Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who orchestrated the devastating Covenant School attack that claimed the lives of three 9-year-old students and three adults on March 27, 2023, wrote a list of her professional failures in the journal police recovered from her vehicle.
The Tennessee Star reported on Wednesday it obtained dozens of pages of Hale’s writings from a source close to the Covenant investigation.
Hale titled one undated entry “Freelance Failure S***,” and detailed the professional shortcomings she experienced after she graduated from the Nossi College of Art and Design in 2022.
“You’ll always miss 100 [percent] of the shots you [don’t] take,” wrote Hale. She then wrote, “I took all of them and missed 99 [percent].”
Hale then listed five items under the subheading, “What I Shot At,” and described the first project she worked on as a “police logo.”
According to Hale, she could “no longer continue” the “police logo” job because the “head leader left.”
After the police logo, Hale wrote that she attempted to secure an internship for “American Spirits,” likely referencing the Natural American Spirit cigarette company. Hale wrote this internship “was total bull****,” and “not real.”
Hale then wrote that she received legitimate work to illustrate a book for a client, but revealed she “finished the book, but not in full color.” Because Hale’s client “never got [the] full product,” Hale wrote, the client “was… pissed off.”
She then claimed her first commissioned job “was all a scam [and] a lie.”
Out of the five projects Hale listed, she wrote that she only found success making a “logo for my friend,” and expressed dissatisfaction, writing ” 1 out of 4 [equals] fail.”
She concluded the entry, “My reality [equals] freelance won’t help s***.”
In possible reference to the scam Hale claimed she was subject to, in a previous entry Hale wrote to great length about “scammers” and how to avoid them on the internet.
“The Internet is a dangerous place,” wrote Hale in the margin of that entry. At the bottom, she seemed to identify “jobs, job searches, commissions, socials, emails, TV,” and “contests” as more appropriate places to search for paying work.
Hale was born a biological female but identified as a transgender man at the time of her death. In a journal entry titled “My Imaginary Penis” that discussed how she explored her sexual fantasies and gender identity struggles, Hale also revealed that she was employed as a delivery driver for a grocery service.
In another journal entry on February 10, 2023, Hale wrote about losing deliveries due to oversleeping.
“It shouldn’t be a problem getting up at 7 every morning. But unfortunately, for me, it is.” Hale wrote, “I’ve missed several morning orders this week. I missed 3 today.”
Hale continued, “I hate myself for not making myself get up,” and later added, “I repeat my same patterns – can’t sleep routinely, or eat, or stick to be more strict on myself. Do I really not give a f***?”
The Star on Thursday published the medications prescribed to Hale by staff at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). Among those medications was Escitalopram, better known as Lexapro, a depression medication with possible side effects that include “mood swings, headache, tiredness, sleep changes, and brief feelings similar to electric shock.”
Hale was additionally prescribed Buspirone, which, when taken with Lexapro, can increase the likelihood of side effects for both drugs.
While Hale’s sources of income appear to have been limited by her inability to find freelance work or regularly deliver groceries, on Friday, it was reported she used federal Pell Grant money to spend about $2,600 on the weapons, ammunition, and other equipment she used to commit her terrible attack at the Covenant School.
Both Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns and operates The Star, and editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy are plaintiffs in lawsuits that seek to compel both the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) and the FBI to release Hale’s full writings, including those some call a manifesto.
The Star published an FBI memo last Wednesday, addressed to MNPD Chief John Drake, which appears to identify writings left by individuals like Hale as “legacy tokens.”
According to the memo, the FBI “strongly” discourages the release of such “legacy tokens,” in part due to concerns about “false narratives” and “conspiracy” theories being crafted by an uninformed or cynical public.
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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].
