Ruby Franke’s handwritten diaries detailing how she carried out abuse on her children have been released. In the diaries she detailed starving her kids, making them perform gruelling manual labor, and once attempting to smother her “evil and possessed” son underwater. Prosecutors say Ruby was motivated by religious extremism.
In redacted entries, she repeatedly wrote that her son and daughter, referred to in the diaries as “R” and “E,” were the “spawns of Satan.” In a July 2023 entry about her son, Ruby wrote: “I will not feed a demon.”
Ruby and Jodi Hildebrandt shaved the children’s heads as punishment, forced them to work outside in the heat, and denied them beds, all purportedly to break their ties with the devil. “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,” Ruby wrote. In other entries, she called her son a compulsive liar with a “cold, dead heart.”
Last July, Ruby wrote that she shaved the boy’s head for refusing another demand; after he attempted to run away the next day, she told him he was like a snake: “He slides and sneaks around looking for opportunities when no one is watching,” Ruby wrote in an entry on July 10, her son’s birthday. In the following day’s entry, she describes holding his nose and mouth and pushing him in the pool. “Big day for evil,” Ruby wrote at the time. She also described her 10 y/o daughter as manipulative and recounting how she made the girl stand in the rain for hours, cut off her hair, and once doused her in “dog-wash water” after she complained about not eating for days.
You can read Ruby’s diaries here.
Videos, police reports, and interrogation from the investigation were also released, including a clip of Ruby’s son being interviewed by authorities after his mother’s arrest last summer. When asked about the wounds and lacerations on his ankles and wrists, the boy tells investigators he got the injuries “because of me.” (He later told investigators Jodi had bound his feet and arms with weights and applied cayenne pepper and honey to his open wounds.)
Body-camera footage shows police finding Ruby’s daughter in an empty closet. In the video, she appears emaciated with her head shaved, and only comes outside after hours of coaxing and food. “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,” prosecutors said in a statement.
At her sentencing hearing last month, Ruby apologized to her children and told the court that she been suffering delusions. “My distorted version of reality went largely unchecked as I would isolate from anyone who challenged me.”
Jodi told the court she loves Ruby’s children and expressed her hopes for both of them to heal. “My hope and prayer is that they will heal and move forward to have beautiful lives,” she said. “I’m willing to submit to what the state feels would be an appropriate amount of time served to make retribution as an outcome.”
SOURCE LIST
https://www.thecut.com/article/ruby-frankes-diaries-the-most-disturbing-details.html