Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, argued that the newly released journals of deceased 28-year-old Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale reveal a disturbing and progressive mental decline over nearly two decades.
Last week, the FBI released a new series of writings by Hale, the transgender shooter who claimed the lives of six at the Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023.
Pappert, who has reviewed Hale’s writings in the journals obtained so far by The Star, said the writings show a clear shift from relatively coherent and sane entries during Hale’s teenage years to increasingly incoherent and delusional thoughts by 2018 through 2023 when she carried out the attack.
He pointed out how Hale’s early writings, likely from high school, demonstrate clearer thinking and were written in more stable handwriting, while her later entries signaled a growing detachment from reality.
“The first journal in this new release – I believe was likely written at some point during her high school career, or immediately afterwards – is the most sane and coherent journal that Audrey Hale has written that has been published to date, and she was a little kid. She was probably 17 years old at the very oldest, and she sounds entirely more sane, entirely more reasonable, and even her handwriting, frankly, is better than it was just a few years later in 2018, and certainly better than it was in 2023,” Pappert explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“These journals, to me, paint the picture of a long mental slide into insanity that nobody caught,” Pappert added.
A central part of Hale’s psychological unraveling, Pappert highlighted, was the killer’s account of hearing the voice of an “imaginary boy” in her head beginning in fourth grade.
Pappert said Hale described the voice of the “imaginary boy” as one she initially tried to suppress, but eventually allowed to gain influence over her thoughts and identity, including convincing her that she was not a woman but a transgender man, adopting names like Aiden and Danny.
“Within these writings, Audrey Hale convinces herself that this imaginary boy, whose voice she claims to have heard for decades, is actually just trying to convince her that she’s a lesbian first, and then that she is indeed a transgender person named Aiden, although she does briefly flirt with the name Danny. She writes a school killer fantasy in which a boy named Danny – her – kills a bunch of people at her former middle school,” Pappert said.
Pappert stated Hale’s pattern of hearing internal voices and identity confusion aligns with serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or dissociative identity disorder.
“In 2018, she writes that she starts allowing this voice to express himself. Quite literally, this is a symptom of Dissociative Identity Disorder, Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective Disorder, and probably a handful of other mental health problems,” he said.
Pappert criticized how mental health professionals and institutions failed to intervene despite repeated warnings, citing three separate evaluations Hale underwent—two by mental health professionals and one at an eating disorder clinic—without any formal commitment or adequate follow-up.
He pointed out how in 2019, one doctor noted that Hale had made homicidal comments about her own father, yet the father was not notified of his daughter’s behavior. In addition, Pappert pointed to Hale reportedly fearing being institutionalized at Vanderbilt University Medical Center but avoiding commitment, allegedly by leaning on an autism diagnosis that the Metro Nashville Police Department has said she never formally received.
“From this journal, we know that Audrey Hale herself feared more than anything else being committed for a week at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where her purported autism diagnosis apparently helped her avoid that. But we now also know, thanks to the Metro Nashville Police Department, she was never formally diagnosed with autism, so it seems to me there was no good reason why she was not committed back in 2019,” he said.
Pappert also critiqued Metro Nashville Police, in which he accused the department of downplaying or ignoring the evidence of Hale’s mental instability – despite having access to the same journals since Hale committed the attack in 2023 – by sticking by its conclusion that Hale was completely “sane” when she carried out the shooting.
“We asked the Metro Nashville Police Department, considering [Hale’s writings] are now public, and we know that Audrey Hale claimed to hear a voice inside her head for basically 20 years before her death, ‘Does this change your analysis that Audrey Hale was most certainly a sane person at the time of her attack, who knew the difference between right and wrong and understood the moral disgusting act that she was perpetuating?’ Metro Nashville Police Department told us quite plainly that they had nothing additional to add and would refer us to their 48 page analysis released earlier this year in April, when of course, yes, they said Audrey Hale was a sane person and she most certainly knew the difference between right and wrong when she stormed into that school and killed six people,” Pappert said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
This news appears to be a case of law enforcement ignoring troubling signs of a sick, dangerous person because they feared being criticized for targeting a gay/transsexual individual, which would have clearly been preferable to a mass murder.