Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions and images of child abuse. The faces of minors have been blurred.
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In 2015, Ruby Franke, a 32-year-old Mormon woman in Utah, became another parent sharing her family’s life on YouTube. The first video on her now-defunct channel, 8 Passengers, begins with old footage of her standing in a modest kitchen, her five children gathered around in anticipation as she cuts into a cake to reveal the gender of her sixth child. The video jumps to a scene at the hospital shortly after her new daughter’s birth. Resting in bed, Ruby cradles the baby and her youngest son, a serious-faced 3-year-old boy in blue overalls. “Can you show me where her nose is?” she asks him as he points. “Where’s her eyes?” When an elder son reports that the camera is almost out of battery, Ruby replies softly, “Go ahead, turn it off. That’s okay.”
Over the next six years, 8 Passengers would grow into one of the most-watched family YouTube channels of all time, amassing, at its peak, roughly 2.5 million subscribers and more than a billion views. Ruby and her husband, Kevin, distinguished themselves as a messy-but-wholesome alternative to the polished, world-traveling, Montessori-practicing parenting influencers taking over feeds. Instead of bringing their children to Disney World, which was initially out of budget, Kevin and Ruby took them hiking; in place of elaborate home-cooked dinners, they ordered Chick-fil-A. Kevin and Ruby were also strict. When one daughter snuck into Ruby’s bathroom and spilled nail polish on the floor, Ruby took away dessert and nail-painting privileges for a month. In another video, their eldest son was allowed to go play in a ball pit — but only after helping to clean the house. The Franke children “had chores and rules to follow, which a lot of family channels didn’t,” one viewer told me. “They weren’t the stereotypical spoiled-brat YouTube kids. It was refreshing.”
The audience was diverse. There were parents, of course, but also teenage girls, single women, and people just curious about Mormon life. The most die-hard 8 Passengers fans not only followed along on YouTube but also gathered in dedicated online forums, where they analyzed the affairs of the Franke family, of which they had encyclopedic knowledge. They discussed whether the Franke children were getting enough social interaction and when the older ones should be allowed to start dating. They celebrated the children’s birthdays.
These fans were, in late 2019, among the first to realize something was off. In 8 Passengers’ posts, Ruby appeared colder, they thought; the couple’s already stern parenting style had sharpened. That August, in between videos about swimming lessons and school supplies, Ruby and Kevin shared with viewers that they’d sent their eldest son to a wilderness camp for wayward teens. After another video, in which the son revealed that his parents refused to let him sleep in his bed, viewers sprang into detective mode. They analyzed footage. They shared theories: Ruby had joined a cult; her marriage was in trouble; there were problems at home. The rumors picked up in 2022 when Ruby and Kevin stopped posting on YouTube entirely. On Instagram, Ruby abruptly changed the account handle to “Moms of Truth” and, in place of glossy images of her family, began uploading strange, prescriptive sound bites on subjects like blame and tactics of deception. The account’s profile picture featured a new face: her therapist and now–business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, another blonde Mormon woman, who was more than a decade older. In the comments, followers asked why Ruby had stopped uploading 8 Passengers videos and begged her for family updates. They became concerned about the children. On September 23, 2022, one Reddit user typed, “This could end up so bad.”
Late in the summer of 2023, Ruby’s two youngest children, then ages 9 and 12 — the baby girl and the boy in the overalls in the very first 8 Passengers video — were found hundreds of miles from home. They were wounded and emaciated, the victims of abuse by Ruby and Hildebrandt. Both women pleaded guilty to four counts of felony child abuse and are now in prison, leaving viewers to wonder who and what they had been watching and whether there had been signs all along.
Ruby met Kevin at a hot-dog social in 2000. She was 18, a freshman at Utah State University, and ready for marriage; her previous fiancé, to whom she was engaged during her senior year of high school, had cheated on her, and college was a new start. She said she chose Utah State for its strong engineering program — not because she wanted to become an engineer but because she wanted to meet one. When Ruby got to school, she hung a list of the qualities she wanted in a husband on the back of her bedroom door, including “wants six children,” “likes yard work,” and “is crazy about me.” Kevin, a sophomore civil-engineer major, checked most of those boxes. She brought up marriage days after they met. “To be honest, it kind of freaked me out a little bit at first,” Kevin later said on YouTube. He said he fell for Ruby’s family, who in videos appear bubbly and tight-knit, before he fell for her: When he met them, “I made the decision I wanted to be around these people for the rest of my life.” Two weeks after her mother dropped her off on campus, Ruby called home to announce that they would wed at the end of the semester.
After they got married, Ruby dropped out of school to start her life as a wife and homemaker. Three years later, she gave birth to their first child, and by the end of 2013, they had five more. Kevin, who had gotten a master’s and a Ph.D., eventually became an assistant professor at Brigham Young University. The Frankes settled in Springville, Utah, a Provo suburb popular with Mormon families that backs into the Wasatch Mountains. Life fell into a rhythm: Kevin went to work while Ruby managed the children and homelife. On weekends, they attended church and shuttled the kids to sporting events.
Ruby said she decided to vlog after watching footage her parents had taken of her own childhood. “I thought, I want my kids to have that,” she said. By then, Ruby’s three sisters had all started documenting their families on their own YouTube channels and collectively now have millions of subscribers. Seeing them connect with viewers “just by sharing their good lives” made Kevin want to do the same. He and Ruby saw an opening, perhaps even a higher purpose. “There are too many people out there who have given up on the idea of family,” said Ruby. “They’ve had such horrible, negative experiences that we just wanted people to know it’s possible, that family is not something to be given up on and it is possible to have happy families.”
In 2015, when 8 Passengers launched, the content that had reigned on mommy blogs in the aughts and then moved to Instagram in the early 2010s was making a hard turn toward video; from 2016 to 2017, viewership of family channels on YouTube increased by 90 percent. Thanks to Ruby’s sisters, she and Kevin already had a road map for success. The platform rewards both minutes watched and upload frequency, and they began posting new videos almost daily: ten-plus-minute-long diaries of the organized chaos of a big family. YouTube was a place for Ruby to connect with a world outside her domestic bubble, where she could showcase the often-unseen work of drop-offs and pickups, cooking and cleaning, and get clicks in return. Ruby’s parents started their own YouTube channel, and she filmed with them and her sisters, cross-pollinating content. 8 Passengers leaned into the categories that tend to perform well on family vlogs: home tours, shopping hauls, morning routines, family announcements. In a little more than a year, the channel hit 100,000 subscribers, and by August 2016, more than 400,000 people were following along. Kevin and Ruby began earning money from YouTube ads as well as brand partnerships with companies like Walgreens, Wet Ones, and Crest.
On a podcast many years later, the eldest daughter would recall that, once her parents started 8 Passengers, “we took a camera when we went on vacations. We’d film going to the store. We always kind of filmed everything.” The Frankes broadcast their kids’ illnesses and teased the contents of their eldest daughter’s journal; they chronicled another daughter’s struggles with acne and read their son’s text messages aloud on-camera. Sensational titles and thumbnail images featuring the children seemed to attract views, and the titles of their videos took on an urgent, almost manic quality that drew viewers hoping for updates on the Franke children’s lives: “Sent to the PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE,” “Don’t Tell My Secret PLEASE!!!,” “SICK, But Where’s the Toilet?!?” Very little, it seemed, was off-limits. A video with a thumbnail of the Frankes’ tween daughter with shaving cream on her legs, sitting on the edge of the tub, got almost 2 million views. One video featuring their eldest son, titled “Officially Hit PUBERTY” and with a description that included “voice cracking and sprouting,” had almost 3 million views. Kevin and Ruby filmed themselves taking their preteen daughter bra-shopping, her siblings in tow. When the girl pulled her cardigan in front of her chest and crossed her arms, Kevin asked, “How come you’re all embarrassed?” The Frankes’ eldest daughter’s voice can be heard from off-camera: “Because you’re filming her and you’re her dad?”
In September 2017, Ruby posted a video titled “Strep or Mono? We hit a MILLION SUBSCRIBERS!!!” It took viewers along as one of their daughters got her temperature taken in the emergency room, but most of it depicted Ruby, in a floral dress and pearl earrings, waiting for 8 Passengers to hit the 1 million-subscribers mark. She recorded herself staring into the phone outside her younger son’s kindergarten orientation, then again as she drove with two children in the back seat. Finally, she pulled over. “It’s just so fitting to hit a million while I’m trying to squeeze in all these little things,” she said, crying. “My big thing has always been Mothers are powerful. Hashtag ‘Mothers are powerful.’”
Ruby was struggling more than she let on. Toward the end of 2018, she and Kevin were having difficulty parenting their eldest son, who was 13. Ruby’s close friend, a fellow Mormon mother on YouTube named Paige Hanna, told her about a parenting class that had helped her through the overwhelming period after the birth of her sixth child. The course was taught by a woman named Jodi Hildebrandt, and it was part of a program she’d designed called ConneXions. Ruby, tired of constantly yelling, of feeling like “a mom on the edge,” signed up.
ConneXions wasn’t officially attached to the Mormon church, but Hildebrandt networked within the Latter-day Saints community to attract clients. Many came to her through friends, family, or their bishops — unpaid church leaders who sometimes paid Hildebrandt for their followers’ sessions using tithing funds. Although Hildebrandt was a certified therapist, she called herself a life coach. This distinction appealed to potential clients. “In many Latter-day Saints’ minds, therapy represents this mainstream, corrupt form of knowledge and authority that does not match their Gospel way of knowing,” said Benjamin E. Park, an associate professor at Sam Houston State University and the author of American Zion: A New History of Mormonism. Hildebrandt, however, was known and trusted in the LDS community. She was one of them: “You’re getting help from someone who is not your priesthood authority but is also not from that corrupt world.”
Hildebrandt wasn’t particularly charismatic; Heather Cook, a former client, found her to be awkward in person. But on Zoom, where she primarily held her coaching sessions, she appeared confident, and clients were eager for her approval.
Her past, as she had described it in numerous self-published books, informed her approach. She grew up with six siblings in rural Arizona, raised by a mother with “a controlled and controlling exterior” and an emotionally disconnected father. By her own telling, Hildebrandt was a people pleaser who worried about upsetting her mother and spent much of her time alone or with animals. In one of these self-published books, she wrote about being sexually abused as a young child — first by a teenage neighbor and then by a 16-year-old boy who had come to live with her family. Nobody noticed, and she stayed silent.
As a child, Hildebrandt convinced herself that the abuse she’d endured was the result of her own bad behavior. “I knew I had evil inside me, and I had to keep at least one step ahead of its shadow or it would overtake me,” she wrote. At 21, she finally saw a therapist — she was suffering from recurring migraines that were preventing her from doing missionwork. Still, she was suspicious of mental-health professionals and resisted their diagnoses. In traditional therapy, “I was allowed to not be responsible for my thoughts and feelings.” So she decided to become a different kind of therapist. Before founding ConneXions, she worked primarily with people struggling with sex and pornography addiction and later served as the director of Utah’s chapter of LifeStar, a national therapy franchise that treats porn addiction — a profitable business in a community with stringent views on sexuality.
Hildebrandt still offered one-on-one coaching but began directing most of her clients to her group sessions, which were separated by gender. She called the program ConneXions. Whether she was addressing marriage, parenting, or addiction issues, she focused her programming on two nebulous concepts she called “Truth” (capitalized) and “distortion.” In videos, writings, and podcasts, she used these concepts elastically and sometimes convolutedly, but Truth boiled down to being in control of one’s life and perceptions, while distortion was the opposite — “the violator of Truth.” Hildebrandt wrote that Truth “is not an abstract philosophy” but “something very specific”: “Truth is about the facts of human existence. Truth is constant and unchanging. Truth is eternal.” This language, she said, had been given to her by a higher power.
Kevin was skeptical but eventually agreed to join Ruby at a ConneXions conference and then on a trip to the U.K. with the Hannas. In addition to being ConneXions clients, the Hannas were also unpaid board members who were helping expand the business through a new model in which clients would pay Hildebrandt to become coaches and then give her a cut. On the trip, the couples’ conversations kept circling back to ConneXions. “I do recall Kevin saying, ‘This is a cult,’” Paige Hanna later said in a video, but added that she didn’t know what a cult was at the time. Still, the trip was effective: Kevin agreed to join one of Hildebrandt’s men’s groups.
“It was like a 12-step group,” Kevin later told police. During these sessions, which were held over Zoom, Hildebrandt pushed her clients to work on what she designated as their addictions — to drugs and sex, as well as to more abstract concepts like control. But her pet diagnosis was pornography addiction; even men who didn’t think they struggled with porn would be told they had a problem. This made a certain sense: “You really can’t have a major meeting with male youths and men where the scourge of pornography viewing isn’t mentioned and/or denounced,” says John Dehlin, Ph.D., host of the Mormon Stories podcast. “I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here,’” Kevin said. “But everyone was like, ‘No, you can learn to have a better life and a better marriage.’” He completed the three-month program and was ready to be done. Then he was “challenged” in the group to have a conversation with Ruby about his “lustful choices.” Over an emotional two-hour-long conversation, Ruby told him “how she felt in our marriage,” he said. She described the things he did: “Asking for sex as a husband frequently, or asking her to wear lingerie, or things like that — how that made her feel.” He decided to stay in the program.
Despite his initial resistance, Kevin started to feel like his marriage was getting stronger. There was less fighting. “Even though we were having less sex, it felt more connecting,” he said. Soon, he and Ruby were speaking at ConneXions conferences. The program “has truly turned my life around and my family’s,” Ruby told her viewers.
In August 2019, Ruby and Kevin calmly explained to the 8 Passengers audience that they were sending their eldest son to Anasazi, a wilderness camp in Arizona where participants live outside in the desert under Spartan conditions. The couple presented Anasazi as a decision they’d made together; in reality, it was Ruby and Hildebrandt who had sent him. They were applying the parenting philosophy of ConneXions, which emphasizes the child’s accountability while simultaneously giving the parent control.
“There needs to be an investigation into the 8 Passengers kids,” a viewer wrote on Reddit. “Their mother, Ruby Franke, is not just strict but a downright control freak.” Viewers were outraged when the eldest Franke son, after returning home, shared in a vlog that he’d been sleeping on a beanbag chair for seven months. Ruby, sitting next to him, recorded as he explained why: It was punishment for pulling a prank on his brother. In that same vlog, Ruby pressured her youngest son to talk on-camera. When he refused, she said, addressing her viewers, “The fact that he’s not willing to sit with me and be humble and talk is a big demonstration to me that he has some distorted views and that he is in a lot of shame.” In another video, Ruby filmed herself in her car, detailing how, when her 6-year-old daughter’s teacher texted to say the child had forgotten her lunch, Ruby refused to bring her food and hoped nobody would share with her. When her youngest son left his socks outside, she filmed herself trailing behind, chastising him. She made him do push-ups as punishment. Then she posted the video.
Some viewers called the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, which dismissed the case after talking with the Franke children, Kevin told Business Insider at the time. The family received death threats. Their income diminished as fans contacted their sponsors and demanded they sever ties. In response, Ruby and Kevin released a video. Their parenting choices were guided by professionals, they told their viewers. “If we make things easy on our kids all the time, they’re going to grow up to be snowflakes,” said Kevin. Ruby was particularly ruffled by a commenter who told her to be a better parent. “She’s claiming the kids as her own,” said Ruby into the camera. “They’re not anybody’s children but mine and Kevin’s.” Despite their assured front, Ruby was shaken, so she went to Hildebrandt for support and validation, Kevin later told police.
Ruby and Kevin were both still meeting weekly over Zoom with their ConneXions groups; members were also expected to call one another multiple times a day to talk each other out of distortion. Heather Cook, who was briefly in the same group as Ruby, noticed that she could be erratic. During one session, a widow new to ConneXions shared that her bishop had introduced her to women in her neighborhood after she had told him she was lonely. Ruby “said things like, ‘You don’t need anybody but us. Nobody else is living in truth besides us,’” Cook recalled. Ruby accused the widow of lying and threatened to make her a pariah in the group. The new client “was so confused and crying, like, ‘But how did I lie to the bishop? What do you mean?’” said Cook.
“I kept going, Something’s weird,” Cook said. “I was like, I’m just waiting for them to pass out the Kool-Aid.” Her friends told her it was time to get out, and she agreed. Ruby, on the other hand, was falling deeper. ConneXions jargon — truth, shame, distortion, honest, responsible, humble — became her new dialect, and Kevin and their children began to use it as well. One of Ruby’s sisters, Bonnie Hoellein, became so uncomfortable with the way that Frankes spoke to her children that she stopped letting them sleep over at their house. When Ruby’s extended family expressed their disapproval — “We all felt weird about this Jodi lady. We weren’t comfortable with it,” another sister later said in a video — Ruby cut off contact.
Ruby was inducted into Hildebrandt’s inner circle, joining Hanna and the company’s president, Pam Bodtcher, a mother of seven and a member of the LDS Church. She and Kevin became the poster couple for ConneXions, their smiling portraits accompanying ads for conferences and retreats. Ruby paid Hildebrandt $10,000 to become one of her “certified mental-health fitness trainers.”
In 2021, Hanna hosted a retreat to celebrate Ruby and another client for completing their training. The weekend took a turn when Hildebrandt shared that she’d been having demonic nightmares, Hanna later recalled. They weren’t the only ones who had noticed Hildebrandt acting erratically. Soon after the weekend, Hanna said, an old friend of Hildebrandt’s got in touch and told her that Hildebrandt had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. Hanna suggested interventions to help, but Hildebrandt refused to participate. She feared they would worsen the voices in her head. But given all of this, she decided to stay with the Hannas for a few weeks.
After six weeks at their home, Hildebrandt turned to Ruby and Kevin. Kevin didn’t want to get involved, but Ruby was eager to help. “Ruby was always jealous of the Hannas — that they had a better relationship with Jodi than she did. This goes back to her childhood: She wanted to be the best friend; she wanted to be the most liked,” Kevin told police. Finally, after pressure, he relented: Hildebrandt could stay with the Frankes.
The dynamics of the Franke home changed quickly, Kevin said. At night, Hildebrandt would go into trances, so Ruby slept in the room with her and then in the same bed. Kevin became what he jokingly called “the resident exorcist,” giving Hildebrandt blessings to pull her out of it. Ruby started to believe she, too, was having visions. She told Kevin that in one of them, she was walking in Heaven and had a pet lion named Charles. She started getting “possessed” by Satan, as Hildebrandt claimed to be, and speaking in different voices. Kevin later told police that one day that October, Bodtcher, the ConneXions president, came over, and she, Hildebrandt, and Ruby locked themselves in a room for several hours. There, in the suburban home that millions of people had seen on YouTube, a bizarre scene unfolded: While the children played in the yard, Ruby and her friends were upstairs receiving “visions” from God. Until their son let his friends in, interrupting them and infuriating Ruby, who’d told Kevin to keep the children away. That night, she told him she wanted an “in-home” separation.
Kevin found himself an outsider in his own house. He was not allowed to enter the kitchen without Ruby’s permission. He was no longer allowed upstairs, where Hildebrandt was staying. If he left the house, he had to ask Ruby when he could come back. She even decided when the two of them could talk. “It was during that time that I really became, I would say, dependent upon Ruby,” he said. “If she said a kind word to me, my whole day was made.”
As the Frankes were growing closer to Hildebrandt, Hanna was distancing herself. She had learned more about Hildebrandt’s past — that Hildebrandt, who was divorced, didn’t have a relationship with her daughter, and that she’d been accused of abuse by her teenage niece Jessi about a decade earlier. While staying with Hildebrandt, Jessi, who uses “they/them” pronouns, said they were forced to sleep outside in a sleeping bag, given strict time limits on using the bathroom, and never enrolled in school, according to police records. Jessi alleged that Hildebrandt would call them a liar and duct-tape their mouth. “She accused me of being a sex addict,” Jessi told Salt Lake City’s KUTV, a CBS News affiliate, last year. “I was never allowed to have the door closed because she was convinced that I was just constantly masturbating.” Hildebrandt often told them she was making them uncomfortable “to force the sin out.”
Finally, in early 2022, Hildebrandt moved back to her own house. But her presence lingered at the Frankes’. When Ruby asked Kevin to sign a contract giving Hildebrandt ownership of 8 Passengers, “I thought it just was batshit crazy,” Kevin said. He tried to remind Ruby, “You have a reputation, you have a multimillion-dollar business, you have a brand — and you are just giving it away.” When their YouTube manager protested, Ruby fired him. The in-home separation had ended, but Ruby threatened Kevin with another one if he didn’t sign. “By this point, I was in total compliance mode,” Kevin said.
On June 28, the first official ConneXions post appeared on the 8 Passengers Instagram account. Ruby changed the handle to “Moms of Truth,” an offshoot of ConneXions described as a support group for parents. The profile photo of the Franke family was replaced with one of Hildebrandt and Ruby on a couch in blazers. It was a partnership that seemed to benefit them both: In 8 Passengers, Hildebrandt gained a nationwide platform much larger than the one she had cultivated in Utah. And in ConneXions, Ruby found a life outside her kids and her home and a path away from family vlogging that might still give her the online validation she’d grown accustomed to. “I have spent the last two years really thinking about what I wanted to do, the direction I wanted to take with my social media,” Ruby explained in her Instagram Stories. “And here’s the reality: I have made my content around my children for years, and my children are getting older.” Her new content would be educational, she said. She would no longer be posting photos of her children.
Ruby and Hildebrandt began releasing podcast episodes as well as videos on the ConneXions YouTube channel in which Ruby sat beside Hildebrandt, often nodding along as Hildebrandt spoke. They co-wrote a workbook on parenting, referencing scenarios that 8 Passengers fans might recognize: On a page about “Patterns of Truth,” it reads, “When I am scared to show mom where I spilled nail polish, I show courage. I choose honesty when I show mom my mess. I am penitent as I offer to clean the mess and pay for damage. I accept my vulnerability as my mom chooses a suitable outcome.” Hildebrandt begged viewers for Google reviews, growing increasingly agitated. In a breathy rant, she pleaded, “This is something super-simple we are asking you to do, and you’re not doing it … We’re just saying, ‘Can you please take five minutes and hit a button and go give us a five-star review?’” She added that she was “sanctioned by God to say what I’m saying.”
In July, Ruby told Kevin to move out of the house and end contact with their children. By then, Kevin had grown to believe that he’d treated his wife poorly and was addicted to pornography. He went from being a leader in the men’s group to getting “knocked to the bottom. Jodi was just piling on me,” he said, and the other men joined in. “It felt like a pack of dogs, and Jodi was the alpha.” Kevin decided on obedience. “I knew that the only way I would ever get back into my house was I had to get Jodi’s approval. Because if I didn’t get Jodi’s approval, I would never get Ruby’s approval.” Ruby told their eldest son, then 17, to leave, too — she was upset that he’d had girls over. Their eldest daughter was already gone, having started her freshman year at Brigham Young University. That left the couple’s two teenage daughters, their 11-year-old son, and their 8-year-old daughter alone with Ruby.
Outwardly, ConneXions promoted discipline, not physical abuse. The week Kevin moved out, however, Ruby posted a video on Instagram in which she tried to justify hitting children. In a defensive tone, she said to her increasingly alarmed followers, “If your kid came to you on fire, would you say, ‘I’m so glad you trusted me to tell me you’re on fire, but if I put out the fire, that’s going to really hurt and you’re going to end up with scabs anyway, so I’m just going to love you where you are right now?’ No! You throw them on the ground, and you start rolling them. You get a blanket, and you start hitting the flames. And they’re going to say, ‘You’re hurting me. You’re beating me. You’re controlling.’ It’s like, ‘No, dear. Hold still — I’m getting the fire out.’”
Two months after Kevin left, the Frankes’ eldest daughter, away at college, called the police asking for a welfare check on her siblings. According to police records, a concerned neighbor had contacted her after noticing that no adult had been in the home for five days. Ruby was with a “friend” more than three hours away, the daughter told police. She worried that her siblings didn’t have enough food. When authorities arrived, they could see the children through the window, but they wouldn’t open the door. Neighbors gathered outside, telling authorities that Ruby often left her kids home alone for extended periods. They were particularly concerned that the youngest two Franke children, who were homeschooled and isolated, had no way to ask for help.
Nothing was done. In Utah, DCFS officers are permitted to forcibly enter a home only under exigent circumstances, and Ruby and Hildebrandt evaded them by not answering the phone or door. Kevin continued to stay away, his paychecks deposited into a shared account that Ruby had access to. Week after week, he went to the men’s group, only for Hildebrandt to tell him he wasn’t doing enough, he said. He had no contact with his children. He barely spoke with Ruby. “I was completely cut off. If I went to my church leaders, I was seeking enablement. If I went to my family, I was seeking enablement. If I went to anybody, I was seeking enablement. It felt like a no-win. It felt trapped.” Kevin said that, eventually, Hildebrandt told him that she’d spoken with God and was told Kevin needed solitude. She told him not to return to the men’s group, either.
Hildebrandt lived in the quiet town of Ivins, Utah, 300 miles south of the Frankes, in a $5 million house that resembled a fortress: a 10,000-square-foot stone-and-concrete box wedged into red desert rock, secluded on 1.4 acres. On May 22, 2023, Ruby brought her four youngest children there to help her with spring-cleaning. Outside, there was a scenic pool and firepit. Inside, there were five bedrooms, 15-foot ceilings, a media room — and, in what seemed innocent enough, a dog wash. There were neighbors within walking distance, but the house afforded much more privacy than the Frankes’; even the blinds were controlled by a remote.
Ruby decided she and her children would stay. Her two teenage daughters would keep going to school, but her two younger children would continue to be homeschooled. While the Frankes settled in, Hildebrandt took meetings with high-ranking LDS Church leaders.
During the eight weeks they spent on Hildebrandt’s compound, Ruby kept a diary, in which she detailed the horrors to which she subjected her youngest daughter and son. In almost daily entries, she appeared to grow increasingly convinced that Satan had a hold on her children and that her role was to bring them closer to God through obedience. Some of the entries sounded manic, others angry, all of them cruel. On July 11, she wrote that her son “stole water” when he was thirsty. “I told him, ‘Give your demon friend a message for me. I will not rest. I will not stop. I will not leave. I will fight him until the day you die. I have the power of God and he must obey. I beat Satan. I win.’”
On page after page, Ruby wrote about forcing her children to work outside in the blistering summer heat, sometimes without shoes. She withheld food. When her son tried to seek shade, she prodded him in the back with a “cactus poker.” Ruby described putting her hand tightly over her son’s nose and mouth and telling him, “The devil lies and says I’m hurting you. Abusing you. But [child’s name redacted] what am I really doing?” She wrote that her youngest daughter made “rhymes” about her, saying things such as “My mom starves me and calls it fasting.” Ruby shaved her head and doused her in the dog wash.
She became fixated on physical labor as a means to enforce compliance and expressed desire for a ranch where the children could work. Her children were, in her view, “manipulative” and “deceptive.” When her daughter whined, Ruby wrote it was “the devil’s voice” coming from her mouth. When her son asked for food, she told him she would not feed a demon. She forced the children to hold a heavy box and walk up and down stairs, noting that her daughter, only 9, would slip and fall.
In the middle of the night on July 14, the boy tried to escape. Hildebrandt and Ruby found him walking on the road. When they got home, Ruby tied rope around his feet and waist and then around her own, forcing him to sleep attached to her. She drugged him. “I now know that in order to keep my son, I will need to put him back under sedation,” she wrote. When he came to, she watched while he showered and then shut him in a closet. Hildebrandt took Ruby’s youngest daughter out into the desert while the girl “screamed for another family, water, food, care, love,” Ruby wrote in her diary. The child threw herself onto a cactus. After cleaning the wounds at home, Hildebrandt put her in a closet. An entry about the daughter ends abruptly with the line: “We forced her to stand outside for two hours in the rain.”
Finally, on August 30, the boy escaped, made his way to a house two doors down, and asked the neighbor to take him to the nearest police station. The man called 911, noticing that the boy wasn’t wearing any shoes, that he was thirsty and bone-thin, that there was duct tape around his ankles and marks on his wrists. When the neighbor realized the extent of the boy’s injuries, he began to cry.
The boy was taken by ambulance to a hospital while police went to Hildebrandt’s home. She was already on the phone with her attorney when she opened the door and appeared panicked, police body-cam footage showed. The youngest Franke child was eventually found by police officers in a bathroom closet, sitting on the floor, her hair shorn. The girl, too, was emaciated and had scars up and down her arms.
Roughly an hour and 40 minutes after police officers showed up at Hildebrandt’s door, Ruby arrived. She stayed mostly silent as she and Hildebrandt were handcuffed and detained, but on the drive to the police station, the two women hummed hymns. Miles away, officers found her two middle daughters at the home of ConneXions president Bodtcher. They’d been cleaning her house.
Kevin wanted to pick up his children. Instead, he found himself sitting across from two police officers, looking like someone who had woken up on another planet after a long nap. Head in hands, he told the officers he and Ruby had communicated only a handful of times since the beginning of the year; that he wasn’t aware of how Ruby disciplined their children; that Hildebrandt was someone he respected.
After the officers told Kevin how his children had been found, they left him alone in the room for ten minutes with a camera recording. When they returned, Kevin asked, “What’s going to happen to my wife? I love my wife.” He equated what he was experiencing to “getting run over by a steam truck.” “Everything you are sharing with me just sounds like a made-up story. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He let out a cry. He said he felt responsible.
The next day, Kevin and Ruby spoke over the phone — her from Purgatory Correctional Facility in Hurricane, Utah. “Adults have a really hard time understanding that children can be full of evil and what that takes to fight it,” she said to Kevin. “You’ve seen what it takes to fight evil. It’s not the person you’re fighting, and it can look like something it’s not.” When Kevin tried to communicate the severity of the children’s injuries, Ruby accused people of exaggerating. “This is a witch hunt,” she said. “The Devil’s been after me for years, and he’s mad as heck.” The next day, she said the most upsetting thing was how she and Hildebrandt were misunderstood. That made sense to her, though: “Every wonderful man of God has had to be misunderstood.” She also told him she had pulled money out of their bank account; later, a bag with $85,000 in cash she’d taken from their shared account and her children’s accounts was found in Hildebrandt’s home.
It would be their last phone call for months. The next time Kevin spoke with the police, he sounded different. ConneXions was “psychological hell,” he said, and Ruby and Hildebrandt had ripped his family apart. In this police recording, he sounded measured and eager to help. “It felt like — have you ever had a dream where there’s, like, a problem you’re trying to solve, but you can’t solve it, and how frustrated you feel? That’s what my life felt like,” he said. In November, he filed for divorce. Five months later, he sued Hildebrandt for emotional harm. Ruby and Hildebrandt didn’t speak again after the arrests; each woman retained her own lawyer.
Although YouTube terminated both 8 Passengers and ConneXions, the Frankes’ vast digital footprint lives on in internet archives. It is these hundreds of hours of videos, as well as police files, lawsuits, recordings, online forums, and other published materials, on which this account is built. All of the Franke and Hildebrandt family members, neighbors, and ConneXions leadership contacted for this story either declined interview requests or did not respond.
Since the arrest, Ruby’s family members have sought to distance themselves from her. On their YouTube channels, her sisters released videos denouncing what Ruby had done. (Hoellein titled one post “I am not my sister. I am not my Sisters Crimes.”) Former clients of Hildebrandt have also worked to separate her teachings from those of the LDS Church. “Jodi Hildebrandt continues to carry this title, ‘Mormon therapist,’” said former client Trey Warner. “She couldn’t be further from the teachings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Still, people who followed the case were reminded of a strikingly similar one. In May 2023, Lori Vallow Daybell, a Mormon mother in Idaho, was convicted of murder. She and her husband, a doomsday novelist, killed her children and his first wife. Vallow Daybell, too, had fallen prey to extremist beliefs. She called her children “demons.”
Theories about Ruby’s spiral still circulate, but the answer to what happened might be fairly simple. Ruby, primed to follow an authority figure and prize obedience, was the perfect prey for Hildebrandt, a woman with a God complex who had won the trust of their community leaders. That Ruby would come to trust her, too, and offer up her platform to spread Hildebrandt’s message, isn’t so much a deviation as an extreme version of what she’d already been taught.
This past summer, just before the first anniversary of Ruby’s arrest, Kevin sat before the committee of Utah state legislators that oversees DCFS. He recounted how Hildebrandt convinced Ruby “that the government wanted to rip religious families like ours apart” and coached her “in navigating the child-welfare loopholes.” Hildebrandt and Ruby had been able to easily evade authorities. He issued a plea that “religious extremism” not be used as a cover for abuse. After the hearing, he told reporters he wanted to regulate the “shadow industry” called life coaching, which is largely unregulated.
But then again, so is the business of family vlogging, which Kevin exposed his children to for years. In his next move, Kevin is planning a return to the screen. Per his lawyer, he has signed a contract with Hulu for a documentary that will likely air next year. The subject: protecting children from social media.
More on Ruby Franke
- Ruby Franke’s Daughter Is Opening Up About Her Mother’s Abuse
- What We Know About the Mommy Vlogger Accused of Child Abuse
- The Most Disturbing Details From Ruby Franke’s Diaries