Ruby Franke's Daughter Speaks Out - SURVIVING A HOUSE OF HORRORS

IN A NEW MEMOIR, SHARI FRANKE OPENS UP ABOUT THE ABUSE SHE AND HER SIBLINGS SUFFERED AT THE HANDS OF THE INFAMOUS UTAH YOUTUBE MOM AND HOW SHE'S REBUILDING HER LIFE.

- CHRISTINE PELISEK

The new school year had just started for Brigham Young University junior Shari Franke in 2023 when she got a call from a neighbor saying police had surrounded her mother's home in Springville, Utah. "My initial thought," remembers Shari, 21, "is that my siblings are dead." The oldest of six children born to Ruby, a parenting video blogger, and Kevin, a geotechnical engineer, Shari had been increasingly concerned for her siblings' well-being, even calling the Utah Division of Child and Family Services to no avail.

A year earlier Ruby, a devout Mormon, had disowned Shari and asked her husband and older son Chad to move out after connecting with a therapist, Jodi Hildebrandt, who advocated for strict parental discipline. When Shari got the call that August, she immediately drove to the house where she watched as officers used a battering ram to break down the front door. "I was in total fight or flight the whole day," says Shari. "I didn't even process a lot of what was going on." On Aug. 30, 2023, Ruby and Hildebrandt were arrested after Shari's 12-year-old brother Russell escaped out a window of Hildebrandt's home in Ivins, Utah, and asked a neighbor to call the police.

The boy was malnourished, with wounds and restraint marks on his wrists and duct tape on his ankles. Shari's sister Eve, 10, was found also malnourished at the home. Ruby later admitted in a plea agreement to abusing her two youngest children, telling them they were "evil and possessed," denying them food and water, handcuffing her son's wrists and ankles and holding his head underwater.

On Feb. 20, 2024, she and Hildebrandt, who also pleaded guilty, both received four consecutive sentences of one to 15 years in prison.