The sadistic abuse former Utah YouTube mommy blogger Ruby Franke meted out to two of her young children — shaving their heads, starving them, dousing them with dirty mop water, making them stand outside barefoot in the desert heat for hours and forcing them to wear adult diapers — has been laid bare in her just-released diaries.
The children were gripped by “Satanic chaos,” Franke, 42, wrote in the partially redacted journals, adding she punished the kids, identified as “R” and “E,” because she believed they were “possessed” by the devil.
The handwritten journals are filled with religious fanaticism.
The youngsters were punished even more if they balked at any of their mother’s abuse, she wrote.
Franke, who once whipped her children with a belt, was convicted of child abuse and sentenced to 30 years in prison last month along with her friend and business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt.
The influencer ran the popular YouTube channel “8 Passengers,” about her life with her husband and six kids in Springville, Utah.
She and her husband separated in 2022 and Franke began spending much of her time in Ivins, Utah with Hildebrandt, a controversial mental health coach.
They launched a video channel from Hildebrandt’s home where they lived with Ruby’s two youngest, a 12-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl.
Franke was arrested in August when her emaciated 12-year-old son managed to escape from the house and ring a neighbor’s doorbell asking for help.
He was covered in wounds, with duct tape around his wrists and ankles.
The children were frequently denied food and water as well as beds to sleep in, prosecutors said.
They had to lift and carry boxes up and down stairs, do wall sits for hours, and do work outside in the “extreme summer heat” barefoot, among other forms of abuse.
“If you can engage a weak minded soul in a physical activity of obedience you can begin to break the bond Satan made w/ the weak,” Franke wrote in one journal entry.
One day in April 2023, her son, then 11, refused to do “wall sits.”
As a result, according to the journal’s timeline, the next day the child was told to stay outside, even to sleep, and only come inside to use the bathroom and shower.
Franke referenced the “devil” or “possession” in her journals, once writing that one of her kids, “R,” “refuses to work. Screams. Has hair shaved off.”
“It is [the boy’s 12th] birthday and he doesn’t even know what month it is,” Franke wrote on July 10. “… I told [the boy] that he emulates a snake. He slithers and sneaks around looking for opportunities when no one is watching.”
The next day, Franke began by writing it was a “Big day for evil.”
“(R) was told to stand in the sun w/ his sun hat/ He is defiant, ‘No.’ I tell him a couple more times. (R), or should his say his demon, stays in the shade.’”
“The investigation found that religious extremism motivated Ms. Franke and Ms. Hildebrandt to inflict this horrific abuse,” the Washington County Attorney’s Office said about the case. “The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies.”
She wrote more than once about her children’s “deviant” behavior and that they were “spawns of Satan.”
“They are both furious their selfish sinful lifestyle is being intervened upon,” Franke wrote.
Franke also wrote about her kids “stealing water” and depriving them of food, and said she “cut more (hair) off E’s head. We doused her w/ water in the dog wash.”
She also described how she forced her son to bake in the sun and prodded him with a “cactus poker” whenever he tried to move into the shade.
After allowing him out of the heat, she doused him with “old mop water,” writing: ‘It’s hot outside. ‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’ Yes.”
“The devil doesn’t like when you get your subject from anger to truth,” she wrote.
In another entry, she wrote that poking her kids “is a strategy/ technique,” and (R) “seems to respond to poking, pouring cold water, towel whip.”
Franke referenced Hildebrandt frequently in the diary, claiming her kids stop being “possessed” around her, then “act up” once alone.
Hildebrandt was also sentenced to 30 years behind bars as she was arrested alongside Franke.
Shocking photos released at the same time as the journals showed the two kids were painfully thin, with infected cuts on their legs and bruises and scratches all over.
They also had duct tape around their arms and feet.
In their search of Hildebrandt’s home, cops Police found also a tiny safe room in the basement locked from the outside, rope used to tie up the children and adult diapers.
Bodycam footage shows the moments police discovered the 9-year-old girl hiding in a room in the basement of the home.
The cops gave her a pizza and patiently spent a long time coaxing her out of her hiding place.
