(LifeSiteNews) — On Tuesday, Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star, released the full 90-page journal of gender-confused Covenant School shooter Audrey “Aiden” Hale, which contains multiple entries demonstrating her disturbed mental state in the run-up to the March 27 attack.
Almost 18 months after the shooting, the newly-released “manifesto” details a slew of writings and doodles which show the killer’s premeditated planning of the massacre, including the role of her gender confusion in the killings as well as her admiration of the 1999 Columbine school shooters.
The diary shows that Hale, who killed three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members before being gunned down by police, had planned to execute the shooting months before, pulling out at least two times, on January 17 and later in February.
The journal makes clear that Hale struggled with her thoughts of being a male and that a deep hatred of her female body could have been an aggravating factor in the events of March 2023: “I wish death upon myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender.”
“Why does my brain not work right? Cause I was born wrong!!! Nothing on Earth can save me. Never-ending pain. Religion won’t save.” Hale declared on the first page.
The journal also contained a strange octagonal symbol, used on pages in which she planned her attack on the Covenant School and where she would describe her feelings of gender dysphoria.
In an undated entry, believed to have been written in mid-March 2023, the future shooter alluded to both the school shooting and her own death. “Soon I will leave this world! You [and] your friends will be just fine. Does it even matter if I am alive?” Hale later added the octagonal symbol to this entry and, above it, wrote, “No regrets by the gun!!!”
“Our reporting on the Covenant Killer investigation has served the public interest,” The Tennessee Star’s Leahy said Tuesday. “We have had a First Amendment right to publish these documents from the moment we legally obtained them in June 2024,” he added in a statement following the journal’s release.
Leahy, along with Star News Digital Media, Inc. (SNDM), the parent company of the Star, are the plaintiffs in lawsuits against both the state of Tennessee and the FBI seeking the release of all of Hale’s writings, which include 20 additional journals the killer wrote between 2007 and her death in 2022 that have yet to be disclosed to the public.
Back in June, the Star published four dozen pages of the gender-confused shooter’s disturbing manifesto in which she wrote entries about her mental health struggles, described her disturbing sexual fantasies as a man named “Aiden,” and ranted about the lack of “transgender rights” in the United States. The killer later added, “With no rights, anyone’s country is a s****y dictatorship.”
In another entry, Hale described how she had planned to die for five years. And, in her final journal entry, which appears to have been written the day of the shooting, the killer described how she had targeted the Covenant School for years. “There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021.”
Later, calling March 27 “Death Day,” Hale callously wrote:
Today is the day. The day has finally come! I can’t believe it’s here…. I’m a little bit nervous, but excited too…. Can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m ready…. I hope my victims aren’t…. I hope I have a high death count.
Hale’s journal was seized by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) on the day of the shooting. An FBI memo to MNPD chief John Drake in May 2023 published by the Star revealed that the agency “strongly suggested” withholding the release of “legacy tokens” from the shooter, including her journal writings.
Conservative podcaster Steven Crowder obtained several pages of the journal last November in which Hale gloated about targeting “white privileged crackers.” The same month the Star released four dozen pages from the journal; the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh got a hold of several more pages, which included more descriptions of Hale’s fantasies and her hatred of the Christian faith.