Transgender Nashville shooter Audrey Hale spent years making ready for assault that killed 6 at Christian college

Nashville police have launched their remaining report on the Covenant Faculty bloodbath – a focused March 2023 assault on a Christian college by a transgender shooter who killed three third-graders and three adults.

Slightly than a extremely anticipated manifesto, the report discovered that killer Audrey Hale left behind quite a few notebooks, artwork books and laptop paperwork about her plans to commit the assault and acquire notoriety, partly impressed by the Columbine college taking pictures in 1999.

Hale, the 28-year-old attacker and organic feminine, started “fantasizing” about and researching mass shootings way back to 2017, based on investigators. A 12 months later, she wrote “detailed fantasies” about taking pictures up the Isaac T. Creswell Center Magnet Faculty for the Arts, killing her father and killing her psychiatrist. 

“On this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the doc reads. “Hale by no means left behind a single doc explaining why she dedicated the assault, why she particularly focused The Covenant, and what she hoped to achieve, if something, with the assault.”

As an alternative, 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 be aware addressed to her mother and father.

“In brief, the motive decided over the course of the investigation was notoriety,” based on investigators. “Regardless that quite a few disappointments in relationships, profession aspirations, and independence fueled her despair, and though this despair made her extremely suicidal, this doesn’t clarify the assault. As Hale wrote on a number of events, if suicide was her purpose then she would have merely killed herself.”

Hale needed individuals to recollect her after her demise, based on the doc, and was partly impressed by books and documentaries on the Columbine killers. She needed related information of her personal life and anticipated her weapons, art work and journals to be preserved in museums all over the world.

“Most disturbingly, she needed the issues she left behind to be shared with the world so she might encourage and train others who have been ‘mentally disordered’ like her to plan and commit an assault of their very own,” investigators wrote.

Due to Hale’s constant diaries over a interval of years, police mentioned they have been capable of accumulate much more details about her than in a typical investigation. They discovered no proof of accomplices and mentioned she needed to show her “superiority.”

The Covenant Faculty was connected 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 struggle, and since she needed to acquire infamy, based on 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 Faculty 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 might bodily overpower her and pressure her to be captured alive.

So she settled on an elementary college that she described because the setting for her “happiest” childhood recollections.

“She by no means remarked of being bullied and ostracized there; quite the opposite, she remarked on a few events how she established friendships, which included play-dates on the properties of different youngsters and a way of acceptance,” police revealed. “She gave no examples of how anybody on the college belittled her or harmed her, as she did elsewhere she attended college. Due to this, Hale felt The Covenant was the proper place to commit an assault, because it was the proper setting for her demise.”

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, based on investigators. 

She spent months working towards on the firing vary and painted the phrase “Darkish Abyss” on her garments and weapons. That was the title she had given to her despair.

However the assault was delayed a number of occasions, together with as soon as after the demise of an in depth pal in a automotive crash. 

Hale, who started utilizing the title “Aiden Williams” within the years earlier than her demise, was killed by responding officers in harrowing bodycam video.

“Hale felt she could be a failure if she killed lower than 10 individuals in the course of the assault. In that respect, she did fail, in no small half because of the actions of the school and employees at The Covenant,” police wrote. “However she managed to achieve the notoriety she craved just by self-documenting her life and actions in a means no different mass killer has executed earlier than.”