Murder of Marcia Trimble

Marcia Virginia Trimble, a nine-year-old girl, disappeared on February 25, 1975, while delivering Girl Scout Cookies in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee. Local and state police, later joined by the FBI due to the possibility of kidnapping, searched for her. Her body was discovered 33 days later, on Easter Sunday, in a garage near the Trimble family home. She had been sexually assaulted, and the cause of death was determined to be strangulation after a broken hyoid bone was found. Despite having been deceased for about a month, her body showed little decomposition due to the cool, dry environment in which it was found.

Investigators believed the perpetrator was likely a local juvenile who knew Trimble, and police attention focused for years on Jeffrey Womack, a 15-year-old neighbor who was one of the last people to see her alive. Womack said he sent Trimble away because he lacked money to buy cookies; police found a roll of pennies, a five-dollar bill, and a condom in his pockets, which they viewed as suspicious. Womack retained an attorney and stopped cooperating with police and media. He passed two polygraph tests, and police were unable to obtain a confession or matching DNA evidence despite testing samples from 96 suspects, including Womack. In 1980, authorities arrested Womack for the murder, but the charge was dismissed for lack of evidence. Some investigators continued to believe he was responsible.

Semen recovered from Trimble's body and clothing was stored improperly and deteriorated over time, complicating efforts to identify a suspect through DNA. Investigators disagreed over interpretations of the evidence, including whether more than one attacker was involved. In 2001, three investigators — Police Captain Mickey Miller, retired homicide detective Tommy Jacobs, and former FBI agent Richard Knudsen — offered differing theories about the crime, though all concluded the killer was likely a local juvenile.

On June 6, 2008, a Davidson County Grand Jury indicted 60-year-old Jerome Sydney Barrett on charges of first-degree murder and felony murder in Trimble's case, after DNA evidence recovered from her remains was matched to him. Barrett had been arrested days after Trimble's disappearance in connection with an unrelated rape of a Belmont University student on February 17, 1975, and was in jail from March 12, 1975, until after Trimble's body was found, yet he had not previously been investigated for her murder despite convictions for other assaults on women and children. Barrett was also linked by DNA to the murder of Vanderbilt University student Sarah Des Prez, killed on February 2, 1975, near the Vanderbilt campus close to Green Hills. During questioning, Barrett reportedly acknowledged involvement in Trimble's death.

On July 18, 2009, a jury convicted Barrett of first-degree murder in Trimble's killing, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Journalists later reported that investigators had, for years, not disclosed that DNA evidence had excluded numerous neighborhood suspects, and that Trimble's body had been handled without protective gloves at the scene. The case, and the decades-long focus on Womack, had a lasting impact on the Nashville community, which came to see it as a loss of civic "innocence."