ST. GEORGE — A journal kept by 41-year-old Ruby Franke, who, along with her codefendant, 55-year-old Jodi Hildebrandt, is in prison for aggravated child abuse, outlines the “training” process that resulted in the torture and abuse of Franke’s two youngest children.
The journals were recovered by investigators shortly after the pair’s arrest in August 2023. The writings, released to St. George News, encompass dozens of pages authored by Franke starting in the middle of May 2023, when she brought her two youngest children to live with Hildebrandt in a remote, affluent area of Ivins.
The final journal entry was dated on or about Aug. 25, five days before the pair was arrested after Santa Clara-Ivins Police officers found one of the children partially bound and emaciated.
Over the course of more than three months, Franke outlined the “training” program that was implemented with the intent to remove the “evil” from her 9-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, whom Franke describes as “the spawns of Satan.”
Franke described the program as “an intervention for the possessed.”
Stripping down a child’s world to the basics of beans and rice and hard work would be considered abuse, Franke wrote, but it was “necessary for the prideful child.”
In the writings, the program consisted of long periods of exposure to the elements. One day in July, after the older child was forced to work for hours in the hot sun, Franke took “old mop water” and poured it over the child.
Also in July, both children were told to stand in the sun, since “only demons stay in the shade.”
When the children refused, Franke used a “cactus poker” to force the children back into the sun. The heat the children were exposed to was not as hot as the heat in hell, Franke wrote, telling her daughter that was where the child would burn, along with the rest of the wicked.
“So either get used to it or start changing,” she reportedly told the child.
Water was also restricted, and whenever the children were caught drinking water from one of the garden hoses outside, Franke wrote that they were “stealing water.”
During another instance, Franke suspected that her son drank water during one of the numerous fasts she instituted.
“He admits to stealing water three times yesterday. He lies and feels no remorse.”
Food was restricted, according to several of the entries, and both children were forced to endure days without food or water, during what Franke described as fasting, which the children were required to do often as a means “to invite them to be humble.”
Following a two-day fast for her daughter, Franke wrote, “she has hardened her heart and will do one more day of fasting.”
In many instances, the children were required to confess before they were given food.
“If you want food, then be prepared to tell the truth about your behaviors.”
In another instance, she told her young daughter, “I will not feed a demon.”
In one entry, Franke says she placed her daughter in a dog bath and shaved the youngster’s head.
“All her long hair is gone. No more distracting with hair.”
Part of the program required the children to perform repetitive tasks that included carrying boxes up and down the stairs, in part to show them the value of hard work, according to multiple entries in the journal. Franke describes how the children were forced to carry boxes up and down the stairs for entire days.
“Good works need to be painful,” she wrote of the exercises.
In one instance, Franke explained a reason for the task to the 9-year-old.
“It’s because you follow Satan that you keep doing boxes.”
The children were separated from one another with periods of complete isolation, causing them to lose all track of time. When Franke realized her son knew his birthday had passed, she wrote that he “has been counting days.”
The younger child had also appeared to be trying to keep track of the days, telling Franke that she thought they had been there about eight weeks. To that, Franke asked the child if she felt like she had made any progress, to which the child said yes.
“I told her she was delusional,” Franke wrote.
Placing the children in a closet was also mentioned numerous times, and in one entry referring to the youngest child, Franke wrote, “Jodi carried her back to this closet and she screamed and sulked and asked for water.”
By Aug. 7, both children were in isolation much of the time and were sent into “sedation,” as mentioned more than once during the last days and weeks.
When her son continued to bang on the side of the closet, Franke wrote that she “got a pair of boots. I went in and kicked him again.”
The children routinely slept on the concrete basement floor, while Franke told them she “slept in a soft bed.”
One morning in June, Franke awoke at 2:30 a.m. to find the older child gone, and when she went outside to look for him, she found pebbles arranged to form a message that read, “Jail. I will call when I get there.”
She then woke Hildebrandt, and they drove around looking for the child. Franke wrote that both were hoping he had not reached the main road yet. While searching, Franke prayed that she and Hildebrandt would be protected while they searched for the boy.
“Oh father, we need a miracle. Show us where he is.”
She went on to write they needed to speed up the search since they were in a race against the sun to find the boy before dawn. Minutes later, she spotted the child walking on the side of the road and described the look of shock on the child’s face when she pulled up.
She also noted they found the child before sunrise when he would be more visible to others, writing, “The devil wants me in prison.”
Finding the child, she wrote, “was a miracle from God.”
Following the escape attempt, the boy spent time in the closet, was tethered to Franke and was only allowed outside without shoes so “he wouldn’t run away.”
Franke wrote that she and Hildebrandt were “buying time” until they could move away from Ivins, which was “not conducive to the intervention” they were engaged in with the children.
While the children believed that once the training was over they would be able to return to their home in Springville in northern Utah, Franke wrote they had different plans for the children.
“They are never going home.”
It was during this time that Hildebrandt was preparing to sell her home so they could move to Arizona, which would get the children to “open land,” a move that Franke said needed to happen sooner than expected since they could not continue the program in Ivins, as the children continued to scream and wail.
“We decided the escalation of the kids is not manageable.”
She went on to write they needed enough property to build a ranch, where “good can be done” and where the kids could experience natural outcomes.
“The kids need a good kick from a horse and a cactus to run into.”
The children were kept in the dark about the move and had no idea of Franke’s and Hildebrandt’s plans to move to a desolate area in the Arizona desert, which would end their days of “enjoying the air conditioning” and other amenities in the Ivins home. But once they moved to Arizona, things would be different.
“We will drop them like hot potatoes out in the desert — their new home.”
On Aug. 1, Hildebrandt contacted Franke from Arizona to advise she was looking at a 500-acre piece of property, and at some point Hildebrandt sent a text: “I found the land.”
By Aug. 16, less than two weeks before the arrests, Franke writes that one of the children was “full of evil puffy infection” and described how the older child needed help with balance and coordination. When asked to balance on one foot, the child fell over, hit his nose on the ground and began bleeding.
By Aug. 25, five days before the arrests, Franke wrote that both children were still defiant and were “out of control” as “the girl” continued to scream and scream.
In one of the final entries in the journal, Franke described her role as a mother by writing that her two youngest children were sent to her because of the powerful intervention she was performing upon “the possessed.”
“God knew I would take my responsibility to mother them seriously.”
On the morning of Aug. 30, the older child climbed out of a window and ran to the house of a neighbor, who called police. By that time, both children had been kept in isolation and neither had seen the other in more than a month.
Inside of a panic room at the home, detectives found the ropes and handcuffs used to bind the older child, while the younger child was still bound when officers found her locked in a dark closet.
Washington County Attorney Eric Clark told St. George News in an earlier interview that the children are doing better than expected.
Franke and Hildebrandt were sentenced to consecutive prison sentences of 1-15 years on four separate second-degree felony counts of aggravated child abuse.
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