I just had a 12-year-old boy show up here at my front door asking for help. We need the cops here as soon as possible.
“If you’re in a position of power and you turn your power and give it over to the kids, that is control.”
“Hi, I’m Jody Hildebrandt. I am at the second annual women’s retreat.”
“I’m as shocked as anybody. Her and Ruby were just the two wrong things to come together in a story that has layers upon layers.”
“She can stay right here on the porch so you can see her. What are you afraid of, sir?”
“Jodi is very smart in how she approaches her therapeutic modalities. It’s like a frog being boiled in water, you know? You start off with the cold water and slowly turn up the temperature.”
“Hey there, everybody. I’m Jesse Weber and welcome to Prime Crime. This is where we break down the most compelling true crime cases in America. Our next story takes us all the way out west, but this is a case that had the entire nation buzzing when it broke in late summer 2023, and it all began with one chilling 911 phone call.”
“I just had a 12-year-old boy show up here at my front door asking for help.”
“What you’re hearing is not your typical 911 phone call, but this isn’t your typical case, and it all begins with one woman.”
“Worshipping your child will be placing your child’s desires over responsibility.”
“I am kind of a crazy mom in that I love my kids to wear red, white, and blue. They have been wearing red, white, and blue every year since they were wearing clothes.”
“Ruby Franke was a YouTuber and had millions of followers for her 8 Passengers channel. That’s where Ruby’s claim to fame really came from.”
“I think the kids are more excited about the presents the siblings are getting than the ones they’re getting.”
“8 Passengers was started several years ago by both Ruby Franke and her husband Kevin.”
“You guys, we are in Florida and the kids had no idea.”
“They have six children together and it was kind of that initial mommy blog YouTube channel where Ruby would basically invite people into her life with her husband and her children.”
“You guys are going to watch each other. I made dinner, but you have to eat dinner. We will. Got it? No silly business. I was going to say hanky-panky, but that’s not right. I’m pretty sure no silly business, that’s better.”
“She focused her family as the main driving source of content for her platform.”
“What is this?”
“It’s a cake inside. It’s the color of the baby, so we’re going to find out if it’s pink or if it’s blue.”
“I knew it!”
“A lot of the kids you almost saw grow up in that YouTube channel.”
“Do you want to start dating? Like, I don’t know if I’ve ever asked you that. I just assumed that you didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t care if I started dating, but I’m 13 and I feel like I’m too young.”
“You know that you can always come talk to me, right? You ever want to talk?”
“8 Passengers was the wild ride of the Franke family with over two million subscribers over the years, most likely by parents who were looking at this, looking at the tactics used, looking to them for advice as so many do on social media.”
“But you yelled at me.”
“Shh! The fact that I yell at my kids is a secret we don’t want our viewers to know.”
“However, these videos started to take a dark turn.”
“Eve did not pack a lunch today, and can I bring a lunch over to the school? I know that her teacher is uncomfortable with her being hungry and not having a lunch.”
“I responded and just said, ‘Eve is responsible for making her lunches in the morning, so the natural outcome is she’s just going to need to be hungry.'”
“People were upset about whatever was happening on this channel, parenting tactics, or how the children were being treated.”
“You have to vote. Listen, if you do not vote for what fun you want, we will ensure you will have no fun at all.”
“There were people who were concerned about the things that she was doing to punish her children. She had her son who left his socks outside, made him do push-ups.”
“Put them in your pocket so you can take them down to the hamper and drop, and give me 10. One. Put your hands straight out. They’re in. They’re not supposed to be out. Shape your hands forward, there you go.”
“There was another situation where her oldest son ended up losing his bed for several months.”
“My bedroom was taken away for 7 months, and then you give it back like a couple weeks ago.”
“I don’t think our viewers know that you’ve been sleeping on a bean bag.”
“I’ve been sleeping on a bean bag since October.”
“Chad came home from Anastasia and Russell was like, ‘I want to try dunking the basketball,’ and I lift him up on the, and he was, and left him there 3 minutes and he was just hanging on there. Do you think it’s funny? Because and then I walk out. If you think it’s funny, then you that was 7 months ago, maybe you need longer without a bedroom.”
“It was not funny.”
“There were a lot of people who were really put off by that, and that led to them criticizing her online. When looking at the change.org platform, there are a couple of petitions pertaining to Ruby Franke and 8 Passengers. There’s one from 2020 that actually says, ‘Get 8 Passengers Ruby Franke under investigation for child abuse.’ There’s also another one that still has almost 18,000 signatures. There were obvious concerns.”
“Eve, this is my tape. What are you doing? What are you doing to this poor baby? Should I tape your eyes to make you sleep?”
“The biggest thing was seeing all the kids get hurt on the YouTube channels. When I saw split fingers and bloody noses, the things that I saw were off camera. They were all the stuff at parties. They were just patterns of behavior saying things like, ‘Oh, if my kids won’t go to bed, I just give them Tylenol PMs.’ One conversation with Ruby was over dinner, and me and her argued the whole time about parenting for like a half an hour. For me, there was red flags throughout all of that.”
“We do know over the years there were a number of calls to Ruby’s home in Springville for a variety of things. Some were welfare checks, just checking on their family because the kids were left alone, according to one of the narratives.”
“Hi, um, my name is Shari Franke. My four younger siblings are living in Springville, and my neighbors have been telling me that they have been left home alone for about four or five days.”
“The CPS visits didn’t amount to much. A lot of those are private records. We’re not able to get those records. What we did see is Springville police assisting. There’s no details of how they proceeded, but clearly they didn’t proceed in a certain direction.”
“In 2022, Ruby Franke stops posting on the 8 Passengers channel. There’s a new person in Franke’s life, and they’re taking up a lot of her time.”
“Hi, I’m Jodie Hildebrandt. I am at the second annual women’s retreat in St. George, Utah.”
“Jodi Hildebrandt was a licensed clinical mental health counselor in the state of Utah. Ruby was working for Jodi at Connections.”
“Hi, we are live in Mapleton, Utah, and we have Ruby here, and Ruby is a part of the original 10 women that are being trained to become mental fitness trainers. Connections is essentially…”
“She’s repeatedly claimed that she is the victim and the children the perpetrators. She has gone so far as to say that the things said in this proceeding and covered by the media today will be full of lies.”
“Miss Hildebrandt, this circumstance is tragic. It’s largely, of course, of your making. By any measure, your conduct in this case was disastrous for these children. Adults are supposed to protect children. Adults with specialized training in particular are supposed to protect children. You didn’t do that in this case. You terrorized children.”
“Like Ruby Franke, the judge sentenced Jodie Hildebrandt to four consecutive sentences. Given that these are second-degree felonies, the most they’d be looking at on the top end is 30 years. They’re not going to do 30 years.”
“There will be a matrix that’s run. They don’t have a criminal history, so they’ll be on the bottom row. For the second-degree felony, it’s 18 months, that’s kind of the minimum, and then the Board of Pardons and Parole gets the opportunity to decide if they’re going to get the chance at parole at that 18-month mark or if they need more time in prison. And the board will look at several different things: have they done any treatment? What has their overall demeanor been like while they’ve been in custody? What do the children want to happen here?”
“Ruby and Jody, by my math, are looking at a minimum of 39.6 months. This is one of the worst child abuse cases we’ve seen.”
“I think that a 4-year minimum for Ruby’s actions are entirely appropriate. I hope that Jodie serves more time than that, and I hope that she isn’t out of prison until everybody is completely confident that she’s no longer a risk.”
“With Hildebrandt and Franke behind bars, the next chapter of this story begins. Kevin Franke has officially filed for divorce from Ruby and at the time of this recording is actively fighting to regain custody of his young children.”
“Once he found out the full truth about how these children had been treated while they were in Ruby’s care and some other things that have been going on behind the scenes, just thought it was the right time to do this.”
“In terms of getting the kids back, there’s a process that the court sets up, and in terms of helping them become rehabilitated from the trauma they’ve been through with Ruby and Jodi, I think that’s the state’s objective is to work them through that, as is Kevin.”
“Unless you’ve had this level of like narcissistic or psychopathic abuse, I can’t explain it to you. And then you have the layers of they’re children, they don’t have the biological mental facilities to understand what’s going on, and this is not going away. These children are going to deal with this potentially for the rest of their lives.”
“It doesn’t stop this. Nearly killed me. Trust your instincts. Build up that muscle of intuition because the things that you’re feeling are true. So ask the questions. Trust yourself. So people like Jodie and Franke are not held in positions of power, and they can be your neighbors, they can be your aunts, they can be your mothers.”
“That is the saga of YouTube mom influencer Ruby Franke and self-described life coach Jodie Hildebrandt, two women who claim to be authorities on child-rearing, only to end up pleading guilty to child abuse.”
“A lot of takeaways from this one. First, just the cost for the quest of fame. What’s really going on behind the scenes of online influencers? But maybe the most important one of all: be careful who you get advice from.”
“That’s all we have for you here on Prime Crime, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jesse Weber. Until next time, stay safe.”
