Ever since the shooting in March 2023 at Covenant Christian School in Tennessee, and the identity of the shooter was revealed, questions have swirled around her motives.

And the more the police declined to go into details about the writings that the shooter left behind, the more we assumed that it would not be favorable to transgender ideology or left-wing politics, and would expose the shooter as a very mentally ill and dangerous person. Her family attempted to circumvent any release of documents by giving the copyright to the victims’ families, while police kept claiming that none of the writings could be released due to the investigation and because they were so “dangerous.” As was repeatedly pointed out by media outlets, there is no active court case that could be compromised by the release of a manifesto, because the shooter is dead and no one else is being prosecuted for the murders she committed. A judge was reviewing what could be released, but it was obvious that law enforcement and the victims’ families would have been content to bury it all.

The Tennessee Star obtained access to the shooter’s last notebook, which was apparently used between January and March 2023 – right before the Covenant Christian School shooting. Today, while still involved in legal wrangling, the paper decided to publish 90 pages of the journal, which details the shooter’s mental state. Contrary to the FBI’s claims, it does not detail any of the plans that the shooter made to commit her crime, but does reveal her intent to commit the murders.

The journal was legally obtained by The Star from a source familiar with the investigation in June 2024. It was recovered from Hale’s vehicle by officers with the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD), along with a spiral notebook, after her March 27, 2023 attack on the Covenant School, where she murdered three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members before she was killed by MNPD officers.

Between June 5 and September 3, The Star published approximately 50 articles that are based on The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal but do not contain the actual pages from that journal. Tuesday’s publication of The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal provides further evidence supporting those 50 articles, but also reveals new information, including the octagonal symbol Hale drew when writing about her planned attack on the Covenant School or her gender identity.
Hale’s symbol appears throughout the journal, including in an undated entry apparently written in mid-March 2023, when the killer wrote about the attack she planned later that month.

“Soon I will leave this world! You [and] your friends will be just fine. Does it even matter if I am alive?” Hale later added the octagonal symbol, and above it wrote, “No regrets by the gun!!!”

Rather than an ideologically driven composition, the “manifesto” — comprised of The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal, the spiral notebook found in her car, and the 20 journals written between 2007 and 2022 seized from her residence — is better understood as a collection of writings in which Hale sporadically wrote her thoughts in the months and years preceding her devastating attack.

“Our reporting on the Covenant Killer investigation has served the public interest,” Michael Patrick Leahy, the Editor-in-Chief of The Star, said on Tuesday.

“We legally obtained writings by Audrey Elizabeth Hale, MNPD investigation documents, and MNPD crime scene photos from a source familiar with the MNPD investigation in June 2024. These documents and photos have helped us inform the public about the underlying reasons for this heinous attack, and have helped drive the public discussion of what should be done to prevent such acts of violence in the future. We have documented a massive failure of the mental health system as a root cause of Hale’s reprehensible actions,” Leahy added.

That last sentence is key. We know from previous reports that the shooter had under Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital’s care since she was SIX YEARS OLD, for 22 out of her 28 years of life. This was something that police discovered about her immediately. Looking through these pages of documents, this does not read or sound like someone who has received appropriate mental health care or treatment. The journal shows someone who was clearly in a destructive spiral, who was looking to solve her problems “by the gun.” And in her mind, her problems were insurmountable, because she could never become male.

In various entries that referenced her mental health, Hale confirmed her desire to transition genders, revealed a purported autism diagnosis, claimed she was not “bi-polar,” and wrote that she once called a phone number associated with a Suicide Prevention Helpline five times in one day.

Hale also referenced her therapist in a possible allusion to her status as a 22-year mental health patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), where police documents obtained by The Star reveal she was twice evaluated for commitment.

In other entries, Hale wrote extensively about her gender identity, including a three-page entry the killer titled, “My Imaginary Penis,” in which she wrote about expressing sexual fantasies with stuffed animals.

“I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony,” wrote Hale, adding that she became engrossed in the activities and lost track of time.

“God, I am such a pervert,” she wrote. “I waste too much time in my fantasies.”

Hale also wrote various entries about the attack she planned at the Covenant School, revealing she considered several dates before settling on March 27.

Though the journal offers scant evidence of a political ideology or motive for the attack, Hale wrote a political rant in an entry dated one month prior, when she complained the United States fails to respect the rights of disabled people, gun owners, and transgender people.

“So now [because] of you, I wish death on myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender.” Hale later wrote, “with no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”

Hale also confirmed, in various entries, that she had been considering attacking the Covenant School for some time.

In her final journal entry, which Hale appears to have written the morning of her attack, the killer wrote, “There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021.”

Hale wrote in another entry, “For 5 years I planned to die,” and other journals found in the killer’s home reportedly suggest she began contemplating an attack as a middle school student. Hale was 28 at the time of her death.

The shooter’s obsessions are clearly spelled out on every page. She wished to be male. She was unhealthily fixated on sex with “a brown girl,” who was reportedly based off a real person that the shooter had known. She had no moral qualms about attacking Covenant Christian School. She was violent, and expressed that she was going to solve her problems “by the gun.”

In opening up this journal, the Tennessee Star has indeed highlighted the crucially ignored point of the Covenant shooting. There is no way that the shooter’s family didn’t know she was unstable and violent – after all, she had been in therapy since childhood! We know that she was under the care of both a psychiatrist and a therapist before the shooting, and that contains an important distinction. A therapist will analyze behaviors and, depending on the type of therapy involved, create a treatment plan to modify those behaviors. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who can not just analyze behavior, but prescribe medication to assist in the behavior modification. Reportedly, the shooter had no drugs in her system – so was she prescribed a medication that she wasn’t taking, or did she not have any current prescriptions? We also know that the shooter considered herself a transgender male, and was acting out on those fantasies. What did the therapist and the psychiatrist know? Why was she in therapy for over two decades, only to finally commit a cold-blooded, pre-meditated mass shooting, with no red flags being raised by either medical professional tasked with analyzing her mental health?

Before the Covenant shooting in March 2023, Vanderbilt’s hospital system – and notably, its gender clinc – was revealed to have admitted in 2018 that transgender “care” was a “big money maker.” When did the shooter first begin to think that she was transgender? Did she struggle with gender dysphoria as a child, or was this something that developed later? She was in the same university hospital system that acknowledged they were creating lifetime patients for themselves, in order to make huge amounts of money. The shooter was in therapy for the majority of her life, and this was the end result? What on earth was going on at Vanderbilt, that this patient was allowed to destructively spiral out to the point of committing mass murder?

The final culpability for the crime, of course, rests with the shooter. But there are open questions that have yet to be answered. We don’t know what her family knew about her violent fantasies. And we don’t know what the mental health professionals, who were overseeing her care and treatment, knew. If the families of the victims wanted answers, there would be legal avenues for them to pursue that. We haven’t seen any indication that they want to pursue those answers.

Those of us who wanted to see the journals of the shooter – and suspected why they were being hidden – have been proven correct. The shooter did not support a politically correct narrative that the national media could exploit, so the murders were conveniently forgotten. Will a demand for accountability from Vanderbilt’s medical system now be swept under the rug, too? My concern is yes, that will happen, and my fear is that there are many more sick people like the shooter out there – a danger to themselves and others, yet cloaked in a politically correct mental illness that keeps therapists and psychiatrists from speaking out before someone is killed.

Featured image via mandarinMD on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license