‘Religion Won’t Save’: More of Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released

The mass murderer who killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville left instructions for the media to refer to her by her transgender name “Aiden,” believed deeply in extreme gender ideology and critical theory, and believed death constituted part of the “deconstruction” of an old society that would be followed by a “reconstruction” ushering in “LGBTQ rights.” Hale idolized the Columbine high school shooters and hated “conservative religion.” On one page, she appears to have drawn an inverted cross and the number 666.

Nearly 18 months after the March 27, 2023, school shooting claimed the lives of three nine-year-old students and three staffers, the media have released more of killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale’s writings describing the reasons behind the deadly rampage. The Biden-Harris administration’s FBI encouraged the Metro Nashville police chief to bottle up Hale’s “confusing” writings for fear they would stoke “conspiracy theories.” Authorities then suppressed the writings over an alleged “ongoing investigation,” and a court ruled this July that the writings could not be released due to copyright infringement.

But on Tuesday morning, The Tennessee Star published a PDF of the nearly 90-page journal Hale kept during 2023, including the days leading up to this shooting. “On July 31, 2024 we appealed the trial court’s ruling to the Tennessee Court of Appeals. We expect to win our appeal,” explained Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO of Star News Digital Media Inc. and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star. “[W]e have had the First Amendment right to publish these writings since early June when we first received them.”

The Tennessee Star had published dozens of stories detailing the journal’s contents. But the full journal — released 526 days after the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, a Christian school operated by a local Presbyterian church — contains additional information and new details about the killer’s beliefs and motivations.

The journal, which the Star refers to as “The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal,” is a Mead Five Star notebook with the name “Aiden” written on the red cover. In the upper-lefthand corner, Hale emblazoned a symbol which adorns many pages that speak of the impending mass shooting: an octagon with a black cross in the center.

The journal’s contents reveal the depth of her commitment to extreme transgender ideology and her mystical belief that, by dying, she would be reborn into a male body that could carry out sexual relations with “brown girls” in the afterlife. She seems to indicate death is part of nature’s process of inverting negative political forces into progressive political change toward “civil rights.”

“Why does my brain not work right? ‘Cause I was born wrong!!!” the journal opens. “Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save.”

“Everything hurts,” she writes repeatedly.

Much of the journal notes Hale’s deep depression at her inability to keep a job or succeed in a creative field. The pervasive tone of suicidal depression clings to every page. “My soul worth nothing but my dead body will be worth more,” she writes. “I hurt bad enough & long enough that I need to die,” she continues. “I hurt too bad. Too many tears. I want to die.”

One page recounts her list of failures, accomplishing only one of four tasks she desired. Hale appears to have considered herself a tortured genius. “My mind is creative, brilliant, but a living hell at the same time,” she writes. “Having a brain like mind has its godliness but also prone to make poor a** decisions.”

“I am shining outside, but my heart is black,” writes Hale.

Hale believed that her death in a mass murder-suicide would open the door to the male sexual experiences she longed to enjoy on Earth — and implied it somehow embodied part of a supernatural change toward “LGBTQ rights.”

After her impending violent death, she writes, “The caccoon [sic] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me. If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f*****.” 

Hale appeared to draw an inverted cross and 666 next to that line.

Hale also despaired over politics, in an entry praising everything from transgender ideology to the Second Amendment. A journal entry on February 20, 2023, on politics declares, that “now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or, be transgender, or non-binary. … Soon this g******** country will turn out no fun like England or Europe. No guns, no gender rights, no freedom of speech or pursuing of radical ideas, no mischeif [sic]. … Disabled have rights. Civil races have rights. LGBTQ have rights. Gun owners have rights. … So now because of all of you, I wish death on myself ‘cause of the pure hatred of my female gender. With no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”

Her writings clearly indicate that she held no belief in human exceptionalism. It is “human nature to kill. Humans kill humans and themselves. Animals kill animals. Bugs kill bugs.”

In a previously unreleased passage seemingly inspired by critical race theory, she continues her view that death is a redeeming aspect of nature. The “deconstruction” of “nature” will undo “racism, gay killings, poverty, asylums.” The “reconstruction” will “change” those things into “civil rights, LGBTQ rights, food banks, [American] Disabilities Act.” Sex will transform into “safe sex,” AIDS into “medical care,” gun violence into “gun laws,” and “death” into “life.”

At one point, Hale refers to herself as a “white nothingness” and draws a schematic drawing of her mind. Her brain produced thoughts of “white privilege [sic], an embarrassment to self.”

The 28-year-old Hale obsessed over “brown girls” and repeatedly writes, “No brown girls, no love.”

“I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind,” she writes. In a previously unreleased drawing, Hale sketches a diagram of anal sex with “a beautiful young brown girl with a big a**” but realizes it will never happen. “Too bad I am a sad boy born w/a puny vagina.” She came to realize she would never have a relationship with most women, who are attracted to men, not women who identify as men. It is a “major blow to girls: I am a boy that has no penis,” she writes.

“I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: boy’s body / male gender,” she writes. “If there is no love, there is no life. And no life is feeling dead. It’s only natural, wanting to die.”

The writings reveal Hale’s deep commitment to transgender ideology, so much that her birth gender had the power to ruin her day. “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead,” she writes. “I hate society [because] society ignores to see me. I’m a queer; I’m meant to die.”

On February 21, she felt happy a worker at a comic book store called her “bud” and “bro,” but it made her feel “embarrassed of my female body. I SHOULD NOT BE IN THIS BODY!!!”

“My body doesn’t make me a female,” she asserts. “When I’m called a lady and ma’am — d*** it, it makes me not want to exist. The [male] body in me exists only to me. I’m just d*** tired of being called & identified by a gender I am not AT ALL. … disgusted at being in a female body. Makes me think about dying.”

On March 8, she writes, “I need a transdoctor … This female role makes me want to not exist … My therapist now is the best I could get 4 autism.”

She also bashed her parents for trying to bring positive, Christian influences into her life. In a passage dedicated to a friend, Hale complains:

“Aren’t parents manipulative? It’s total ignorance when parents step in and try to change their child’s environment. Make them go to youth group & force Christian friends into thier [sic] life because the old ones were a ‘bad’ influence. … Parents actually believe religion can change nature. That could explain why I don’t practice religion anymore. Let kids think for themselves … Kids are not robots. We are the future. That’s how it’s ment [sic] to be.”

She blasted her parents, especially her mother, who do not entirely and immediately affirm their child’s chosen gender identity, blaming it on “thier [sic] preference of conservative religion — gay s***.” Parents should be “willing to listen to their children, not the other way around.” Speaking of puberty blockers, “I’d kill to have those resources.”

A March 11 entry titled “My Imaginary Penis” carries Hale’s transgender ideology to its furthest extent. “My penis exists in my head. I swear to god I’m a male,” she writes, illustrating her journal with a crude image and describing her fantasy of committing sodomy on another woman. During her “tortured” childhood, she “tried to be feminine. But that didn’t last long after high school ended and no longer had to fear being called a dyke or a f*****. It was only until my early 20s I finally found the answer — that changing one’s gender is possible.”

She began “thinking of porn and doing surgery on my boy stuffed animals,” who identify as male but had no male anatomy. “I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony.” Eventually, she realized this consumed too many of her waking hours. “I am such a pervert,” she writes. “I waste too much time in my fantasies.”

Much of the notebook is dedicated to “P.A.P.,” an apparent reference to Paige Patton, who played basketball with Audrey in eighth grade and stayed in touch periodically. Other pages are dedicated to a deceased fellow teammate. Patton, now a Nashville radio host who goes by the name Averianna, revealed that Hale texted her a message the morning of the shooting stating, “I'm planning to die today.” Patton asked Hale not to harm herself and called the suicide prevention hotline, which suggested she inform the police — who did not see the message until that afternoon.

In an entry dated last February 20, she wrote, “It’s infamous to die young! Dying young is my destiny.” On March 2, she wrote that her friend “will live a legend and I will die a shooter — hopefully to become infamous. No one will forget neither [sic] of us. She will be the blessing, and I will be the horror to inflict pain.”

“If I ever cry all day, it’s ‘cause I need your love,” says one page. “All I see is you. … I yearn for you,” she writes. In an entry to her departed friend she writes, “maybe, just maybe you’ll give a kiss to me in heaven. God knows I can’t get it down here. … I’d die to know, Literally.”

“Audrey is not my name but when you say it I am just the little 1 I was back then. I can be a kid again … even if I can’t really be with you,” she writes. “God is love, so are you.”

“There is a better place than being in these bodies, forced to live in [them],” she continues. “You like showing yours. I’m in the wrong body … so … I can’t wait to get there.”

Yet Hale, who began psychological counseling at age six and remained in counseling until her death, felt her neurodivergence held her back. “Love cannot be real if my autism is,” she writes. “Love will find me once my body loses me. (I will be whole again.)”

“I’m told I’m bi-polar by some prideful b****. No one gets me. Everyone misunderstands autism,” she complains at another time.

“I think God will enter me in heaven. If do get there, I’ll be waiting there for you,” she writes to Patton. “I’ve always been different. … My thoughts are a neverending abyss. A DARK ONE.” In another entry, Hale referred to herself as a “cursed soul.”

“Idc [I don’t care] if people die as I am the shooter because I am going 2 die too,” she vows. “My only true motivation = mass suicide [leading to] death.”

Hale infamously hated her father and intended to return home to murder him. In an entry titled “Dad problems,” she writes: “I hate his old cranky-man existance [sic]. All cranky good-for-nothing mentally ill men SHOULD DIE. They’re useless pieces of s***. … I DON’T CARE IF YOU DIE. I WANT TO KILL YOU.” Later, she adds, “A whole day w/o a father will be a better day …”

“I’m sorry innocent lives will be taken,” she writes on March 13, two weeks before the mass murder. She adds she has honed “a plan to near perfection.”

The octagon shape — which is sometimes black with a white cross — appears to represent “dark abyss, my only existence [sic].” She continues, “I think about death every day & fascinated/curious with the idea of dying too much. I know it’s unhealthy, but I just don’t care if it is anymore. … It’s too late now. I’m ready to die.”

Hale makes a number of references to the Columbine high school shooting. “I want my massacre to end in a way that Eric & Dylan would be proud of,” she writes. She also notes the date of the shooting in the notebook.

At one point near the shooting, she refers to herself as “just A.E. (not Audrey Elizabeth). I don’t like that name, never have, never will.”

She left explicit instructions for the news media to refer to her by her transgender name, Aiden, “For media: ‘A.’ A.E. (legal initials). Aiden (illegal name haha). A.E. Hale. Aiden Hale,” she writes. The legacy media strangely insisted on referring to the trans-identified mass child murderer by her birth name and reported that her gender identity was fuzzy.

As time went on, Hale’s resolve strengthened. On the morning of the shooting, March 27, she writes, “Forgive me God. This act will be inglorious.”

On “Death Day,” Hale confesses, “Don’t know how I was able to get this far, but here I am.” She adds, “There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021.”

“Can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m ready … I hope my victims aren’t.”

“My only fear is if anything goes wrong. I’ll do my best to prevent anything of the sort. (God let my wrath take over my anxiety),” The killer wrote. “It might be 10 minutes. It might be 3-7. It’s gonna go quick. I hope I have a high death count.”

The journal goes on, “Ready to die haha Aiden.”

These writings are different from a spiral-bound notebook police found in Hale’s vehicle at the scene of the crime. That other writing has yet to be released in its entirety. Conservative activist Steven Crowder obtained and released two pages of the spiral-bound notebook, including a “Death Day” itinerary of Hale’s shooting plans and poem dated February 3, 2023, titled “Kill those kids!!!” which reads in its entirety:

“Kill those kids!!!

Those crackers [an anti-white slur],

Going to private fancy schools

With those fancy khakis & sports backpacks,

With their daddies’ mustangs & convertibles.

F*** you little sh***

I wish to shoot you weak a** d**** with your mop yellow hair,

Wanna kill all you little crackers!!!

Bunch of little f******

W/your white privileges.

F*** you f******.”

It is not clear how many more pages of the spiral-bound notebook remain unreleased. You can download the full red Mead notebook from The Tennessee Star here.