Nashville police have launched their last report on the Covenant College bloodbath – a focused March 2023 assault on a Christian faculty by a transgender shooter who killed three third-graders and three adults.
Relatively than a extremely anticipated manifesto, the report discovered that killer Audrey Hale left behind quite a few notebooks, artwork books and pc paperwork about her plans to commit the assault and acquire notoriety, partly impressed by the Columbine faculty taking pictures in 1999.
Hale, the 28-year-old attacker and organic feminine, started “fantasizing” about and researching mass shootings way back to 2017, in response to investigators. A 12 months later, she wrote “detailed fantasies” about taking pictures up the Isaac T. Creswell Center Magnet College for the Arts, killing her father and killing her psychiatrist.
“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the doc reads. “Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack.”
As a substitute, her motivations have been scattered throughout these many notebooks and different writings, investigators discovered. They included a picture exhibiting greater than two-dozen notebooks seized from Hale’s automotive and bed room. In addition they mentioned she left a suicide observe addressed to her mother and father.
“In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety,” in response to investigators. “Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack. As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself.”
Hale wished individuals to recollect her after her dying, in response to the doc, and was partly impressed by books and documentaries on the Columbine killers. She wished related information of her personal life and anticipated her weapons, art work and journals to be preserved in museums world wide.
“Most disturbingly, she wanted the things she left behind to be shared with the world so she could inspire and teach others who were ‘mentally disordered’ like her to plan and commit an attack of their own,” investigators wrote.
Due to Hale’s constant diaries over a interval of years, police mentioned they have been in a position to gather way more details about her than in a typical investigation. They discovered no proof of accomplices and mentioned she wished to show her “superiority.”
The Covenant College was hooked up to a church that Hale as soon as attended, and she or he selected the goal due to her connection to it, as a result of youngsters wouldn’t put up a battle, and since she wished to acquire infamy, in response to police.
She killed three 9-year-olds: the pastor’s daughter Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney. The three adults she killed have been 60-year-old Head of College Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Mike Hill, 61.
Her greatest worry within the assault, at 5 toes, 2 inches tall and 120 kilos, was operating right into a “hero” who may bodily overpower her and drive her to be captured alive.
So she settled on an elementary faculty that she described because the setting for her “happiest” childhood recollections.
“She never remarked of being bullied and ostracized there; on the contrary, she remarked on a couple of occasions how she established friendships, which included play-dates at the homes of other children and a sense of acceptance,” police revealed. “She gave no examples of how anyone at the school belittled her or harmed her, as she did in other places she attended school. Because of this, Hale felt The Covenant was the perfect place to commit an attack, as it was the perfect setting for her death.”
The killer additionally had plans for “B” and “C” targets – the Opry Mills Mall and a stretch of Belmont Boulevard close to Belmont College campus in Nashville. If her mother and father found her plans, she determined she would kill them and assault the Belmont goal, in response to investigators.
She spent months practising on the firing vary and painted the phrase “Dark Abyss” on her garments and weapons. That was the identify she had given to her despair.
However the assault was delayed a number of instances, together with as soon as after the dying of a detailed pal in a automotive crash.
Hale, who started utilizing the identify “Aiden Williams” within the years earlier than her dying, was killed by responding officers in harrowing bodycam video.
“Hale felt she would be a failure if she killed less than 10 people during the attack. In that respect, she did fail, in no small part due to the actions of the faculty and staff at The Covenant,” police wrote. “But she managed to attain the notoriety she craved simply by self-documenting her life and actions in a way no other mass killer has done before.”
