Ruby Franke vividly recalls the pivotal moment when doubts about her friend and former mentor, Jodi Hildebrandt, began to surface. In a phone call from prison on December 28, 2023, which was released by the Washington County Attorney’s Office and obtained by Oxygen, Franke expressed her disbelief. “Piecing it all together, realizing she was lying all along, it’s humiliating,” she admitted. “It makes me question how gullible I was, how much control I allowed her to have without seeing it.”

Franke and Hildebrandt, once partners in a thriving online self-improvement venture, now find themselves behind bars. They are serving sentences for four counts of aggravated child abuse. Prosecutors have detailed the grim reality faced by Franke’s children, who suffered severe abuse, living in conditions akin to a work camp, deprived of essentials like food, water, and proper bedding.

Their arrest on August 30, 2023, was triggered by a harrowing incident. Franke’s 12-year-old son, emaciated and bound with duct tape around his wrists and ankles, managed to escape through a window and sought help from a neighbor, exposing the cruelty inflicted upon him and his siblings.

It was only after her arrest that Franke began to critically evaluate Hildebrandt’s practices and methodologies, leading her to question the path they had taken. This introspection marks a stark contrast from her previous unwavering trust in her mentor.

It didn’t take long after her arrest for Franke to begin to question Hildebrandt’s methods. 

Ruby Franke Describes Moment She Began to Separate From Jodi Hildebrandt

As she explained in the Dec. 28 phone call, about a month after the arrest she was talking with her attorney LaMar Winward when she learned that Hildebrandt “denies everything.” 

“She denies having anything to do with this and I was shocked. I was like ‘What?’” Franke recalled. “And I’m, I’m still telling LaMar like, you know, all of the justifications and all of the—you know I’m talking like a criminal, I sound like a mad person. He was so patient with me.” 

Franke credited Winward with helping her sort out her own disordered thinking at the time, saying he’d often just stare at her blankly as she tried to justify her behavior.  

“And I’m like, ‘What am I saying that is so off?’ But that’s cause I really believed it,” she explained in the call. “Then when I heard that Jodi was not talking like that, she was denying the whole thing, it told me she knew all along [that it was wrong].” 

According to Franke, that was the moment she realized her friend had been deceptive. 

“And that’s when I realized, she knew, she knew all along and she’s hiding it and then I was like, ‘Crap, what I have done? That’s when things kinda started turning, I was like..she’s not been honest,” Franke continued, adding it made her begin to consider “Where else have I been deceived?” 

Franke—who pleaded guilty to the charges against her on Dec. 18, 2023—described the moment as the “little string that started pulling apart this fabric.” 

Ruby Franke Remembers Car Ride to Jail With Jodi Hildebrandt

She made the comments Dec. 28—just one day after Hildebrandt entered her own guilty plea to four counts of second-degree aggravated child abuse.

Franke described the plea in the call as a “big relief” to her, but she also questioned Hildebrandt’s motivations for making the plea deal with prosecutors. 

“The only reason she pled was because she didn’t want to do life,” she said. “She knew I would testify.”

Yet, Hildebrandt’s attorney Douglas Terry told reporters after Hildebrandt entered the plea that she had come to the decision first. 

“She decided to plead guilty before Ms. Franke entered into her plea agreement or agreed to cooperate with the state,” he said, according to KUTV. “She has pled guilty because she…did not want these children to testify. She takes responsibility and it is her main concern at this point that these children can heal.”

Nearly two months after the phone call was made, both women received sentences of four to 30 years behind bars, prosecutors said. 

While on the phone in December, Franke said she hadn’t spoken to her co-defendant since the day they both were arrested outside Hildebrand’s Utah home and shared a 40-minute car ride to the jail. Though they didn’t talk much, Franke said they did hum hymns together.

“She was still justifying the whole time she was like ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry we’ll have our day in court,’” Franke remembered. “And then when we were booked in, they put us in separate cells and we’ve been in separate cells every since.”

The time apart ended up being beneficial for Franke.

“This has been the strangest and the most miraculous intervention,” Franke said in another Dec. 2, 2023 call from behind bars. “It put everybody where they needed to be. It separated me from Jodi so I’m not hearing her and I think just being gone and not hearing her has cleared a lot of things up for me.”

Prosecutors Say Abuse Was Motivated By “Religious Extremism”

Following the investigation, the Washington County Attorney’s office concluded in a case overview that it was the pair’s “religious extremism” that motivated them to inflict Franke’s children to “horrific abuse.”

“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins,’” prosecutors said, “and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies.”

They described Franke’s 12-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter being denied basics like food and water and being forced to complete physical tasks like carrying heavy boxes down the stairs, sitting against a wall without a chair for hours or doing outdoor labor in the heat without shoes or socks. 

“They were beaten, and the 12-year old was bound hand and foot after a previous attempt at running away,” the prosecutors said. “Additionally, the children suffered emotional abuse to the extent that they came to believe that they deserved the abuse.”

Franke’s ex-husband Kevin Franke has now retained custody of the couple’s four minor children, according to People.