Audrey Elizabeth Hale wrote a Valentine’s Day entry to the journal police recovered from her vehicle after she claimed the lives of three 9-year-old students and three adult staff members at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023.
The Tennessee Star confirmed on June 5 it obtained approximately 80 pages of Hale’s writings from a source familiar with the Covenant investigation.
One entry in the journal is a smaller, loose sheet of lined paper that appears to have been torn from another notebook and placed between other pages in the journal. This is the only loose page among among the entries included in the journal police recovered from Hale’s vehicle.
In entry, dated February 14, 2023, Hale wrote about her lack of intimacy and disdain for Valentine’s Day.
“No one could love me,” Hale started the entry. She wrote, “I have no one to love,” and on another line continued, “intimacy is in another demension [sic].”
In an apparent reference to her plan to attack the Covenant School, Hale wrote, “I will find love once I leave this place,” and added, “I hate Valentine’s Day.”
She finished the journal entry, “Mom is the only love I have.”
At the bottom of the page, Hale wrote the phrase “everything hurts,” then drew a box around it, and surrounded it with stars or asterisks.
On the right side of the page, next to her writing, Hale added a crude drawing that appears to depict a broken heart.
Hale had no known romantic relationships during her life, but it has been publicly reported she harbored an “infatuation” with Sydney Sims, a former middle school basketball classmate who died following a 2022 car accident. Hale wrote several journal entries referencing Sims’ death.
The Star also recently confirmed more than a dozen entries Hale wrote in the journal were about another former middle school classmate, Paige Averianna Patton, who is now a Nashville radio personality.
Hale wrote of Patton, “for the life of me I cannot help but gaze into her beauty… so when her hand layed [sic] onto me after the show, it’s being touched by an angel.”
She also appeared to directly address Patton in a journal entry dated just 10 days before her attack on the Covenant School, when Hale wrote, “Dear Paige, the biggest hurt of them all; I love you.”
In another entry, Hale wrote about her desire to achieve notoriety commensurate with Patton’s celebrity.
“She’s famous to me; a star to many,” wrote Hale. She later added, “She will live a legend and I will die a shooter – hopefully to become infamous. No one will forget neither of us.”
Hale elsewhere wrote about her romantic attraction to “brown girls.” Both of Hale’s possible romantic interests were black.
“No brown girls, no love,” wrote Hale. She added, “I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind.”
Both Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns and operates The Star, and editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy are plaintiffs in lawsuits to compel Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) and the FBI to release the full writings left by Hale, including those sometimes called a manifesto.
The Star recently published a May 2023 memo sent by the FBI to MNPD Chief John Drake which “strongly” advised against the release of “legacy tokens” from criminals like Hale. An FBI definition suggests the agency considers both the writings obtained by The Star and those sought in the lawsuits to be “legacy materials” that should be withheld from the public.
Though the FBI did not confirm it sent the memo, the federal agency confirmed in a statement to The Star it sends such “products” to local law enforcement.
Since obtaining Hale’s journal and a tranche of documents related to the Covenant investigation, The Star has published dozens of articles, including many that reveal the killer’s writing.
A Friday legal filing by MNPD confirmed the authenticity of the materials obtained by The Star.
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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].
Image “Audrey Elizabeth Hale” by Nossi School of Fine Art and “Averianna the Personality” by Averianna Patton.
