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.
“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!!!”
“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.
“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.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Leahy said, “We have had a First Amendment right to publish these documents from the moment we legally obtained them in June 2024.”
We legally obtained this 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. 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, and in a court filing submitted on June 14, 2024 by MNPD Lieutenant Alfredo Alevado. . .
On April 24, 2023, in compliance with the Tennessee Public Records Act, we formally requested of MNPD, a department within the Metro Nashville Davidson County Government, that they release all of the writings of Audrey Elizabeth Hale they had obtained as part of their investigation into the March 27, 2023 murders. Metro Nashville Government denied that request one day later on April 25, 2023, and in May 2023 we filed suit against Metro Nashville Government in Davidson County, Tennessee Chancery Court to obtain those writings, as provided for by the Tennessee Public Records Act. The case was assigned to Judge I’Ashea Myles. In this matter we are well represented by America First Legal and their outstanding local counsel, Nick Barry.
In May 2023, MNPD provided Judge Myles with all of Hale’s writings obtained through their investigation for her in-camera review. On July 4, 2024, Judge Myles released her decision in the case, which was to deny our request, on two grounds: (1) MNPD’s assertion that they were conducting an ongoing investigation into the murders was a statutory exception to the Tennessee Public Records Act which would have allowed our request and (2) The assertion of ownership of Hales’ writings and a subsequent copyright claim stemming from that purported ownership by an intervening group created a non-statutory exception to the Tennessee Public Records Act.
On July 31, 2024 we appealed the trial court’s ruling to the Tennessee Court of Appeals. We expect to win our appeal.
Star News Digital Media, Inc. (SNDM), which owns and operates The Star, and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy are plaintiffs in the Tennessee lawsuit, which sought to compel MNPD to release Hale’s writings, and the federal lawsuit, which sought the same from the FBI.
On June 10, prior to announcing her ruling, Judge Myles ordered Leahy to appear in court on June 17 and explain why articles about the contents of Hale’s journal, which The Star published between June 5 and June 10, should not subject him to contempt of court charges. At that June 17 hearing, Myles ultimately reversed course, holding a “landscaping” hearing about the status of the case and ignoring the original purpose of the hearing.
In his statement, Leahy explained how these actions had a chilling effect on his First Amendment rights:
On June 10, 2024, five days after we began publishing articles based on The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal, Judge Myles issued a Show Cause Hearing Order to me, requiring me to show up in her courtroom on June 17, 2024 and explain to her why I should not be held in contempt of court for violating a court order. This was a surprising development, given that I have never violated any court order in this case and that the judge never produced the court order upon which the Show Cause Hearing Order was based.
When I appeared in court on June 17, 2024, Judge Myles changed the purpose of the hearing – claiming it was for her to determine “the landscape” of the case – and again refused to identify to my counsel the court order she thought I might be violating. Judge Myles ended that hearing by stating that she would take under consideration both a) her final ruling and b) whether or not she would appoint a “special prosecutor” to investigate and prosecute me for contempt of court – even though there is absolutely no evidence before the court that I have done anything that could be considered contempt of court. This statement, combined with the June 10 Show Cause Hearing Order and the June 17 Show Cause Hearing, have combined to create a chilling effect on my First Amendment rights.
While Judge Myles issued her final ruling on the case itself on July 4, 2024, she has provided no information as to whether she intends to appoint a “special prosecutor” to investigate me. This “Sword of Damocles” has been held over my head by Judge Myles since June 17, 2024, and we have held off on publishing The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal, in part, until our legal defense financial resources have reached a sufficient level such that I can hire counsel to represent me in the event Judge Myles seeks to resurrect this false claim against me. Our legal defense financial resources have just recently reached that level of sufficiency. I am pleased to announce that we are once again ably represented by Daniel Horwitz on the limited issue in which he represented us at the June 17 Show Cause Hearing.
The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal, left by Hale in her vehicle and seized by MNPD on March 27, 2023, and legally obtained by The Star in June 2024, provided several revelations about the killer and how she spent the months before the attack on the Covenant School.
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 about 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 five 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.
Since it first obtained Hale’s journal and a portion of police documents related to the Covenant case, The Star has published more than 100 articles that analyze the killer’s own words or provide new details about the police investigation, including the existence of an FBI memo which “strongly” advised MNPD against releasing “legacy tokens” from killers like Hale. The term would appear to include her writings.
While the FBI declined to confirm it sent the memo, the federal agency told The Star it does send such materials to local law enforcement.
In his statement, Leahy noted that, despite having the First Amendment right to publish Hale’s journal since The Star legally obtained it in June 2024, practical, financial, and legal considerations have accounted for the three-month delay between the time the journal was legally obtained and its publication:
Until just recently, the lack of legal representation to address a second potential legal issue also prohibited our publication of The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal. Though they have not registered their copyright claim with the federal government, the intervening group that purports to own Hale’s writings also purports to hold the copyright to those writings. We consider the ownership claim to be dubious at best and the copyright claim to be without merit. We also believe that the fair use doctrine would prohibit the successful litigation of any copyright infringement claim that might be brought against us for publishing this journal. Nonetheless, we chose not to publish the journal until we had secured proper legal representation in the event a frivolous copyright infringement claim were to be brought against us in federal court. I am pleased to announce today that, in the event a copyright infringement claim is brought against us, we are now represented by the Dhillon Group, the premiere law firm in the country representing conservative groups and organizations.
Leahy is expected to appear in a number of media outlets this week to provide further insights to the public on the Covenant Killer investigation.
The Tennessee Star legally obtained the MNPD crime scene photos contained in this article in June 2024 from a source familiar with the MNPD investigation.
