A newspaper in Tennessee on Tuesday published 90 pages of writings it said were left by The Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who murdered three children and three staffers in March 2023 before being shot dead by police.
The Tennessee Star said it believes that Tuesday’s release, which it calls “The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal,” was written by Hale between January and March 2023. Hale was 28 years old when she entered The Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, 2023, and shot dead three 9-year-old students in addition to the three adults.
Hale was female but identified as male, often signing her journal entries as "Aiden," according to the Star.
“We legally obtained this handwritten journal – which we refer to as ‘The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal’ to distinguish it from the many journals written by Hale prior to 2023 – in early June of 2024 from a source familiar with the MNPD investigation,” Star Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy wrote in a statement accompanying the published documents.
The Metro Nashville Police Department found 20 additional journals written by Hale between 2007 and 2022 at the Nashville house she shared with her parents, the Star reported.
“We believe it to be authentic. In addition to our belief, the journal was confirmed as authentic in court by a Metro Nashville Government lawyer in attendance at a June 2024 court hearing,” Leahy added. “We have had a First Amendment right to publish these unredacted documents from the moment we legally obtained them.”
The Star published roughly 50 articles since June 5 based on information from Hale’s journal without including “actual pages from that journal,” the paper wrote. The Star wrote that publishing the journal pages revealed new information.
One, Hale would draw an octagonal symbol when writing about her planned attack on The Covenant School. And two, her gender identity. The octagon was drawn on the cover of Hale’s notebook, too. It's unclear what the meaning was behind the octagon.
“Soon I will leave this world! You [and] your friends will be just fine. Does it even matter if I am alive?” Hale wrote in one passage, according to the Star, which included the octagonal symbol, and above it wrote, “No regrets by the gun!!!”
Hale wrote about her desire to transition to a male and a purported autism diagnosis while adding she was not bi-polar, according to the Star.
Hale wrote of considering several dates before landing on March 27 to attack the Covenant School, according to the Star. Further, while she did not explicitly write of a motive for the attack in the journal published Tuesday, according to the Star, she complained that the United States did not respect rights of disabled people, gun owners, and transgender people in an entry the month before.
“So now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or, be transgender, or non-binary,” Hale wrote on Feb. 20, 2023, 35 days before the attack, according to the Star. “So now [because] of you, I wish death on myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender,” Hale wrote, adding, “with no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship,” according to the Star.
In a separate 3-page manifesto released to conservative social media influencer Steven Crowder last November, Hale purportedly wrote, "Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little fa***ts w/ your white privileges."
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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