Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, stressed the importance that the Madison Police Department (MPD) in Wisconsin confirms or denies the existence of a six-page manifesto reportedly written by the 15-year-old Abundant Life Christian School shooter that is being shared by online personalities.
On Monday, MPD identified the shooter who killed two and injured seven at the Abundant Life Christian School as 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow.
MPD said that Rupnow took her own life after committing the shooting and was pronounced dead while being transported to the hospital.
After the shooting, Anna Slatz, co-founder of the website Reduxx, posted in a now-viral X post that she had gained access to a 6-page, password-protected manifesto reportedly written by the shooter after making contact with the shooter’s alleged online German boyfriend.
The shooter is reported to have sent the link to the manifesto to the boyfriend just minutes before the shooting occurred.
Slatz said she verified the manifesto by making the alleged boyfriend “screen record himself opening it from a direct link the shooter sent to him via WhatsApp.”
On Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pappert said the existence of the manifesto is “unlike we’ve seen before” as the adolescent shooter, in this digital age, “surrounded herself” with the digital community, which Pappert noted leads him to believe that the manifesto obtained by Slatz is legitimate.
“It is very modern. It’s very digital. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like this before but in my estimation, this could be the real mccoy and the fact that police have not rushed to say it is not leads me to think that it might be,” Pappert said.
Pappert further said it appears that the only way that the manifesto being shared online is a “sophisticated fake” is if the online boyfriend doctored the screen recording sent to Slatz or was operating two accounts posing as the shooter to pass the document off as a manifesto.
“The question to me is what would have to be done in order to make this a sophisticated fake. So this 17 year old alleged German boy would have had to have created a second account and at approximately the same time of the shooting would have had to send from one account to another account this document knowing that they would pass it off as a manifesto…Or this is, essentially, a fake phone app that [the boyfriend] was recording,” Pappert said.
“So I will say that we’re in a new modern world where these things happen online. This is a digital community that this person surrounded herself with. This may be some of the best provenance we’ve seen,” Pappert added.
Despite the alleged existence of the manifesto currently being circulated online, Pappert and host Leahy stressed the importance of MPD confirming or denying inquiries regarding the manifesto, including from The Star.
“If it’s a fake it’s pretty sophisticated. But you’re going to see more and more sophisticated fakes…This is why it’s so important for the Madison, Wisconsin Police Department and the FBI to either confirm or deny the provenance of this six page manifesto,” Leahy said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
