the high-energy dance hit “Rasputin,” by Boney M, remixed with lyrics that praised her for up to 10 hours straight.
By that point, Didulo’s fictional laws had begun having ruinous effects. Homes were being foreclosed on. Vehicles were being repossessed. Some of her followers, including those involved in the Peterborough police siege, faced criminal charges. Citing abusive conditions, some members of her inner circle quit. Didulo responded by threatening to hang treasonous followers “head first aboard a military helicopter directly above a volcano or commercial crocodile farms (they are always hungry),” according to a Telegram post.
Keeping their fleet of rented RVs going cost about $20,000 a month. To save money, the group ate carrots and sardines. Didulo routinely used false pretenses to raise money. According to VICE, she raised more than $50,000 through a GoFundMe campaign ostensibly intended for victims of BC wildfires, before the fundraising site shut her down. Other tactics involved printing her own “loyalty money” and posting an apparent endorsement from Trump adviser Roger Stone to a fake account. In a text message, Stone tells me the Didulo story was “so long ago that I had to look it up myself,” and points me to a Newsweek article in which he suggests he filmed the Didulo video without knowing who Didulo was or how it would be used.
A Failed Takeover
By the spring of 2023, life on the road had become increasingly difficult. Money was running out. More followers had quit or formed their own splinter groups. Media pressure, including by VICE, was mounting. A few months later, the Kingdom began heading west, pulling into Kamsack on Sept. 13 and claiming the Saskatchewan town — and the surrounding indigenous land — belonged to them. A bylaw officer, Ken Thompson, tells me the Queen’s security team “weren’t allowing people to walk around” the streets.
Thompson alerted a town administrator and special constable named Sherise Fountain, who went to investigate. “It was a delegate of hers,” Fountain says, “trying to tell people that the Queen of Canada had now arrived and had taken over.”
By that afternoon, the RCMP — and a convoy of local vehicles — escorted the Kingdom out of town.
An Ultimatum
That same day, 260 miles west, the mayor of another Saskatchewan town was sitting on the end of a fishing dock when his phone buzzed with a text message. For years, Mayor Brad Miller had been embroiled in a local dispute with a resident named Ricky Manz over the old Richmound School, which had closed in 2008 and been abandoned for almost a decade. Manz had bought the school property with the dream of turning it into a “Can-Abis Botanicals” shop. Ever since, multiple villagers tell me he had struggled to pay taxes on the property.
In one of the long, rambling text exchanges to Miller, Manz threatened to start a “situation” Miller would “regret” if the mayor didn’t give him an exemption for the tax payment.
Years earlier, Miller had known Manz as an excellent carpenter who could pour cement, but, Miller says, Manz “went down the rabbit hole so far that he couldn’t get out.” In the texts with the mayor, Manz laid bare a worldview that can only be described as paranoid, saying the media was owned by Wall Street and the banks were going “tits up.” But lately someone had been giving him hope.
“She travels across Canada the last year and a half meeting people and making changes,” Manz gushed in a text about Didulo. “Do some homework brother!!!!!!!! And spread the good news … they are the real deal.”
Then he tried to make a deal with the mayor: Help him get out of paying an education tax on the school property, or he was going to invite Didulo and her inner circle to live with him in the school.
“The ball is in your court,” he said in a message. “Call it a warning shot across the bow.”
(Manz couldn’t be reached for comment. His lawyer said he couldn’t answer a detailed list of questions because his client hadn’t given him approval to speak to the media.)
The Richmound Takeover
On Sept. 14 — one day before Manz’s warning to the mayor — Didulo and about 14 members of her inner circle pulled into Richmound, a prairie town of about 120 people a couple of hours north of Montana. Didulo drove a 2000s-era motorhome with her face airbrushed onto the side, along with the sign offering a “meet and greet” with Queen Romana. Unlike the situation in Kamsack, this time, Didulo and her followers had been invited by Manz onto private property — the Richmound School — which gave them legal protections. Didulo had a favorable first impression of the village, describing it as “very friendly” in a livestream. It wouldn’t last.
As officials later found out, living quarters inside the school were segregated by gender. Men slept in the gym and women in the library. Both groups showered in the janitor’s closet and ate in the old home-ec room, which doubled as “HRM Queen Romana Didulo Command Center,” according to the banner. In one room was a pool table. In the gym was a makeshift courtroom, complete with a jury box consisting of chairs on a stage, where the Kingdom tried their own cases, dolled out sentences, and issued fines for people who had violated “natural law.” The gym also served as a broadcast space for QRTRV: Didulo’s daily livestream. On the roof, there was a garden and Starlink dish, which the group used to upload their videos, keeping their connection with the wider world.
Brad Miller was mayor of Richmound, a prairie town of about 120 people, when Didulo and her followers moved into the old school. Zander Sherman Among the people who came and went from the school was “His Excellency Frank Curtin,” the architect of the Peterborough police siege; a man nicknamed “Cowboy”; and a follower villagers describe as an unhinged, ex-military type who Brad Miller nicknamed “Vin Diesel.” After almost two years on the road, the school offered a higher standard of living for Didulo and her followers. Officials also believed it represented a final, desperate showdown between Didulo and the government — one that had been steadily building from the cease-and-desist letters up to the attempted takeover of Kamsack.
A wire boundary was set up outside of the school, along with private-property signs, lights, and security cameras. The temporary barrier was soon replaced with an enormous metal fence. All day and night, a vehicle slowly patrolled the perimeter. Anyone who approached was recorded. So were children at the nearby playground.
After their arrival, Miller went up to the gatekeepers, who wore baseball hats with the word “security” on them, and asked them what they were doing. “What is your concern?” he asked. They never responded. Soon after that conversation, Miller, who lives around the corner from the school, looked out the window and saw followers on the school roof with binoculars looking back.
Threats of Execution
Almost everyone in Richmound believed Didulo posed an imminent danger. Miller had spoken to people involved in the failed Kamsack takeover who told him to do whatever it took to try to get her out of their town. Miller’s wife, Arlene, had downloaded Telegram and seen enough of Didulo’s content to convince her to participate in a protest that Saturday, Sept. 16. Trucks and semis from all over the southwest came to Richmound, blaring horns and, in one case, ramming the new fence surrounding the school.
In apparent response, on Sept. 29, the Kingdom addressed a cease-and-desist letter to the village’s administration office, naming several Richmound officials, including the Millers. Citing conspiracy tropes involving the Rothschilds banking family and the Chinese Communist Party, the letter warned that failure to stop “demoralizing and immoral activities” could lead to “publicly broadcast executions upon yourselves, and undeserved devastation upon your children.”
The threats sent the village into shock. The village administration office closed, and the school playground was cordoned off. On Oct. 6, the RCMP deployed a temporary mobile detachment to Richmound so officers could keep the peace and patrol the community. The week after the letter was sent, Manz was charged with assaulting a villager who got too close to the fence. (The charges were later dismissed.)
Sleeping with a .22
By the time Arlene organized a second protest on Oct. 14, the RCMP announced that the Kingdom posed no “imminent threat” and withdrew the resources it had just deployed — decisions that were criticized by almost everyone in the town with whom I spoke. Inspector Germaine, the senior investigative officer with the RCMP in Regina, the provincial capital, says police had done a risk assessment and determined tensions had “very much de-escalated.” She says the RCMP had consulted community leaders and determined their presence was no longer needed. In other words, Richmound was on its own.
The Millers, married for 43 years, closed their blinds at night and lay awake with a .22 beneath their bed. On the mayor’s nightstand were three rifle clips and two cards from his grandkids: “Granpma (sic),” they read, “I love you.” He thought about how much time he could spend with them if he stepped down from his position. But he had sworn an oath. At 62, the mayor had already raised a family and retired from the oil-and-gas industry when he’d taken office. He had only taken the helm of the village at the urging of the previous mayor, who didn’t want any outsiders “screwing up” Richmound.
While they were living in the school, the Kingdom bought supplies from the general store in town. Didulo — paranoid that people in the village would poison her through the town’s utilities — bought vast quantities of bottled water. The owner of the general store even traveled to the next province over to buy goods to sell to Kingdom members. The Millers say the store owner told them more recently she’d sold mattresses to Didulo’s followers. (The store’s owner declined an interview request.)
After the encounters with the Kingdom, Miller sleeps with a firearm under his bed. The village hired legal counsel, who said the village didn’t have the bylaws needed to get rid of the Kingdom, and couldn’t create any new ones because the group’s use of the school was now “grandfathered” in at the time of their arrival. The special protection would only disappear if the Kingdom stopped using the property for a lengthy period. At the advice of counsel, the village pursued a municipal warrant that would let them inspect the school, which by then the group had painted a vibrant purple. But a judge quickly shot down the request, saying the information the village had provided was “insufficient.”
Miller appealed to officials on all levels, including the premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, who didn’t respond to my interview request but was quoted in the media calling the situation “unfortunate” and saying it was up to the municipal government to oust the group. Frustrated by the runaround, Miller sought direct mediation with the Queen, going up to the fence and asking for a meeting. When that failed, he wrote her a letter. She never wrote back. Miller then tried to reason directly with the baseball-hat-wearing gatekeepers, inviting them over to his house for a steak. One problem with his plan: They were vegetarian.
The Dividers
Miller suspected there was a faction of nearly a dozen local residents who were sympathetic to the Kingdom and trying to get him and other council members fired. He soon had a name for them: “The Dividers.”
Among them was Melinda Fischer, a middle-aged woman who sometimes wore a chunky beaded necklace and cat-eye glasses. Before the school closed, she had driven the bus. Now, she seemed to mostly dig up dirt on the community and its residents. It all began in 2022, when a contractor working for the village damaged her fence while working on the house next door and didn’t reimburse her the amount she wanted. As she explained on a Didulo broadcast in 2024, “I started posting [town council] minutes and revealing all the nastiness of the corrupt village.”
Fischer then accused the town of misusing public money, falsifying public meeting minutes, and other perceived offenses. In text messages shared with Rolling Stone, she called the mayor a “pussy” and said Arlene needed dental work. (Fischer didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions.)
Fischer had tried to recruit others in her crusade against the local government, including foreman Ben Kessler. As Kessler tells me, Fischer had texted him in an attempt to get him to complain about his $20-an-hour wage, saying he should be making $30. When he refused, she turned against him. As he was spraying weeds near her house one day in 2024, he claims, she told him she was glad his recently deceased son was gone and said she hoped it had been a “horrible death.”
“I couldn’t believe somebody would actually say that,” Kessler tells me. “If you wanna talk about me and call me out and tell me I’m a whatever, that’s fine. But to use … the death of a loved one?”
Partly because of that incident, Kessler and his wife sold their house and left Richmound. The village hired a new foreman, Dustin Cowan, who was friends with Fischer. At first, Fischer was the only person the Cowans, who moved from Ontario, knew in town. Friendly at first, she invited the Cowans over to her house for wine and offered to let them park their trailer on her property.
Eventually, Fischer convinced Cowan’s retired father-in-law, who’d been diagnosed with cancer of the blood and bone marrow, to “reserve” a spot on one of Didulo’s supposed medbeds by paying tens of thousands of dollars in crypto, believing it would erase his cancer and reverse his biological age. I asked Cowan if his father-in-law, who he described as mentally and physically vulnerable, was wealthy. Cowan laughed and said, “He’s a pensioner.”
Breakthrough
At town hall meetings, Richmound villagers took turns at the microphone, talking about how their lives had changed. They open-carried firearms and locked their doors at night. According to the Millers, at least four people, including the Kesslers, left Richmound altogether.
In the fall of 2024, after a year of failed attempts to remove Didulo and her followers through bylaws, mediation, and inspections, the village had only two practical levers left. One was shutting off the school’s water supply, which would cost $14,000. The other was plugging the sewer, which could be done for around $2,500 and would also cut off the Kingdom’s water supply. So, the town council uncovered a long-forgotten manhole and a rubber bladder was used to plug the sewer.
After a heavy rainfall the next spring, the Millers were driving past the school when they noticed water bubbling up from a different manhole and running down the highway. Arlene, who works several jobs, including as a water-treatment-plant operator, suspected the Kingdom had tampered with the shut-off valve to illegally access the municipal water supply. The water had been turned off in 2008, after the school had been decommissioned. Villagers had seen a plumber on the school property in recent months but couldn’t prove the water had been reconnected. If the group had tampered with the valve, the municipal water supply could be contaminated.
After Didulo and her followers moved into the old school, a fence was constructed around the property. Standing on opposite sides of the fence, Miller says, he asked Manz about it, and Manz denied the group had tampered with the valve.
On July 18, Miller and two RCMP officers went to the school to inspect the curbstop. As they approached the fence, Manz appeared on the other side.
“What are you doing?” he asked, according to the school’s video surveillance.
“Back up,” an officer instructed.
“Fuck off,” Manz responded. “You’re on my property.”
The officer jumped the fence and shoved Manz so hard his hat fell off. Manz shoved the officer back, and they tumbled to the sewage-soaked ground. Miller helped subdue Manz, who was pepper-sprayed and arrested. Manz was charged with assaulting both officers and the mayor, and intimidating a justice-system participant. Didulo was also charged with the intimidation offense.
Around the same time, the RCMP received a tip about a gun inside the school. Nine days later, they executed a search warrant. Early on Sept. 3, a SWAT truck battered the school’s metal fence. Drones smashed windows to clear the way. Dozens of police cars and a pair of special-forces units moved in. The Queen had been in a classroom, where she and her 15 followers were repeatedly told to come out with their hands up. Didulo livestreamed the whole thing, musing aloud that police may actually be there to rescue her. Shortly after, several heavily armed officers entered the building and arrested the group.
The Millers heard the sirens and ran outside. For hours after, Miller was shaking. “The happiest day of my life,” he says now.
Police seized 13 semiautomatic handguns, ammunition, and numerous electronic devices. The guns all turned out to be replicas that couldn’t fire.
Seventy-two-year-old Lise Beauchamp, 37-year-old Melany Rinker, also known as Melony Vanderbrink, and 63-year-old Nancy Jancke were each charged with obstruction of a peace officer after failing to give their names and dates of birth. As of summer 2026, the charges against all three people have been paused by the prosecution. They couldn’t be reached for comment. Most of the other 15 followers who were arrested were released without charge.
After the raid, police led Fire Chief Gene Perreault through the school, along with other officials. “Very little sunlight was allowed in,” Perreault tells me, saying the Kingdom had been living in “their own prison” and he had “never seen anything like it.”
Twenty-one fire violations were found in total. In a laundry area, officials found a 45-gallon barrel stove vented out a window. In a pit below the stage was a cistern containing dead rodents. If police hadn’t intervened, Perreault says, he believed the group was at an imminent risk of carbon-monoxide poisoning due to improper and unvented heating sources.
Facing Charges
On Sept. 5, Didulo stood on the steps of a courthouse and told onlookers she was “innocent until proven guilty.” She said the charges against her were “false.” Didulo and Manz were ordered to stay away from each other — a condition they failed to meet, resulting in an additional charge. At a bail hearing, Manz denied assaulting anyone and said the video evidence supported he had been victimized. He also faces charges for making threats.
Didulo and several followers were arrested in 2025 during a raid on the school. Shawn Mullin/Swift Current Online At Didulo’s bail hearing three days later, she told the judge she would only consent to proceedings if they were under “natural law.” More recently, she said she and her followers were constantly harassed in Richmound and that she had received “daily threats” against her life. In March 2026, Didulo’s and Manz’s charges for intimidation of a justice-system participant were shelved due to lack of evidence, though prosecutors have one year to refile. The other charges against Manz are proceeding.
Since the hearing, the Queen has kept a low profile. In her absence, followers host a daily, three-hour livestream, recording themselves discussing news events from around the world, often concluding that Didulo will return and save the world from impending disaster. Didulo herself rarely appears in the videos, and the group never divulges information about her.
Before claiming to be prime minister, Didulo had created shell companies with names like “Infinite Wealth” and “Didulo Holding Incorporated.” At one point, even police noted, she had a plan to start a company in the U.K.
MacKenzie, the doctoral student, thinks Didulo would never leave her followers. “I see her as a very power-motivated person. And that’s a big thing for her to give up.”
But Netolitzky, the Canadian scholar, believes Didulo could flee: “It’s entirely possible that she has been building up funds in a bank account somewhere. And one day she is going to simply disappear.”
The Aftermath
Today, both Manz and Fischer remain in the community. I ask Kessler, the original foreman, if he would consider moving back now the Kingdom was gone. He says there’s “no way.” The village had become associated with trauma, a place where Fischer’s comments represented “the pinnacle of the evil that happened there.”
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After ousting Didulo from Richmound, the Millers petitioned the provincial parliament to update and re-release Saskatchewan’s Safer Communities and Neighborhoods Act, which will make it easier to get rid of groups like the Kingdom of Canada. Miller describes it as a “binder filled with bylaws” that a village can open should it find itself in a position Richmound did.
The Richmound School has been abandoned since the raid. One villager describes it as a “cheap prison,” “bloody eyesore,” and “constant reminder.” The Millers say they want to see it burned down and a greenhouse built nearby. What stayed with me is how the school is the first thing you see coming into town and the last thing you see on your way out: an object in the rearview mirror that shrinks with distance but never seems to disappear.
