The Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) referred The Tennessee Star to the court of Tennessee Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea L. Myles when asked if the department provided specific documents to Judge Myles before she declared in her decision that not one page of the writings left by Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale will be released, citing the copyright allegedly held by the parents of Covenant School children.
The Star asked MNPD Public Affairs director Don Aaron whether investigators provided Judge Myles with the document titled “Vandy Psych.” The document contains notes written by an MNPD investigator who received at least 75 pages of documents from Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), where Hale was a 22-year mental health patient, after obtaining a search warrant in the wake of her March 27, 2023 attack that claimed the lives of six.
In the document, which was obtained by The Star from a source familiar with the investigation, the MNPD investigator wrote that Hale expressed both suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation, including thoughts of killing her father and committing a mass shooting at a school.
The Star has additionally learned from sources familiar with the investigation that MNPD sent an inventory list of documents to Judge Myles for in camera review, and one of the documents was listed as “will.” The Star asked Aaron whether MNPD sent Judge Myles the document labeled “will” for review.
In response to both inquiries, Aaron told The Star, “Since you are a party to the litigation before Chancellor Myles, I defer to your counsel to make such inquiries to the court.”
Both Star News Digital Media, Inc. (SNDM), which owns and operates The Star, and editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy were plaintiffs in the Tennessee lawsuit overseen by Judge Myles.
Judge Myles issued her ruling at 11:58 p.m. on July 4, and the next day Leahy immediately confirmed he “absolutely” intends to appeal the judge’s ruling, which he said is “clearly not in the public interest and is a subversion of the intent of the Tennessee Public Records Act.”
He stated, “The judge has erroneously accepted a dubious copyright claim made by intervenors who should not have been allowed to intervene in this case in the first place.”
While the killer’s parents claimed to transfer the copyright ownership of Hale’s writings to parents of minor students known as the Covenant Children’s Trust, while doing so, they asserted they “diligently searched for a Will and have not discovered a Will.”
This appears to contradict Hale’s own words in her suicide note, in which she wrote, “PLEASE READ MY WILL about what to do [with] my stuffed animals [and] possessions.”
Hale’s suicide note also resembles a will in that she instructs her parents, “If I don’t survive my massacre, I want my room to be left Exactly as it is left. I don’t want any of my possessions down in that dingy basement.”
The Star contacted Aaron a second time, noting that Judge Myles made her final ruling in the case, which is now over pending appeal.
Aaron told The Star, “Please consult with your counsel concerning any matter that you believe to have been filed under seal with the court.”
Both Leahy and SNDM remain plaintiffs in the ongoing federal lawsuit which seeks to compel the FBI to release of Hale’s full writings, including those sometimes called a manifesto.
Last month, The Star published a May 2023 memo sent by the FBI to MNPD Chief John Drake which “strongly” advised against releasing “legacy tokens” left by killers like Hale. An FBI definition seems to suggest both the journal of Hale’s writings obtained by The Star and those sought in the lawsuits are considered unfit for public consumption by the federal agency.
The FBI declined to confirm it sent the memo in a statement to The Star, but the agency acknowledged it sends such “products” to local law enforcement.
Since obtaining about 80 pages of Hale’s writings and a tranche of police documents, The Star has published more than 60 articles that include the killer’s own words and offer new details about the ongoing Covenant investigation.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “MNPD” by Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.
the judge is in no way following the law, she is following an agenda and doing her part in a coverup
It will be overturned. A copyright belongs to the author, when the author dies the copper at then goes to the Next of Kin, like any other piece of property.
But this case differs in that the copyright owner, the murderer that, the transvestite murderer, turned her documents over to the public. By leaving them for the police.
Like any other property you own, what normally happens is that ownership of your copyrights is transferred to the heirs of your estate. This will depend on local state law, but typically this will mean your spouse and/or children, or other family members if you are unmarried and do not have children.
To somehow say that the random victims, parents, are the owners of the copyright, well that’s foolish. Just a way to mask and subvert the public records law.