FIRST ON FOX: Nashville police have released their final report on the Covenant School massacre – a targeted March 2023 attack on a Christian school by a transgender shooter who killed three third-graders and three adults.
Rather than a highly anticipated manifesto, the report found that killer Audrey Hale left behind numerous notebooks, art books, and computer documents detailing her plans to carry out the attack and gain notoriety, partly inspired by the 1999 Columbine school shooting.
Hale, the 28-year-old attacker and biological female, began “fantasizing” about and researching mass shootings as far back as 2017, according to investigators. A year later, she wrote “detailed fantasies” about shooting up the Isaac T. Creswell Middle Magnet School for the Arts, killing her father, and killing her psychiatrist.
NASHVILLE SCHOOL SHOOTING MANIFESTO: WHY KILLERS WRITE ABOUT MOTIVES
Audrey Hale wrote in notebooks, journals, and diaries for years, between 2017 and 2023. (Metro Nashville Police Department)
“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the document 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.”
Instead, her motivations were scattered across those many notebooks and other writings, investigators found. They included an image showing more than two-dozen notebooks seized from Hale’s car and bedroom. They also said she left a suicide note addressed to her parents.
Read the Nashville police report:
“In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety,” according 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 wanted people to remember her after her death, according to the document, and was partly inspired by books and documentaries on the Columbine killers. She wanted similar records of her own life and expected her guns, artwork, and journals to be preserved in museums around the world.
“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.
NASHVILLE SCHOOL SHOOTER MANIFESTO: POLICE GROUP SIDES WITH SCHOOL IN LAWSUIT OVER RELEASE