Even after years of false leads, dashed hopes and far more questions than answers, the three investigators who have made the unsolved rape and murder of Marcia Trimble a personal obsession continue to uncover new evidence and fresh clues about the 27-year-old mystery.

For the last month now, Metro Police Capt. Mickey Miller, who is in charge of the investigation, along with retired homicide Lt. Tommy Jacobs and former FBI agent Richard Knudsen, have met at police headquarters to review old witness statements in light of two major pieces of new information: First, investigators have isolated important DNA evidence from Trimble’s body that could help police find the perpetrator. The frustrating twist is that none of the 96 samples of DNA the police have collected from possible suspects so far matches the newly identified sample. (That, however, doesn’t necessarily clear each of those 96 people. More on that later.) Second, investigators now know definitively that the Girl Scout was killed in the garage where she was found more than a month after her shocking disappearance.

Taken on its own, each piece of information holds promise. Together, however, they seem to at once dim and brighten the spotlight on Jeffrey Womack, the only person ever arrested for the Trimble murder. That the pristine DNA doesn’t match Womack’s is helpful to him. But that the girl was killed in the garage, rather than placed there later by a calculating adult, as Womack’s attorneys had always claimed, is a strong indication that a child committed the crime.

On Feb. 25, 1975, between 5:15 and 5:25 p.m., Marcia Trimble left her Copeland Drive home to deliver some Girl Scout cookies to a neighbor. When the young girl didn’t return, her parents called the police. Within a day, 200 police officers, along with television news crews and print reporters, swarmed the comfortable Green Hills neighborhood in a frenzied search for the missing girl. For 33 days, Marcia Trimble’s disappearance held a city at bay until she was found strangled to death in neighbor John Thorpe’s backyard garage on Easter Sunday.

After an exhaustive four-year investigation, police arrested Jeffrey Womack for the Trimble murder in the summer of 1979. Womack, who was 15 years old at the time of Trimble’s murder, had long been the main suspect for investigators. A Hillsboro High School dropout, Womack had seen Trimble the day she disappeared and, according to some neighborhood children, was with her shortly after she walked out of her home for the last time. Womack’s own lawyers have admitted that their client boasted to his friends that he killed and raped Trimble. Womack also told an undercover police officer seemingly incriminating details about her murder.

But while the evidence against Womack was thick, the teen-ager passed two polygraph tests. In addition, the garage where Trimble was discovered already had been searched by police cadets. If Marcia Trimble was killed and later dumped in the garage, no jury in America would ever convict Womack. After all, as his lawyers pointed out, how could a 15-year-old child hide a dead body for 33 days, drop it off in an area where police were swarming and not be detected? Surely, this was the work of an adult.

In 1980, due in no small part to the uncertainty of exactly where Trimble was killed, then-Davidson County District Attorney Tom Shriver dropped all charges against Womack. For 22 years, perhaps the biggest obstacle to solving the case remained figuring out the exact location of her murder.

Fast forward to 2002 and the new DNA discovery. For more than 10 years now, investigators have been able to isolate several DNA samples collected from sperm found inside Trimble’s vagina. But because they were collected long before genetic fingerprinting, the samples are not well-preserved. As a result, the samples can be used to exclude possible suspects, but they can never confirm an exact match.

But last March, two TBI forensic scientists achieved a dramatic breakthrough in the case. Using the latest DNA technology, Mike Turbeville and Joe Minor, who are assigned to the bureau’s serology DNA unit, were able to enhance one of the DNA samples to the point where it could provide an exact match. The problem is that, of the 96 DNA samples the police have collected from possible suspects, none of them—including Womack’s—match this lone authoritative sample.

Now here’s where the case gets even murkier. It’s possible that the other degraded samples collected from Trimble’s body could match Womack’s sample or any of the other 95 that were collected. But given their condition, we may never know for sure. But this we now know: If Womack, the main suspect for more than 25 years, was the assailant, then he was aided and abetted by someone else—the person whose DNA has now been isolated. Based on this new DNA evidence, Womack absolutely, positively could not have been the lone perpetrator of this mysterious crime.

“If it’s Jeffrey, then it can’t just be Jeffrey,” Miller says. The evidence, Miller says, “hasn’t exonerated him, but it has influenced us to look in other directions.”

Womack’s attorney Ed Yarbrough says, “Based on this new evidence, Jeffrey needs to be removed or eliminated as the principle suspect. I think he has been mentioned too much.”

Last year in an interview with the Scene, former homicide Lt. Tommy Jacobs, who was one of the first officers to investigate the case, maintained that he believed only one person killed and raped Marcia Trimble. “It’s almost inconceivable that you had two, three, four attackers and nobody talked,” he said. “Odds are somebody would have talked.”

Miller is now focusing his attention on a mysterious group of children who were seen in and around the Trimble neighborhood soliciting money for underprivileged youth. Ranging in age from 10 to 16, the children asked residents to purchase items to aid their cause. Virginia Trimble remembers seeing these youthful solicitors and recalls hazily that they were selling candy in her neighborhood a few days before her daughter disappeared. She says that she remembers the children did not appear well-kept and had stringy, dirty hair. Miller says one witness who had seen this group of children remembers that they were with a young adult who was wearing a long green army-type trench coat.

It’s not clear what role if any the children played in Trimble’s disappearance, but Miller would at least like to talk to them and find out more about their group. Given that Miller has yet to find a positive DNA match so far, you could understand why he wants to talk to as many people as possible.

“We would like people to tell us if they know something about this organization,” he says. “We’re not saying they’re involved, but we need to talk to them to clear some things up.”

As for the location of the crime, investigators are now convinced Trimble was killed in the garage where she was found. Earlier this year, Capt. Miller, who heads the personal crimes unit for the Metro Police Department, visited the Knoxville office of Dr. Bill Bass, a well-recognized expert in body decomposition. Featured recently on the television program 60 Minutes II, Bass consults with police departments across the country on forensic issues. He is also the founder of the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility (also known as “The Body Farm”), which Biography magazine wrote “serves science like no other place in the planet.”

Capt. Miller shared with Bass all the details about the girl’s death and the condition of her body when it was discovered. Bass reviewed the autopsy report, along with pictures of the dead girl and even temperature ranges for the days Trimble went missing. The forensic expert concluded, with no equivocation, that she was killed in the garage shortly after she left her home that February evening.

Based on other pieces of forensic evidence, Miller had long suspected that, while investigators searched the city, Trimble’s body lay in the garage just 200 yards away from her home. Even though the garage had been searched, Miller maintained that Trimble was hard to find amid all the clutter. But like any good homicide detective, Miller prefers, wherever possible, to confirm as many hunches as he can.

“There is no doubt in my mind she was in the garage the whole time,” he says. Miller adds that were the case ever to go to trial, the prosecution would have no trouble proving the location of the murder.

Interestingly, Miller and his fellow investigators believe that one or more of the perpetrators returned to the dingy Thorpe garage shortly before she was discovered for the purpose of uncovering her body so that investigators would find it. It may have been precipitated by the girl’s mother, Virginia Trimble, publicly hoping that she’d be reunited with her daughter on Easter. Police believe that the perpetrator or perpetrators felt remorse and returned to the scene of the crime. “I just think that somebody wanted her to be found,” says Richard Knudsen, the former FBI agent.

Who would kill, then return to the crime scene to uncover the dead body? Police believe that whoever killed Marcia Trimble meant to stop her from screaming and, in the process, accidentally strangled her. It’s that lack of intent combined with a possible sense of remorse that Miller hopes will prompt one or more of the perpetrators to come forward and help put the case to rest once and for all.

In addition, Miller says that in recent weeks, he has conducted new interviews and even visited a prison inmate who was believed to have knowledge about the case. To protect the ongoing investigation, he would not detail what he learned—just that he learned something. “From interviews and physical evidence, we feel pretty confident how she got in the garage and what occurred in the garage,” he says. “We feel like it was a strong possibility that she walked into the garage with someone she felt comfortable with.”

Confirming the murder location would seem to cast the spotlight once again on Womack—whom Trimble might have sold cookies to earlier that day. He lived a block away from the garage. And Marie Maxwell, one of the last people to have seen Trimble alive, originally described someone who matched Womack’s description standing next to Trimble in her driveway, which was only a short walk away from the garage.

But Richard Knudsen, who has long believed that Womack is the perpetrator, says that recently there has been less talk about the main suspect than ever before. “I think I’m the last holdout,” he says. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.”

Perhaps moving off the Womack track, Miller continues to explore every possible angle of the Trimble mystery. On Monday night, he met again with Jacobs and Knudsen to talk about the case. The previous Friday, he spent hours with Virginia Trimble, trying to help her recall any other adults and children she might have seen in the neighborhood shortly before her daughter disappeared.

Meanwhile, Virginia Trimble, who has shown remarkable strength as police continue to search for her daughter’s killer, is keeping her hopes up.

“I need to know who killed Marcia,” she says. “The word 'closure’ is not in my vocabulary, but I need to know some answers.”