Case, But Not Mystery, Closed

A few years after her young daughter died, Virginia Trimble went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and said a prayer. She asked God to save the soul of the person who killed her child.

For 33 years, the question ruined lives, tore apart families, tormented cops and haunted a mother: Who killed Marcia Trimble, a Green Hills Girl Scout, one February evening in 1975? With the arrest last week of a left-field suspect, there may finally be an answer—but the mystery is just as perplexing and tragic as ever, particularly to Virginia, who would like, decades after her prayer in Jerusalem, just a little peace.

“Even if they could ask for the death penalty, I don’t know if I want him dead. I want to know what his faith is like. I want him to examine his faith, examine his soul,” she says, after expressing sympathy for the suspect’s family. “I’m connected with him if he killed my child. I’m bonded with him the rest of his life.”

On Friday, Davidson County District Attorney Torry Johnson announced Jerome Sidney Barrett’s indictment in the murder of Trimble, the 9-year-old who went missing for 33 days before turning up strangled, raped and dead in a nearby garage. Although police have linked Barrett to Trimble through DNA evidence following his arrest on another murder charge, police and prosecutors have offered no details on how the former landscaper came across the girl, or if any witnesses spotted the suspect, a black male then 28 years old, walking through her white, middle-class Green Hills neighborhood. Authorities may not want to tip their hand just yet, especially if they can extract a confession from Barrett, but people who once helped lead the investigation are befuddled about how someone with the accused killer’s description escaped notice.

“I couldn’t have been more surprised in the outcome of the case,” says Tommy Jacobs, one of the first officers to arrive at Trimble’s home the night she went missing. “We were pretty much looking for young, male Caucasians, and we were looking for that for 32 years.”

On Feb. 25, 1975, at approximately 5:10 p.m., Trimble was inside her three-bedroom red-brick home on Copeland Drive for the last time. It started out like any other evening. Marcia’s mother Virginia prepared dinner, while her father Charles was in the den. Outside, Marcia’s older brother, Chuck, was playing basketball with his friend and neighbor March Egerton.

Between 5:15 and 5:25, Marcia headed out the door even though dinner was almost ready, and told her mom that she needed to drop off some Girl Scout cookies to a neighbor. A feisty, friendly girl with straight blond hair, blue eyes and freckles, Marcia said she wouldn’t need a coat because she’d only be gone for a little while. When she didn’t return, her parents called the police, and after she wasn’t found that evening, 200 officers, along with print and television reporters, swarmed the neighborhood in a frenzied search for the girl. A young Oprah Winfrey, then working for WTVF-Channel 5, dropped by the Trimble house too, asking in vain for an interview.

Like a drama creeping toward a grim finale with each passing scene, young Marcia’s disappearance held the city in suspense for 33 days until she was found dead in a neighbor’s garage tucked amid piles of junk. Almost immediately, the police turned their attention to Jeffrey Womack, a 15-year-old in the neighborhood who showed up at the Trimble home voluntarily the evening of her disappearance when he learned authorities were looking for him. On his shoes were written the words “fuck you,” which didn’t endear him to detectives.

In August 1979, more than four years after Marcia’s death, the police arrested Womack for her murder, but District Attorney Tom Shriver dropped the charges 12 months later. In one of the case’s many intriguing subplots, a source in the police department, convinced that authorities were unfairly targeting the young suspect, took it upon herself to leak their case to the suspect’s lawyers.

“We had a mole in the police department,” says John Hollins Sr., who has represented Womack for the last 33 years. “We knew what they were doing as soon as they were doing it.”

Even with a turncoat in their midst, police uncovered evidence that seemed to implicate Womack in the crime. An undercover cop posed as an employee of a restaurant where the suspect worked. After the two became friendly, Womack confided seemingly obscure details about how Marcia’s body was hidden. Meanwhile, he boasted to friends that he raped and killed her, even if most of them didn’t take him seriously.

Police also believed that he talked with Trimble the evening she disappeared and thought that he was one of two people later seen with the girl in her driveway. To this day, those two people have never been identified, and for years police felt like they held the clues to the case.