The FBI on Wednesday released new files from the journals written by Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who killed six on March 27, 2023, including an entry in which the killer appears to accuse her father of demonic possession.
Audrey Hale, whose parents told police was diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses over her 22-year history as a mental health patient, appears to have written the entry sometime in 2018, based on the dates assigned to preceding entries.
FBI redactions make it unclear exactly who Hale accused of being possessed, however, she wrote within the journal entry that she lived in the same home as the allegedly possessed person. Hale lived with her parents, Ronald and Norma Hale, for her entire life, while her brother left the family home in Nashville to attend college.
“There is a demon that is inside you. A demon that is under the devil’s control to cast every [misery] on you,” the killer wrote in a journal entry titled, “Devil’s Demon.”
She wrote, “A demon that has you under its possession, blinding you from its harsh flashes of manipulation [and] interpretation, this demon is a smart actor, for it knows how to push you around and act himself out through you like it’s the devil’s play.”
The killer then accused the demon of being responsible for a series of behaviors that appear consistent with notes about the relationship between Audrey Hale and Ronald Hale by a former Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) detective, who later questioned the father about whether his daughter’s hostility was apparent during her lifetime.
“I hate this demon of yours,” wrote Audrey Hale. “I hate him when he acts like a big fat drama queen b**** when one thing is messed up in his schedule,” or when he was asked “to take money out of his account, or fix something broke in the house.”
The killer later claimed the demon was responsible for Ronald Hale’s alleged lack of consideration for his family, and complained her father was more concentrated on work than her family.
Audrey Hale accused the demon being responsible for her father, “Always procrastinating on projects, bills, [and] tuition bills to my college,” and claimed the family home was, “a few times [with] no electricity because he doesn’t have the priority skills [and] time management to pay for it on time.”
Unlike the killer’s 2023 journal, which was published last September by The Tennessee Star, Audrey Hale did not appear to express a desire to harm her father within the entry that appears dated to 2018.
Despite a detective’s notes suggesting Audrey Hale shared this desire with a mental health professional during her evaluation for possible commitment at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), the 2023 interview between MNPD detectives and the killer’s parents revealed they were unaware of their daughter’s patricidal fantasy.
“She had a schedule. On one schedule, she wants to wake up early in the morning to slash dad’s tires before the incident happened. She wanted to create a diversion after the incident to make it out of the school but to come back and harm dad, I believe kill you is what she,” one MNPD investigator told Ronald and Norma Hale.
The investigator was interrupted by a second, who bluntly told Ronald Hale, “We’ll be open, it was, she wanted to kill you.”
Audrey Hale wrote entries explicitly stating her desire to kill her father in her 2023 journal.
“I hate his old cranky-man existance [sic], all cranky good-for-nothing mentally ill men should die,” wrote Hale. She later added, “Well guess what? Your [sic] a loser. I hate your (life, you). I don’t care if you die. I want to kill you.”
In another journal entry, the killer wrote, “A day [without] father will be a better day.”
A retired MNPD lieutenant previously claimed that no mental health provider at VUMC, where Audrey Hale received treatment during her 22 years as a mental health patient, informed Ronald or Norma Hale of their daughter’s homicidal fantasies, despite Tennessee’s duty to warn law, which in 2023 may have allowed victims to file civil lawsuits against the killer’s doctors for failing to inform an intended victim of a patient’s plans to engage in violence.
The law has since been strengthened through legislation passed last year. State Representative Jason Zachary (R-Knoxville) told The Michael Patrick Leahy Show that the changes were provoked by revelations from the attack on the Covenant School.
“After the tragedy at Covenant, I had a friend reach out to me who lives in Nashville, whose children went to the Covenant School,” said Zachary last year. They reached out and asked if they could come to Knoxville to talk about something that they had discovered, and so we met at Panera on Cedar Bluff in Knoxville and they literally laid out duty to warn, duty to report, and it requires a mental health practitioner to report If somebody makes a threat against a clearly identified victim. But then it stops. it’s super vague, super short.”
He told Michael Patrick Leahy, the editor-in-chief of The Star, “They brought language that strengthened it by taking it a step further and saying that if there is an imminent threat or there is an intent, then you have to report that to law enforcement.”
Within the files released by the FBI, the journal entry accusing her father of demonic possession followed an earlier entry in which Audrey Hale wrote that she heard the internal voice of a boy, who demanded she allow him to “express himself,” for over a decade.
“The voice is not an it. It’s a he. And this voice lies a boy who has been imprisoned in a cage for over 16 years,” wrote the killer.
Leahy and Star News Digital Media, Inc. (SNDM), which owns and operates The Star, were the first to sue the FBI in May 2023 to obtain Audrey Hale’s writings. After more than two years of litigation, SNDM settled with the FBI, which consolidated similar lawsuits before releasing redacted portions of her 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].
