The Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) said it has “nothing additional to add” regarding its conclusions regarding the March 27, 2023 attack on the Covenant School, where Audrey Elizabeth Hale, then identifying as a transgender man, killed three 9-year-old students and three staff members at the Christian elementary school she once attended.
The department’s Friday statement to The Tennessee Star came despite the release of new journal entries, written by the killer as late as June 2019, in which she claimed to hear the voice of an “imaginary boy,” which demanded to “express himself,” including through a romantic interest in women, for more than a decade.
She also wrote extensively about demonic possession, variously claiming she and her father were subject to the “Devil’s demons” in entries written throughout 2018 and early 2019.
As MNPD previously described Hale as “certainly sane” in its April report on the Covenant case, as she “fully understood her attack was not only criminal but morally reprehensible,” The Star asked the department on Friday whether it stood by its analysis, and if so, whether it could explain the methodology used to ascertain the killer’s state of mind.
“We refer you to the case findings released earlier this year and have nothing additional to add,” a spokesman for the department told The Star.
MNPD did not comment on whether the department considered Hale’s claims to have heard the voice of an “imaginary boy,” which she divulged in her journal in 2018, and later connected to the “LGBTQ spectrum.”
“It’s been frustrating lately with my imaginary boy now fully aware of his [presence] by me,” wrote Hale in an undated diary entry dated to 2018. “I remember how much he used to nudge me, convince me, hammer me into the nailing reality that I am him in the past, [and] it seemed the older I got, his image began to develop progressively.”
She then credited the media’s support for the LGBT movement for helping her to understand this voice.
“The LGBT movement has grown move involved in society over the pats few years,” wrote Hale. “The media has expanded this movement from movies, to TV, to even music videos and music.”
Both editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy and Star News Digital Media, Inc. (SNDM) sued MNPD in May 2023 to compel the full release of the killer’s writings. The lawsuit was defeated in chancery court, has been appealed, and Leahy expressed confidence a higher court would reverse the decision.
The Star released the killer’s unredacted 2023 journal last September after legally obtaining it from a source familiar with the investigation.
The new journal entries by Hale were release by the FBI to The Star following two years of additional litigation against that agency by Leahy and SNDM, who settled their lawsuit in June, when the FBI pledged to release redacted versions of more of the killer’s writings.
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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].
Image “Audrey Elizabeth Hale” by Nossi School of Fine Art and “MNPD on Scene” is by MNPD.
