How The Covenant School shooter planned the deadly attack for years while manipulating parents and therapists

Bent on infamy and obsessed with mass killings and school shootings, Audrey Hale extensively chronicled her grievances against her parents and others she blamed for her fraught life as she stocked up on firearms and meticulously prepared for the March 2023 massacre at a Christian school, according to a police investigative report released Wednesday.

The 28-year-old who gunned down three third graders and three staff members at The Covenant School in Nashville “used a great deal of manipulation” to conceal the extent of her mounting mental health struggles from her parents and therapists for years while planning a mass shooting, a police investigative report said. Bent on infamy and obsessed with mass killings and school shootings, Audrey Hale extensively chronicled her grievances against her parents and others she blamed for her fraught life as she stocked up on firearms and meticulously prepared for the March 27, 2023, massacre, according to the 48-page report released Wednesday. “She used a great deal of manipulation to convince those she interacted with she wasn’t a threat to anyone, including herself,” said the report, which described Hale as female though the killer “identified as a male and used he/him as preferred pronouns” on social media. “As Hale was a biological female at the time of her death and throughout the incidents described in this summary and in the case file, Hale will be referred to as a female,” the report said. After two years of interviews and examinations of Hale’s digital devices, online accounts, video tapes, medical records and artwork and writings across 1,299 pages of notebooks, investigators found no culpability on the part of family members, therapists or the retailers who sold her guns in the years before the carnage at the private Christian school. “She regularly manipulated others into giving her what she wanted, and she railed against those who saw through the manipulation,” the report said.