The details of the March 2023 mass killing in Nashville, Tennessee are all too familiar now: Little children were slaughtered in cold blood and innocent educators gunned down. Yet something was different about this tragic massacre. This one took place in a Christian school — the very school the shooter went to as a child.

And this time, the shooter was a woman.

As The New York Times noted on March 27, 2023, “In a database of 172 public shootings involving at least four fatalities over the last five and a half decades, all but four of the perpetrators were male.”

Yet this female mass murderer, Audrey Hale, was different in still another way: She identified as a man.

It has been known since last year’s horrific attack that Hale’s writings, called a “manifesto,” outlined her reasons for the massacre. But until last week, those writings had not been released by the police.

Now that some of them have been made public, we have a window into Hale’s tormented soul.