Ruby Franke threatened to cut the head off one of her daughter’s cat stuffies in a chilling unseen home video.
The twisted Mommy Vlogger held up the blue animal and told the girl, who looked about two years old: ‘If you cut one more thing in my house I’m going to cut your cat’s head right off!’
In the video Franke, who was jailed last year for up to 30 years for child abuse, put her fingers around the cat’s neck in a scissors shape to underscore the point.
The disturbing footage featured in the documentary, Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, which premieres on Thursday on Hulu.
The film reveals the contents of a diary that Franke, 43, kept on her bedside table in which she wrote down the abuse she meted out to her two youngest children, a son aged ten and the same daughter.
In the diary, she calls her children ‘Satan’ and chides her son for showing no remorse for ‘stealing’ water even though she was denying him food.
The sickening home videos made by Ruby Franke, 43, who was jailed last year for up to 30 years for child abuse, will be displayed on Hulu’s new documentary that premieres Thursday
Ruby Franke threatened to cut the head off one of her daughter’s stuffed cats in a chilling unseen home video
The film shows the contents of a diary that Ruby kept in which she wrote about the abuse she meted out to her two youngest children, a son aged ten and her youngest daughter, alongside her guru 55-year-old Jodi Hildenbrant
Franke was arrested in 2023 after her son escaped the home in St George, Utah, they were living in and ran to a neighbor to ask for help.
Horrified police discovered he was emaciated and had deep wounds in his ankles which had been covered over with tape.
Franke, who became famous vlogging about parenting her six children, was arrested, as was her guru Jodi Hildenbrant, 55, a therapist whose house they had been staying in.
Both pleaded guilty to child abuse charges last year and are serving sentences that could last decades.
The documentary crew was given access to 1,000 hours of home video footage that was never uploaded to Franke’s wildly popular YouTube account, 8 Passengers, in which she chronicled their life as a Mormon family in Utah.
Her former husband Kevin tells the film that for Ruby ‘love is obedience and the moment you disobey me, you’re going to fear me’.
Franke (left) was arrested in August 2023 after the shocking abuse of her children came to light after she partnered with Jodi Hildenbrandt
In one video, Hildenbrandt can be seen speaking in a strange low voice and repeatedly saying ‘She’s mine! She’s mine! She’s mine! She knows!’ before hitting herself and adding ‘I own her!’
In another home video, the mother could be seen berating her son Chad and telling him to ‘be excited to tell them where your name came from. Even if you have to fake it.’ He looked dejected and refused to look Franke in the eye. ‘Fake being happy,’ she forcibly told him
Kevin, Franke’s ex-husband, tells the film after that ‘weird things started happening’ and describes how Hildenbrandt went into ‘possessed trances’
The cat video shows her holding the stuffed animal with her
left hand while berating her daughter, who bursts into tears when Ruby threatens to cut the head off.
Another clip shows Franke with her eldest son Chad who says sorry for giving her a bad look because he was ‘nervous’. She tells him to ‘just be yourself’ and when Chad explains that he is doing that, Ruby snaps back: ‘Then change it!’
The videos show the range of tactics that Franke used to get her children to comply to her relentless filming schedule that helped her amass more than two million YouTube subscribers.
In one video, the kids look fed up but she tells them: ‘Do you know that this is what we do and everyone gets $10 for a video they help with. Do you want $10?’
Even Kevin got in on the act and in one video says that Chad is being ‘terrible’.
Kevin scolds his children, who were considered employees in the family Vlogging business, and says: ‘The whole reason we’re here is because of our job and you guys are acting like this is stupid’.
The documentary describes how Ruby Franke fell under Hildenbrandt’s spell so strongly that she moved her into their home.
Kevin tells the film after that ‘weird things started happening’ and describes how Hildenbrandt went into ‘possessed trances’.
In one video, Hildenbrandt can be seen speaking in a strange low voice and repeatedly saying ‘She’s mine! She’s mine! She’s mine! She knows!’ before hitting herself and adding ‘I own her!’
Kevin claims they had to exorcise the evil spirits inside Hildenbrandt who would react when he said Jesus’s name
Both Shari, Ruby’s eldest daughter, and Kevin tell the documentary that they believed their mother and Hildenbrandt had a relationship of some kind.
Kevin says it was ‘much more than a sisterhood’ and says that when they were together – they slept in the same room – ‘it was uncomfortably intimate’.
Franke’s two eldest children, Shari and Chad, spoke in the documentary about their horrific memories growing up with her as a mother. The worst of the abuse occurred around a year after Chad was kicked out and by that time Shari was in college
The Utah property, owned by Hildebrandt, the two children were held captive in and abused inside
Hildenbrandt and Franke had some sort of relationship, both her ex husband and oldest children believe
The worst of the abuse happened during the 12 months after Ruby kicked Kevin and Chad out of their home in Springfield, Utah.
Shari was already away at college and the next two youngest children appear to have stayed with friends whenever possible.
That left the two youngest of the six siblings at their mother’s mercy, the documentary says.
Franke spent a lot of time at Hildenbrandt’s home in St George which had a ‘panic room’ where police found handcuffs, ropes, heavy duty tape and a cayenne pepper mix which is thought to have been put on the children’s wounds.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence against Franke was her own writing – the diary she kept on her bedside table which chronicled the abuse of her own children.
It described how she thought her two youngest were in the grip of Satan and that she needed to physically abuse them and starve them to get his spirit out.
In clear handwriting Franke calls her son a ‘snake’ who must submit to ‘painful good works’.
At one point she writes of her son: ‘I will not feed a demon’ and talks about him as being ‘selfish, sinful’.
In clear handwriting Ruby calls her son a ‘snake’, in her diary, who must submit to ‘painful good works’
One passage described how she thought her two youngest children were in the grip of Satan and that she needed to physically abuse them and starve them to get his spirit out
In another passage that hints at how desensitized the children were, Ruby talks about poking her son with a cactus and yet he ‘doesn’t even flinch’
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Images released highlight the extent of the abuse by Franke and show the two emaciated victims with infected cuts on their legs and duct tape around their arms and feet
In another passage that hints at how desensitized the children were, Ruby talks about poking her son with a cactus and yet he ‘doesn’t even flinch’.
The son grew so desperate for water he once put his head in the toilet bowl, earning a scolding from his mother. Despite not feeding him, she chided him for ‘stealing’ water.
She also admitted sedating the boy, tying herself to him while he slept and making him do sets of ten push ups.
Ruby writes that her son became so desperate he demanded to be taken to jail ‘where I belong’.
In interviews for the film, St George police officers reveal that Franke’s youngest son told them he was forced to stand in the sun all day, was tied down to weights and had to jump on a trampoline all day.
Both he and his sister were taken to a street in the desert called ‘Hellhole Road’ and forced to run despite the soaring desert temperatures.
