‘Spawns of Satan’: Ruby Franke detailed torture of kids in newly released journal

globalnews.ca:

NOTE:The following article contains content that some might find disturbing. Please read at your own discretion.

A trove of documents, videos, photos and audio recordings from the child abuse investigation into disgraced family vlogger Ruby Franke and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt paint a disturbing picture of the state Franke’s children were in when they were finally rescued.

The video footage and photos show Franke’s 10-year-old daughter with stick-thin arms and buzz-cut hair. Police documents detail how she refused medical treatment for hours before letting anyone touch her.

Franke’s 12-year-old son was found with saran wrap around gaping, still-bloody wounds on his ankles. He told a witness he was to blame for his injuries.

But the most disturbing pieces of evidence in the collection were journal entries written by Franke, found in the home. The entries detailed how Franke starved and beat her children, and how she believed they were possessed by demons and needed physical punishment to “repent.”

Franke and Hildebrandt pleaded guilty to child abuse and were both sentenced Feb. 20 to four consecutive terms of one-to-15 years each.

Before getting into the journal entries, here’s what the documents revealed.

A statement from the Washington County Attorney’s Office, included with the trove of documents, described the home environment as a “work-camp like setting,” in which the children were forced to complete gruelling physical tasks, sometimes bare-foot in the heat of the summer sun in Utah.

“The investigation found that religious extremism motivated Ms. Franke and Ms. Hildebrandt to inflict this horrific abuse. The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the