The Tennessee Star has released more of the Trans Shooter Audrey Hale's manifesto that she wrote before going on a shooting spree at Tennessee school when she killed six people.
On Tuesday, The Tennessee Star and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy released 90 pages of writings left by Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale. The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal, which was handwritten by Hale between January and March of 2023, can be downloaded here.
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, who was 28-years-old when she died, was born a biological female, but identified as a transgender male at the time of her attack. She often signed journal entries using the name Aiden.
“In the manifesto, there’s several different writings about other locations, there were locations, [it] talks about the school, there was a map of the school, a drawing of how, potentially, she would enter and the assaults that would take place. It’s quite a bit of writing to it, I have not read the whole entire manifesto. Our team and the FBI have been working on this,” Drake stated.
While The Star has not obtained this spiral notebook, which is said to contain writings of her operational plan of attack, a portion was leaked and subsequently published by conservative commentator and comedian Steven Crowder last year.
MNPD officers, accompanied by agents from the FBI and the ATF, seized 20 additional journals written by Hale between 2007 and 2022 at the Nashville residence she shared with her parents during a legally authorized search on the afternoon of March 27, 2023, Those journals are said to contain about 1,000 pages. In addition, numerous videos, a suicide note, and duplicate thumb drives containing information she may have wanted police to find were seized that afternoon.
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.
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