Marcia Trimble was nine years old, a fourth-grader working on her Girl Scout cookie sales in one of the safest, wealthiest neighborhoods in Nashville. Thirty-three days after she disappeared, on Easter Sunday, her body was found in a neighbor's garage, hidden in a plastic wading pool about 150 yards from her home. She had been strangled.
What followed became Nashville's most notorious unsolved murder. Investigators fixed early on Jeffrey Womack, a 15-year-old neighbor who was among the last people to see Marcia alive. He passed two polygraph tests, including one given by the police department's own examiner, and still couldn't shake the suspicion. In August 1979, officers in SWAT gear arrested him at two in the morning. The case against him was dismissed on August 11, 1980, for lack of evidence, but the cloud followed him for nearly three more decades.
Meanwhile, Jerome Sidney Barrett had been arrested in March 1975 for a separate sexual assault and was still in custody when Marcia's body was found. He was never investigated in her death. According to research for The Suspect, wiretapped calls from a police informant pointing investigators in another direction never made it into the case file.
In 2007, while investigating Barrett in the 1975 murder of Vanderbilt student Sarah Des Prez, Metro's cold case detectives found that his DNA also matched evidence from Marcia's clothing. On July 18, 2009, a Davidson County jury convicted Barrett of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 44 years, on top of the life sentence he was already serving for killing Des Prez. Marcia's mother, Virginia Trimble Ritter, told reporters simply: "After 34 years, it's over."
In this episode:
AUDIO CREDIT
Special thanks to Demetria Kalodimos and Genuine Human for sharing research audio from their work on the Marcia Trimble case. Kalodimos spent more than three decades covering this story in Nashville, first as an anchor and investigative reporter at WSMV-Channel 4 and later as a documentary filmmaker. Her Emmy-winning film Indelible: The Case Against Jeffrey Womack examines the thirty-plus years Womack spent as the only suspect Metro Police ever seriously pursued in a murder he did not commit.
Genuine Human: https://genuinehuman.com
FURTHER READING
The Suspect: A Memoir — Surviving Three Decades of Accusation in Nashville's Most Infamous Murder (2012)
By Jeffrey Womack and John Hollins Sr., with an introduction by E. Thomas Wood and a foreword by John Seigenthaler.
Womack's own account of the investigation, told alongside that of Hollins, the attorney who represented him for more than three decades without charging him a fee. Former Nashville District Attorney Torry Johnson called it "a cautionary tale for law enforcement."
Some voices in this podcast were created with Fish Audio AI
