Murder of Marcia Trimble

In 2008, thirty-three years after the killing, Jerome Sydney Barrett – not the person police had pursued in the 1970s – was charged with Trimble's assault and murder after DNA evidence recovered from her remains linked him to the crime. Barrett had been arrested just days after Trimble's disappearance on suspicion of an unrelated sexual assault, and was still in jail when Trimble's body was found. Despite this and his convictions for attacks on other women and children, police had not investigated him in relation to the murder. On July 18, 2009, a jury convicted him for the killing, and he was sentenced to forty-four years in prison.

On June 6, 2008, a Davidson County Grand Jury indicted 60-year-old Jerome Sydney Barrett, charging him with first-degree murder and felony in the case of Marcia Trimble. Barrett had formerly been indicted and convicted for other assaults against women and children. At the time of Marcia's murder, Barrett was working in her neighborhood.

In 2001, a local paper interviewed Police Captain Mickey Miller, former homicide detective Tommy Jacobs of the Nashville Police, and former FBI agent Richard Knudsen about the unsolved Trimble case. Each had a different theory about what had happened on the evening when Trimble disappeared.

Unable to obtain a confession, the police resorted to other means to try and gather evidence against Womack. When Womack was 17 years old and working as a bus boy in a restaurant, the police sent an undercover officer into the restaurant to befriend him, but they did not get any incriminating evidence. Womack passed two polygraph tests. In 1980, authorities finally arrested him for Marcia Trimble's murder, but the charge was dismissed for lack of evidence. Many police officers involved in the case continued to believe that he was guilty.

After Womack's release in 1980, residents continued to be haunted by this unsolved murder. Each year, Nashville media highlighted the story on the anniversary of Marcia's disappearance or of the discovery of her body. The case marked a time of great change in how news was covered by local media, and in the emerging importance of DNA evidence (not well understood in earlier years).

Marcia Virginia Trimble was a nine-year-old girl who disappeared on February 25, 1975, while delivering Girl Scout Cookies in the affluent Green Hills area of Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Her body was discovered thirty-three days later on Easter Sunday, near the Trimble family home. She had been sexually assaulted. During the early years of their inquiry into the assault and murder, the police persisted in investigating one particular suspect, finally charging him in 1979, but he was released in 1980 for lack of evidence.

Barrett first took responsibility for the 1975 murder during a private conversation on the rooftop of the Davidson County Criminal Justice Center. During questioning, "He said he did not rape her. He killed her." "He said his DNA was on her, but not in her." Barrett once again claimed to have killed Marcia immediately after he had had an altercation with another jail inmate. It was during this altercation, the convict said, that Barrett claimed to have killed "four blue-eyed bitches."