Covenant School killer Audrey Hale dedicated two pages of her 2021 journal, which was recently released by the FBI, detailing “guns used in movies,” with a particular focus on firearms depicted in two films within the “Bourne” franchise.
Hale, who identified as a transgender man when she killed six at the Christian elementary school she once attended on March 27, 2023, claimed to list the weapons used in “The Bourne Identity,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” “Fargo,” “The Dead Zone,” and “Stand By Me,” in a two-page journal entry written pages apart from wish-lists of guns and accessories for her secret arsenal and transaction records that show how she used federal Pell Grant money to cover the transactions.
The killer listed six weapons she thought were used in “Fargo,” one in “Stand By Me,” and three in “The Dead Zone,” but seemed to spend more time examining the two films from the “Bourne” franchise. Hale listed 17 weapons purportedly seen in “The Bourne Identity,” and another 18 from “The Bourne Supremacy.”
None of the weapons listed by Hale, or the civilian-model counterparts to the automatic weapons she included, were purchased by the killer prior to her attack.
Though the journal entry is undated, the killer marked the following page August 21, 2021, and wrote about her effort to sell the firearms that were previously discovered by her parents. They previously confronted Hale over her weapons and removed them from the family home after discovering she purchased literature about the Columbine school shooting, though the parents eventually returned the firearms on the condition they would be sold.
In their interview with Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD), which was obtained by The Tennessee Star in 2024, the parents told detectives their daughter purchased the firearms using federal student grant money that was returned to her by the Nossi College of Art and Design in Nashville.
“Because she was 25, and because she’s still a matriculated student, she had to fill out financial aid forms, and when she became 25, she couldn’t use our income,” said Hale’s mother. “So then she had no income and so she got this grant money.”
When the detectives stated their curiosity over how Hale was able to afford the weapons, the killer’s mother confirmed, “It was the grant money.”
Hale also explicitly referenced her use of federal financial aid in the newly released writings, which included apparent references to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and tracked the checks she received from Nossi amid her purchases of firearms, ammunition, and accessories.
These writings emerge after the FBI pledged to publish redacted versions of the killer’s journals in order to settle Biden-era litigation, including the lawsuit filed by Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns and operates The Tennessee Star, as well as Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy, that sought to compel their release.
Prior to that decision, The Star legally obtained the killer’s final journal prior to that decision, and published her unredacted writings in September 2024.
The Star was nominated for the Dao Prize in Best Local Journalism for its coverage of the Covenant case.
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Tom Pappert is a 2025 recipient of the Dao Prize and the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star. He also reports for the Star News Network. Follow Tom on X. Email tips to [email protected].
