By Chiara Fiorillo
A chilling police bodycam video shows a so-called "safe room" where parenting YouTuber Ruby Franke sent her children to stay.
The Utah mum, 41, gave parenting advice to millions via a once-popular YouTube channel called ConneXions Classrooms alongside her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, 45. The pair pleaded guilty to four of six counts of second-degree aggravated child abuse in December 2023.
Police said that after carrying out "a security sweep" Hildebrandt's $5.3million (£4.2million) desert home in Ivins, Utah, they found a "safe room", also referred to as "panic room" in the basement. In the room, which had a vault-like "safe door", police found a small Murphy bed, cabinets, a fridge, a sink and some cleaning supplies.
READ MORE: Youtuber Ruby Franke's horrifying handwritten journals detail abuse inflicted on her kids
In a dispatch call on August 30 which was released by the Washington County Attorney's Office, an officer could be heard saying: "There's a panic room inside the garage, downstairs and beneath the garage. He's calling it a safe room."
Newly-released footage shows the moment officers entered the room, hidden behind the "safe door", and checked all cabinets, as well as the fridge, for anything that could help their investigation. Police also checked the sides of the fridge/freezer as well as the closet to see if they could find any further clues.
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Franke's daughter was found in a closet in Hildebrandt's bathroom and police offered her pizza as she appeared malnourished. Other audio and video recordings showed how the children were being subjected to doing physical labour, emotional harm and had limited access to food in what was described as a "work-camp-like setting".
Harrowing details of the abuse suffered by Franke's children were revealed in the sadistic diaries kept by the former YouTuber, who described torturing and humiliating her children. The now locked-up child abuser wrote how one of her sons "refuses to do wall sits - he says he is done", the day before declaring he "is to stay outside. Sleep outside."
Her insane, abusive ramblings often included religiously-rooted writings of the Devil or "possession," and she added that another child in the heavily redacted document that cited the children raised publicly by their initials, "refuses to work. Screams. Has hair shaved off." The Utah mother-of-six wrote often of punishing her kids because she believed they were "possessed" by the devil and displayed signs of "satanic chaos".
Franke was convicted for the abuse of two of her six children, with the redacted diaries seeming to center on these two children, labelled as 'E' and 'R'. "They are both furious their selfish sinful lifestyle is being intervened upon," abusive Franke gloated in one diary entry. When they were rescued from her home, the children said they were punished and tortured by their mother as a way to help them with their deviance.
The mother wrote that child R was "in and out of possession", and that she told him "that he needs God. I invited him to fast and pray." Franke also wrote of her poor children "stealing water", depriving them of food, and declaring that she "cut more (hair) off E's head. We doused her w/ water in the dog wash."
She wrote that when one of her kids tried to run away, she "screamed for another family, water, food, care, love." The children were kept in the dark about important life events, despite being splashed all over the family YouTube channel.
On July 10, 2023, she wrote cruelly: "It's (R's) birthday. He doesn't even know what month it is." "I told (R) he imitates a snake. He slithers, sneaks around looking for opportunities when no one is watching, then he scurries," she scrawled in the birthday diary entry. The next day, Franke's torture continued and she began her entry by writing that it was a "Big day for evil."
In February, Franke admitted guilt to four counts of serious child abuse and was given four consecutive sentences ranging from one to fifteen years in prison. This implies that her overall prison term could range from four to sixty years; the board of pardons and parole will decide the exact duration of her sentence at a later time. Franke spoke to the court, laying the guilt at the feet of Hildebrandt.
"I've chosen to follow counsel and guidance that has led me into a dark delusion for the past four years," the woman stated. "I would distance myself from anyone who dared to question my warped perception of reality, so it remained mostly unchallenged."
