Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star, and The Star’s lead reporter Tom Pappert discussed a potential probate court action to obtain the purported will of Covenant School shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale, which the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) has identified as a will but has continued to withhold.
During Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Leahy explained how The Star has sought records related to Hale under the Tennessee Public Records Act for approximately three and a half years.
After losing in trial court in 2024, The Star prevailed in the Tennessee Court of Appeals earlier this year, and the Tennessee Supreme Court on August 17 declined to hear Metro Nashville’s appeal, leaving the appellate ruling intact.
More than a month later, however, Leahy said the Davidson County Chancery Court has still not acted to release the records.
The purported will is significant to a separate dispute over ownership of Hale’s writings. Hale’s parents, Ronald and Norma Hale, notified the court on June 13, 2023, that they had assigned rights to Hale’s writings to the Covenant Children’s Trust. The probate estate was not opened until June 15, 2023.
“The vital fact about this is that it happened not until two days before the probate case was even opened. So in other words, they could not have known who owned this writing because the estate was still unsettled,” Pappert explained.
Leahy stressed how the assignment occurred June 13, while the estate was opened June 15.
“So any of these documents are not the ownership of the parents; they’re the ownership of the estate, which is administered by the court,” Leahy said.
Leahy said the probate case remains open and that petitioner Clata Renee Brewer previously asked the probate court to obtain the will from chancery court but was told she lacked standing. He said Hale’s parents’ attorney previously attributed the continued status of the probate case to pending litigation, which Leahy said has now concluded.
MNPD’s 2025 final investigative report described Hale as leaving a “will” containing instructions concerning the distribution of her “possessions, thumb drives, writings, and artwork.” That description appeared to conflict with a June 2023 probate filing by Hale’s parents’ attorney stating that Hale died intestate, meaning without a will.
Pappert said the probate judge could potentially seek the document from Chancellor I’Ashea L. Myles.
“If a motion were to be brought before the probate court and the judge, Andrea Hendrick, if she were to be informed of all of this, that a document that Audrey Hale called a will, a document that Metro Nashville Police called a will, a document that was reportedly called a will in the chancery court, if she were made aware of this information, it seems as though she could ask or subpoena the will from Chancellor I’Ashea Myles, who is, of course, the one overseeing the estate case at the chancery court,” Pappert said.
He added that obtaining the document could clarify whether Hale intended to release her writings and whether ownership of those writings could legally have been transferred from the estate to her parents and then to the Covenant Children’s Trust.
Leahy said he and Star News Digital Media Inc. have been threatened with copyright litigation by the Covenant Children’s Trust, which purports to own Hale’s writings.
“The copyright currently exists in the estate of Audrey Elizabeth Hale. It never existed in the parents’ hands, the parents of the killer. It never was transferred to the Children’s Covenant Trust, and yet they’re threatening to sue me for copyright infringement,” Leahy said.
Leahy said the purported will should be reviewed to determine whether it qualifies as a testamentary document and potentially as a holographic will.
“I think it would be appropriate for the probate court to look at this purported will, determine if it’s truly testamentary if it meets the standard for a holographic will, which I think it might, because all you have to do in Tennessee, is it in the handwriting of the decedent? I think it is,” Leahy said.
Pappert noted that The Star has obtained more than 1,000 pages of Hale’s handwritten writings and that Hale dated almost every page of her journals.
The Star previously obtained and published Hale’s final journal in September 2024 and obtained a suicide note containing the words, “PLEASE READ MY WILL.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
