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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The malnourished and severely bruised son of a YouTuber who gives parenting advice politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in a newly released video from the day his mother and son business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son Ruby Franke, A mother of six who gave advice to millions through a popular YouTube channel escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the County Attorney’s Office. Washington.
The crime scene photographs, body camera videos and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and his business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined that religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Prosecutor Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women seemed to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach children how to properly repent of imagined ‘sins’ and expel evil spirits from their bodies,” Clarke said.
Franke, 42, and Hildebrandt, 54, pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse that included convincing Franke’s two youngest children that they were evil and subjecting them to manual labor, multi-day fasts, and conditions that Clarke has described as “concentration camp-like.”
The women, who have said they belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were arrested last August at Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, a picturesque suburb of St. George, after their neighbor Danny Clarkson opened his door and find the emaciated boy. Their actions have been condemned by other Mormon parenting bloggers who say they misrepresented their community and religion.
In the video, the boy is seen walking away barefoot, with torn socks and his ankles wrapped in bloody duct tape and plastic wrap, but turns around when Clarkson opens the door. He and his wife, Debi, could be seen on their Ring camera feeding the boy, calling 911 and asking about the lacerations on his ankles and wrists, which the boy insisted were his fault.
“I received these injuries because of me,” the boy tells the couple as they share worried glances. He tells the first responders that his younger sister is still at the Hildebrandt house and the police rush to the house.
The boy later told investigators that Hildebrandt had used rope to tie his arms and feet to weights on the floor. She used a mixture of cayenne pepper and honey to bandage her wounds, according to the police report. Franke and Hildebrandt had told him that everything they had done to him was an act of love.
In handwritten diary entries also published Friday, Franke recounts months of daily abuse that included starving her son and 9-year-old daughter, forcing them to work for hours in the summer heat and isolating them from the outside world. The women often made the children sleep on hard floors and sometimes locked them in a concrete bunker in Hildebrandt’s basement.
Franke repeatedly insists in his diary that his son is possessed by the devil. In a July 2023 entry titled “The Big Bad Day,” he describes holding the child’s head underwater and closing his mouth and nose with his hands. Franke tells him that the devil will lie and tell him that he is hurting him, but that he is actually trying to save him.
He later justifies denying his son food and water, writing, “I will not feed a demon.”
Franke’s attorney, LaMar Winward, and Hildebrandt’s attorney, Douglas Terry, did not immediately respond Friday to requests for comment on the new evidence.
Body camera video shows officers entering Hildebrandt’s home and detaining her on the couch while others search the winding hallways in search of the young woman. They quickly discover a boy with a haircut sitting cross-legged in a dark, empty closet. After hours of sitting with the girl and feeding her pizza, the police convince her to leave.
Franke describes shaving the girl’s head several times for complaining and writes in her diary, “If she’s going to act sick, she may look sick.”
Franke and her husband, Kevin Franke, released “8 Passengers” on YouTube in 2015 and amassed a large following while documenting their experiences raising six children in a Mormon community in Springville. The couple also has a 15-year-old son and a 16-year-old son, as well as two adult children.
She later began working with Hildebrandt’s coaching company, ConneXions Classroom, offering parenting seminars, launching another YouTube channel, and posting content to her shared Instagram account, “Moms of Truth.”
Ruby Franke was already a divisive figure in the world of parenting vlogging. The Franke parents had been criticized online for banning their eldest son from her room for seven months for playing a prank on her brother. In other videos, Ruby Franke talked about refusing to bring lunch to a kindergartner who forgot it at home.
The “8 Passengers” YouTube channel has since ended and Kevin Franke filed for divorce shortly after his wife’s arrest. He appears stunned in the interrogation images when the agents inform him of the condition of his son. He had not seen his wife or his children since Franke asked him to move out in July 2022, investigators said.
Kevin Franke has filed several petitions in the months since his wife’s arrest in hopes of regaining custody of their four minor children, who were taken into state custody.
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