Review: ‘Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke,’ starring Shari Franke, Chad Franke, Kevin Franke, Brannon Patrick, Paige Hanna, Jessica Bate and Nick Tobler

March 22, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke”

Directed by Olly Lambert

Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” features an all-white group of people talking about the child-abuse scandal involving former YouTube family influencer Ruby Franke and her business partner Jodi Hildebrant, who are both from Utah.

Culture Clash: In 2024, Franke and Hildebrandt were both convicted of felony child abuse for beating, torturing, starving and holding captive Franke’s two youngest children.

Culture Audience: “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching true crime documentaries about child abusers who are punished for their crimes and how family vlogging can have a dark side.

The three-episode docuseries “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” is an insightful but still not completely comprehensive chronicle of one of the most horrific crime cases involving a family of YouTube vloggers. It’s an above-average documentary about this high-profile criminal scandal because this docuseries has interviews with Ruby Franke’s ex-husband Kevin and their eldest children Shari and Chad. However, the series needed more details about Jodi Hildebrandt, Ruby’s business partner who was also convicted of the same child-abuse felony crimes. In February 2024, Hildebrandt and Ruby were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.

Directed by Olly Lambert, “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” does not reveal the names and faces of Ruby and Kevin’s four youngest of the ex-couple’s six children, in order to protect the children’s identities. That’s because these four children were still under the age of 18 when this documentary series was released. At the time this documentary was released, Kevin was fighting to get custody of these four children, who were placed in foster care after Ruby was arrested. This custody case is sealed in juvenile court, which means more details about this custody battle are not available to the public.

Episode 1, which is titled “Abundance,” chronicles the happy years of the Franke family, particularly in the early years of the Franke family’s YouTube fame. Episode 2, titled “Distortion,” is about the family’s fall from YouTube grace and the mutual obsession that developed between Ruby and Hildebrandt when they went into business with each other and eventually lived together. Episode 3, titled “Truth,” shows how the child abuse was eventually exposed and how Ruby and Hildebrandt were brought to justice. The documentary could have been better in providing the exact years in timeline captions, instead of “six months later” or “one year later.”

“Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” begins with the same home security camera footage that many documentaries and video news reports about this scandal have used in the opening scene: Ruby and Kevin’s second-youngest child (who was 12 years old at the time) is shown walking up to a neighbor’s house in Ivins, Utah, on August 20, 2023. The boy is emaciated when he approaches the front door.

The people inside the house don’t open the door right away. Just as the boy is walking away, the house owner (an unidentified elderly man, whose face is not shown) opens the door and asks the boy how he can help him. The boy asks to be taken to the nearest jail. The concerned neighbor sees that the boy is skeletal, is covered in bruises, and has duct tape bindings on his legs and wrists that have cut through the skin.

The neighbor asks the boy to sit down on a front porch bench. As the man sits near the boy, he calls 911 (the call is played alongside the footage), and he chokes up in tears when he describes the boy in distress. An unidentified woman, who is presumably the man’s wife, is shown pacing nervously after she gives the boy something to eat and drink. Her face is also blurred out to protect her privacy.

This haunting footage is what the world now knows as the boy’s escape from Hildebrandt’s sprawling compound, where he and his younger sister were held captive and tortured by their mother Ruby and Hildebrandt. His escape from the compound led to the arrest of Ruby and Hildebrandt. Ruby and Kevin’s two middle children (both teenage girls) were found unharmed at the home of a friend of Ruby. This friend (who is unidentified and not interviewed in the documentary) had been asked by Ruby to pick up the girls from school.

And where was Kevin, the children’s father? Kevin and Ruby had been separated for about a year, and he had not seen any of his kids during that time. Under the orders of Ruby and Hildebrandt, Kevin was forbidden to have contact with Ruby and the children during this separation. On the day that his Ruby and Hildebrandt were arrested for child abuse, Kevin was questioned by police and was cleared of any wrongdoing in this child abuse. He filed for divorced from Ruby in November 2023.

Why were Ruby and Kevin separated at the time Ruby was arrested in August 2023? According to Kevin, Hildebrandt (a psychotherapist) had brainwashed him and Jodi into thinking that Kevin was a bad husband. Hildebrandt, a divorcée with adult children, had a life coach business called Connexions, which marketed itself on YouTube and other social media platforms. Several people in the documentary describe Hildebrandt as a man-hating manipulator who encouraged an alarming number of her married clients to break up.

But there were problems in Chad and Ruby’s marriage long before Ruby met Hildebrandt. Ruby and Kevin, who are both Mormon, had been become immersed in an increasingly paranoid religious mindset, after the family’s YouTube vlogging business imploded because of public backlash and criticism that Ruby was being abusive to their children. Through interviews with Kevin, Shari, and Chad, as well as friends and neighbors of the Franke family and a few law-enforcement officials, the documentary unpeels the layers to show how this YouTube-famous family fell apart and became an example of sickening child abuse that takes place behind closed doors. (Not surprisingly, Ruby and Hildebrandt declined to be interviewed for the documentary.)

Ruby (who was a homemaker), Kevin (who worked as a professor) and their kids lived in a middle-class house in Springville, Utah. People in the documentary describe Springville as a great place to live, but Springville and other predominantly Mormon communities have a culture that is fixated on perfectionism. The Frankes used to have a happy family when their lives first went on display on YouTube. According to Kevin, Ruby was the one who came up with the idea to document their family life on their own YouTube channel, which launched in 2015 and was called 8 Passengers.

The 8 Passengers channel has since been removed from YouTube, which has banned Ruby and Hildebrandt for life. However, the filmmakers of this documentary had access to more than 1,000 hours of Franke family home videos, many of them unaired. And some of this previously unseen footage shows that Ruby often put up a front of being a “nice mother” on camera, but she could be bad-tempered and sometimes cruel in footage that she said would be edited out and not made public.

At the height of the popularity of 8 Passengers, the channel had about 2.5 million subscribers. At first, the 8 Passengers channel was lighthearted and fun. On camera, the family’s squabbles were minimal and handled in a loving and caring way. But over time, Ruby showed more impatience and anger toward her kids. Chad and Shari say they and their siblings eventually resented having to “perform” and fake their emotions on camera.

The documentary has a clip from the channel’s very first video, which shows Ruby, who was pregnant at the time with her sixth child, doing a gender reveal for the baby, by cutting a cake in front of her other five children. Ruby says that if the cake is blue inside, the baby will be a boy. If the cake is pink inside, the baby will be a girl. The gender revealed showed that the baby would be a girl. Shari looks elated. Chad looks disappointed.

In the documentary, Kevin describes his quick courtship of Ruby as something that involved some manipulation and deception on his part. They met in their late teens in August 2000. Kevin says there were about three or four other guys he had to compete with to date Ruby. In Ruby’s home, Kevin found a chart where Ruby had listed all the attributes she wanted in a future husband. His name and the names of the rival suitors were listed on the chart.

Kevin saw that he didn’t have enough boxes checked under his name for the ideal husband attributes. He decided that he would reinvent himself for Ruby, so that he could check all the boxes on that chart. This tactic worked. By October 2000, just two months after they met, Kevin and Ruby were engaged. They got married in December 2000.

Kevin explains his relationship with Ruby this way: “She really wanted me to be the perfect husband, the even-keeled but strong patriarch of the family. But I wasn’t. I am a nerd, through and through. I was very insecure with who I was. And I was willing to change to become somebody that somebody else would appreciate and love.” He adds, “Once I had it, I was willing to do anything to keep it.”

Kevin admits that although he wasn’t entirely comfortable on camera, he was definitely comfortable with the money that started to pour in from the family’s YouTube business. Kevin says that the payments grew from $85 for the first payment and over the years peaked at about $100,000 per month, largely due to sponsorship deals. Kevin describes Ruby as the CEO of the family business and everyone else in the family was an employee.

The Franke family became famous on YouTube in a way that endeared them to many of their fans but alienated them from some other people. Some of the neighbors interviewed for this documentary describe Ruby as too caught up in being a YouTube star—to the point where she had a video camera filming her almost every time she was went out in public, and neighbors were sometimes filmed without their consent. Ruby is also described as someone who wasn’t very friendly or sociable when she wasn’t on camera.

Chad became a breakout heartthrob star on the channel because much of the audience consisted of girls his age. But eventually all that attention didn’t matter enough to him because he was especially resentful of Ruby telling him how to act on camera, and he started to rebel. The documentary has a previously unaired clip of angry Ruby giving this stern order to Chad: “Fake being happy.”

Over time, Chad began to not pay attention to authority figures, and he got expelled from school. Ruby’s friend Paige Hanna, who’s interviewed in the documentary, introduced Ruby to Hildebrandt as someone who could possibly help Chad through counseling. Hanna was also a member of Connexions and expresses regret about introducing Hildebrandt to Ruby and being fooled into thinking that Hildebrandt was doing God’s work.

By all accounts, Hildebrandt was the ignition match to a proverbial powder keg in the Franke family that was ready to explode. Ruby and Hildebrandt believed in a “tough love” form of parenting where spankings and other corporal punishment were not only considered acceptable but also necessary for parents to discipline their children. In an archival video, Hildebrandt is shown saying that children do not have a right to privacy. Ruby enthusiastically agreed with Hildebrandt.

One of Chad’s punishments at home was to have his bed privileges taken away. He had to sleep on a bean bag for seven months. When Chad let this information slip in an 8 Passengers video, it sparked immense outrage from the public. The 8 Passengers channel saw a steep decline in viewers and sponsors. Ruby eventually shut down the channel permanently in 2022.

That same year, Ruby and Hildebrandt started a support group together called Moms of Truth, which was marketed on social media platforms and was really a way for Connexions to get more members. Many concerned members of the public called for Child Protective Services to investigate Ruby. Some people in the general public predicted that Ruby would end up in a true crime documentary about child abuse.

It’s mentioned in the documentary that an attorney advised Ruby to make a public apology video about the beanbag backlash. Ruby refused and instead doubled down on the idea that her kids needed more discipline, not less. Her two youngest children kids were eventually homeschooled. Later, Ruby began to have even more disturbing ideas about the kids. In her journals that were found by police after Ruby’s arrest in August 2023, she described her children as demons who needed to be punished.

Chad describes the moment he knew that his mother got hooked on Hildebrandt. He says it was when he had a videoconference call with Hildebrandt, which was the first time that he met her for a therapy session. Ruby was also in the room with him. When Hildebrandt asked Chad if he was ready to start living a responsible life, Chad says he enthusiastically replied, “Yes.”

But Hildebrandt’s response was to stare at Chad and declare, “You’re lying, Chad.” Chad says that Hildebrandt was correct: He had been faking this response. And he noticed that his mother had an expression on her face that indicated that Ruby looked both smug and in awe that Hildebrandt could see through Chad’s fakery, and now Ruby had an ally in disciplining her kids.

In the documentary, Hildebrandt is described as a cult leader who yielded a lot of power and influence over her admirers and supporters. At one point, Hildebrandt convinced Ruby and Kevin that Hildebrandt should be their in-house marriage counselor. In 2021, Hildebrandt moved into the Franke home. Hildebrandt also said that she was afraid to live in her house in Ivins (which is about a four-hour drive from Springville) because Hildebrandt claimed that the devil was after her at her house in Ivins.

According to Kevin, things got weird after Hildebrandt moved into the Franke home: Hildebrant said that the devil was possessing her. The documentary has some bizarre home video footage of Hildebrandt appearing to be in a trance and speaking in a husky voice, as if she’s possessed. Ruby and Kevin separated in 2022, after Hildebrandt moved into the spouses’ home. After Kevin moved out of the house, Hildebrandt convinced Jodi and her four youngest children to live with Hildebrandt in Ivins.

Shari says that long before Hildebrandt weaseled her way into the Franke family’s lives, it was not unusual for Ruby to physically abuse the children, especially Chad. Shari gives this harrowing description in the documentary: “He got beat really bad one time. And I helped him clean blood off the walls.” In Shari’s 2025 memoir “The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom,” Shari says that she didn’t report any of the abuse that happened in the household because she feared that she wouldn’t be believed and thought at the time that this was “normal” punishment for children.

Chad and Shari, who describe each other as being each other’s best friend since childhood, eventually were disowned by Ruby and Kevin when Chad and Shari were in their late teens. Chad still clung to Hildebrandt’s counseling, because he says he was brainwashed until after Ruby was arrested. By contrast, Shari wasn’t fooled and knew that Hildebrandt and Ruby were menacing dangers to her younger siblings.

Shari says in the beginning of the documentary: “What Ruby has done has crossed the line from abusive to psychotic to full-on evil.” After Ruby and Kevin separated, Shari was a student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (which is about seven miles northwest of Springville) and heard from neighbors that her four siblings who were living with Ruby were often left home alone for hours, sometimes days, at the house in Springville.

Shari called authorities to do a welfare check on her younger siblings because her parents had forbidden her to be at the house, and she wasn’t on speaking terms with Ruby and Kevin. Neighbors also called the authorities to check on the kids. But unfortunately, every time the police showed up to the Franke family house to respond to these reports, no one answered the door, and the police couldn’t go inside without a warrant and without any witness accounts of abuse.

Many of the Springville residents interviewed in the documentary are married couples who knew the Franke family and describe Springville as an idyllic place to live: Jared Condie and Sydney Condie; Grant Collard and Kristin Collard; Matthew McClean and Lisa McClean; and Ruel Haymond and Tresa Haymond. Lisa tearfully says although she never personally saw the Franke kids being abuse, she regrets not telling the police a lie by claiming to be a witness to abuse, in order for the police to go into the Franke house in Springville and rescue the Franke kids who were being neglected.

Other people interviewed in the documentary are Sgt. Nick Tobler and Det. Jessica Bate, both of the Santa Clara-Ivins Police Department in Utah. They were two of the law enforcement officials who were at the crime scene when police searched Hildebrandt’s compound after the 12-year-old Franke son fled to get help. Tobler was the one who found Jody and Kevin’s youngest child starving and terrified in the house. Tobler and Bate also were part of the investigation, including interviewing Jodi and Hildebrandt after both women were arrested.

In the aftermath of this terrible abuse, Shari says that she has no interest in ever seeing or talking to Ruby again. Chad doesn’t say whether or not he will cut off contact with Ruby for the rest of his life. However, Chad does firmly say that Ruby should be not be let out of prison until all of his siblings are at least 18 years old.

Kevin is the one person in the documentary who seems to be the most willing to forgive Ruby. He willingly admits that he still loves her. And he says that many of his decisions and mistakes were based on putting his marriage above the needs of his children. Kevin seems remorseful but not apologetic. If he made any apologies to his children, those apologies are not in the documentary.

“Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” has the benefit of interviews with three members of the Franke family who knew Ruby best. However, the documentary doesn’t answer some questions, such as: “Where were the children’s grandparents or other family members?” “Did any of the neighbors ask the kids if the kids needed help?” And “If this family was so religious, how come their church did not get involved?”

The documentary also has voids when it comes to information about Hildebrant’s personal background. The only Hildebrant associate who’s interviewed in the documentary is Brannon Patrick, who’s described as a local therapist who trained with Hildebrandt for more than a year. Patrick says that he became disillusioned with Hildebrandt (who had her license suspended at least once for revealing confidential patient information) after he saw that she was more interested in fame and money than in helping people.

Jessi Hildebrandt, a nonbinary adult whose father is Jodi Hildebrandt’s brother, has given interviews in other documentaries and news reports saying that Jodi physically and mentally abused Jessi when Jessi was a teenager and young adult. The documentary should have had more insight into Jodi Hildebrandt’s past to explain how she ended up being such a terribly abusive person. There is also no information about what her children think about her.

As it stands, “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” still does a very good job of showing what happened in this notorious crime case. The documentary is not a condemnation of people who choose to document their lives (at least what they want to show on camera) for the whole world to see. Instead, the documentary can serve as an urgent warning to not believe everything on the Internet and to pay more attention to families who might need help in the real world.

Hulu premiered “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” on February 27, 2025.