The story of Audrey Hale is already interesting, and it got even more interesting when it was discovered that the mass shooter that attacked a Christian elementary school in Tennessee was an FTM transexual. Since then, talk about her has gotten really interesting.

However, a passing post on a message board took me down a rabbit hole that led me to consider the possibility that Audrey Hale may have been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, and that abuse may have actually occurred at the very same elementary school that she attacked.

Before continuing, I want to make it clear that it’s not my intention to come anywhere close to excusing what Audrey Hale did. There is absolutely no excuse for going on a shooting in an elementary school, no matter what you may have been through at any point. I know at least two people who were sexually abused as children. While the experience was traumatic for both of them, neither of them went on to become school shooters. So yes, it’s possible to have been a victim at one point, but not turn out to be a piece of shit.

Audrey Hale, however, was a piece of shit.

Having said that, here’s the article that started me down the rabbit hole. It’s a Courthouse News Service article dating back to the year 2013, that pointed out that a Presbyterian church covered up for a “confessed child molester”, the church being the Covenant Presbyterian Church of Nashville.

In the article, we got the name of the confessed child molester:

In the lawsuit, Davis claims that on July 14, 2008, “the defendants quietly accept[ed] the resignation of the confessed child molester, John Perry, from the Covenant Diaconate, with Lewelling recorded in the board minutes as being present in the room.”

As the article points out, abuses of children by John Perry had been committed, and they were when John Perry was a part of a Presbyterian church, which is noteworthy considering that the Christian school targeted by Audrey Hale was also Presbyterian, and Audrey herself was reportedly once enrolled as an attendee. Because Audrey was 28 years old at the time of the shooting, and the school was an elementary school, it would have been quite some time since Audrey had been in attendance as a student.

According to the article, the resignation of child predator John Perry was accepted in 2008, so it would stand to reason that the abuses would have occurred prior to that point.

In the United States, it’s usually from around ages 6 to 12 that a child is in attendance of Elementary School (from Kindergarten to Fifth Grade). If Audrey had been in attendance of Covenant School, that would have likely been from the years 2001 to 2007. Because Covenant School offers a pre-school program, a student could hypothetically start school there younger than age 6. This might not have been the case for Audrey, as according to Covenant School’s website, the year 2001 would have been the school’s founding year.

If Audrey Hale had actually been sexually abused at the very school where she would later go on a shooting rampage, that would add a new dimension to the story, and make a possible motive for the shooting more apparent. However, at that point, it doesn’t seem as though that connection would yet be made with the information available to us at the time of this posting. After all, the manifesto has not yet been released, and that document might do a lot to tell us about the sicko’s motivations for the shooting.

With a name for the abuser, I decided to look into more information about him. As it turns out, the guy was being investigated by police, but ended up being let off by reason of the expiration of the statute of limitations for the offenses.

As I see it, there is sound philosophical basis for the statute of limitations, especially considering that human memory can be flawed, and tends to become more flawed the older a memory may be. However, that makes it no less disappointing when a person who commits a heinous crime gets off because of it.

But that’s not the only surprising thing about the matter, according to this article by the Daily Mail UK: The child abuser went on to become a co-author alongside Mike Huckabee!

Mike Huckabee was, of course, entirely unaware of the fact that the co-author of his book was being investigated for child abuse. But if it turns out that Audrey Hale was one of the students that was sexually abused by John Perry, imagine how she would have felt if she were to discover that the piece of filth who abused her would go on to team up with one of America’s most famous men!

For the searching that I did, I didn’t find a definitive link between John Perry and Audrey Hale. It would have stood to reason, considering that names of victims of child sex abuse are not usually public, not only for their benefit, but also because the victims would be minors.

It tends to be the case that victims of sexual abuse as a child experience lasting emotional disorders, and they often require psychiatric treatment. In many cases, the children can become sexually aware younger than one might expect them to. Because homosexuals tend to have a high occurrence rate of victimhood of child sexual abuse, it’s reasonable to expect that their sexuality is a manifestation of the effect that the abuse had on them. While transsexuality is relatively new and still somewhat unstudied, it’s reasonable to suspect that an interest in transsexuality at any age could be a manifestation of the trauma of child sexual abuse.

Could Audrey Hale have been sexually abused as a child at the very same school where she would eventually die as a mass murderer? As of this posting, it’s hard to say definitively with the information that’s been publicly made available. It’s because of this that I’m interested in the contents of Audrey’s manifesto, which may explain her motives.

Of course, I think it’s reasonable to ask why child abuse happens as often as it does in religious settings. Personally, I doubt that child abuse happens in religious settings with greater frequency than in the general population. However, I think it’s obvious that the unbiblical practice of celibacy is partly to blame. But outside of that, I suspect that predators find something attractive about churches due to the fact that religious folk tend to attempt to resolve matters amongst themselves, rather than get law enforcement involved. Because of this, there would be more potential for predators to manage matters when things go wrong when in the company of the religious, than in more secular settings where there’s a stronger connotation of obligation to report wrongdoing of that nature.

But if it turns out that there’s a connection between John Perry and Audrey Hale, I imagine that John Perry would be sweating bullets about now.