New details have emerged about the bizarre writings of Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the transgender killer who carried out the deadly mass shooting at a Christian school in Tennessee last spring.
Hale was a 28-year-old former student of The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, She identified as a man.
As NBC reported at the time, Hale had no criminal record prior to the shocking attack on March 27, 2023, where she fatally shot three 9-year-old students and three staff members before being killed by police.
The attack appeared meticulously planned, as Hale left behind writings that mapped out the school in detail.
Photos released by the Metro Nashville Police show the three guns used by Hale in the attack — two rifles and one handgun.
One of the rifles had the word phrase “Hellfire” written on it in red and black and was adorned with several strange symbols.
The Tennessee Star, a conservative online news outlet, has obtained dozens of pages from Hale’s personal journal, revealing her desperate desire for a “boy body,” hatred of God, and “s***head politicians.”
The journal — which authorities obtained from Hale’s vehicle, according to the Star — provides disturbing insights into Hale’s mind in the months leading up to the horrific attack that claimed six lives. While the writings do not provide a clear motive, they show her profound anguish over her perceived gender identity.
Hale’s journal conveys her distress at having a female body, at one point exclaiming, “I should not be in this body!” She wrote that being treated as a woman made her “not want to exist” and expressed fatigue at being “identified by a gender I am not,” the Star reported.
Should these writings have been released earlier?
In addition to chronicling her gender dysphoria, Hale also appeared to connect her struggles with religion. On one page, she wrote, “Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save.” In a later entry, in blatantly sick blasphemy, she used an anti-gay slur to describe Jesus — “if God won’t give me a boy body in heaven.”
Another shocking three-page journal entry reported by the Star, written by Hale just over two weeks before the attack, was titled “My Imaginary Penis.”
In the sexually explicit passages, Hale expressed an obsessive longing to have male genitalia.
Trans school shooter Audrey Hale who killed 6 — including 3 kids — wrote about ‘imaginary penis’ in screed https://t.co/uB6fsfSj5T pic.twitter.com/oZkfQCiLjR
— New York Post (@nypost) June 7, 2024
“My penis exists in my head. I swear to g– I’m a male,” Hale wrote.
Hale voiced resentment towards her parents, lamenting, “I hate parental views; how my mom sees me as a daughter – and she’d not bear to want to lose that daughter because a son would be the death of Audrey.”
In shockingly explicit detail, Hale also described fantasizing about experiencing sex as a man by simulating graphic acts using stuffed animals and a “stuffed boy doll” she referred to as “Tony.” She wrote, “I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony.”
The Star also reported another entry, dated just over a month before the tragedy, contains a rant asserting that in the United States,, “it makes one a criminal to have a gun or be transgender or non-binary.”
“G– I hate those s***head politicians,” Hale wrote.
In a chilling concluding line referencing her female gender, Hale wrote: “So now [because] of you, I wish death on myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender.”
Another harrowing entry from Feb. 18, 2023, suggests Hale may have originally planned to attack the school days on February 17, writing, “Covenant was closed yesterday. I guess it was [because] of the weather.”
The Star published these articles amid legal battles by the outlet and its parent company against the FBI and Metro Nashville Police Department to force the release all of Hale’s materials, including a “manifesto” she wrote before the attack.
On Wednesday, the Star published an FBI memo urging against releasing these “legacy tokens” due to concerns over conspiracy theories.
Hale’s writings offer a chilling window into the grave internal turmoil that preceded her unspeakable act of evil.
While some will attempt to interpret these writings as a justification for affirming the transgender agenda, it is clearly a cry for help from a tormented woman.
If there was ever a reason to believe in demons, Hale presents it.
Hale was 28 years old, an adult with the freedom to change her body into whatever she wanted if she so wished.
But Hale didn’t go through with a gender transition.
She had bought into the lie that women can be men and vice versa — a theory debunked by the Word of God, which tells us that God made man and woman. And, although she worried about her mother’s unhappiness, if she were to transition, surely her mother would be far less brokenhearted about that choice than the one she eventually made.
So why didn’t she do it?
Perhaps it’s because somewhere in her mind, Hale knew that changing her physical appearance would not make her a man.
Her rants questioning God about providing her a “boy body” in heaven point to an internal crisis that physical “transition” could not resolve.
She seemed to understand at some level that altering her body would still leave her feeling like a pretend version rather than addressing the root issues.
Hale’s case proves that transition as a solution neglects the emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions that must be tended to with prayer, counseling, community support, and compassionate guidance.
With empathy and Biblical teachings on the spiritual component of our humanity, churches need to be front and center in addressing questions around self-perception that gender dysphoric individuals so often grapple with.
Hale’s horrific outcome serves as a wake-up call that simply altering physical characteristics is not enough when the turmoil lives in the soul.
Perhaps if Hale had received the Christian understanding and guidance she needed, the nightmare at The Covenant School could have been averted.
