Editor’s note: March Egerton, who was one of many people subjected to police scrutiny in the unsolved Marcia Trimble murder case, chose not to speak with reporter Matt Pulle for the Scene’s two-part story, “The File on Marcia Trimble.” This week, he responds to the article and comments on the Metro Police Department’s investigation.

In compiling a story ironically entitled “The File on Marcia Trimble,” the Scene’s Matt Pulle was, by his own admission, granted no access to the actual police file. Thus deprived of any sort of primary documentation or otherwise useful material that might move the Trimble case in a new and fruitful direction, Pulle settled for revisiting a few old newspaper clips—he clearly did nothing like a complete reading of the earliest Nashville Banner and Tennessean stories—before giving abundant space to the same kind of wildly incomplete and divergent law enforcement theories that have left this case mired in the mud for going on three decades.

It was mere weeks ago that the Scene treated us to a five-part series cataloging the Tennessean’s general shortcomings and reportorial weakness in particular. In that piece, Willy Stern quoted journalistic heavyweights from across the land. Yet inexplicably, in his “exhaustive look at Nashville’s most notorious unsolved murder,” the sleuthful Pulle showed a decided aversion to dialing long distance, seeking out nary a nationally recognized expert in areas pertinent to the Trimble case, such as DNA testing, adult or juvenile sex offender profiling, forensic medicine, or cold case investigation. Capping things off, having found precious few interviewees outside the law enforcement community, the author of a recent, riveting puff piece on the hipsters of “The New New Nashville” resorted to the saddest sort of Old Nashville journalistic copout: When in doubt, quote Teddy Bart.

It’s bad enough the Scene would stoop to tabloid-caliber titillation and malicious innuendo—Exhibit A being the nine(!) paragraphs devoted to the pathetic, pointless tale of Tommy Poggenburg, fugitive berry picker—for no other reason than to fill space between ads. It’s far worse that fresh from lambasting the profit-obsessed Tennessean for forsaking its proud investigative reputation, our so-called “alternative” paper would send a boy to do a man’s job, then unashamedly publish the anemic result—in two cover stories—as though its unskeptical reporter had done anything more than lick off the same spoon as everyone from previous Scene writers to Larry Brinton.

If Bruce Dobie aspires to anything like the high journalistic ideals he expects of others, he ought further to contemplate the important distinction between talking it and walking it. But by the looks of what passes for hard news reporting in his paper, I’m thinking that: 1. He’s come to the same sad conclusion as the suits at Gannett: True investigative journalism doesn’t fatten the bottom line—sensationalism and ads do; and 2. All the walking he’s planning on doing is down another cash-green fairway at the Belle Meade Country Club.

In the end, though, the Scene’s failure can be left for media critics to quibble over. What lies behind it is one of the great ongoing tragedies of the Trimble investigation—the way in which original details continue to fade away. Whatever role feeble reporting plays in that, ultimate responsibility lies with the police, who bungled the case from the start and since 1990 have waged a campaign to recast the story altogether.

It was in 1990 that both DNA and a California murder case involving “repressed memory” made headlines. DNA matching has since proven a valuable crime-solving tool, though useless in this case; repressed memory turned out to be a pop-psychology sham and was by the mid-1990s largely discredited in courtrooms and scholarly journals.

During this period, the police began reinterviewing dozens of people, with a very specific goal: to establish an entirely new time line for the Trimble murder, so that they could place their favorite suspect squarely in the middle, and me there as a witness. This reinterviewing process was marked by a systematic attempt to pressure people into modifying their recollections to fit the new time line and, more incredibly, to implicate others based on false information provided by police.

The police pressure to “re-remember” times and details from 15 years earlier was intense, and many people changed their stories. I base this claim not only on personal experience, but also on having seen “before” and “after” statements from both Chuck Trimble and Marie Maxwell—provided to me in March 1991 by an assistant district attorney. I was also shown interview summaries and transcripts showing the way Marcia’s brother was coerced into twice changing his story, and how Mrs. Maxwell was subjected to what can only be called a verbal pistol-whipping, asked leading question upon leading question and badgered until she told police what they wanted to hear. It is this deliberate reengineering of the case file that has led to the patently false police claim that my time is somehow unaccounted for, and that I may have witnessed Marcia’s murder.

The police story, as uncritically relayed by Matt Pulle, is that there are people out there who are withholding information. I’m here to tell you that’s true. But those making the claim, and those doing the withholding, are one and the same: the police. If they feel free to point fingers and speculate publicly, they ought to feel every bit as free to open those black binders in Mickey Miller’s office to public scrutiny. Naturally, the police will forever protest that to open the files might compromise an ongoing investigation. By their twisted reasoning, sharing actual factual material could jeopardize an investigation, whereas elaborate public comment and conjecture, unsupported by any documentation, can spur an investigation forward.

It is the Metro detectives who hold the scientific reports and the volumes of statements and information gathered in the first weeks of the investigation. It is those records—not a bunch of coerced recollections gathered years after the fact—that offer the best hope for solving this murder. But as long as the Matt Pulles of this world are content to confuse simple note-taking with real reporting, the police will likely continue working the same miserable rut they’ve worked for more than a quarter-century.

In a perfect world, reporters and cops alike recognize that, at least in serious matters like this, they have a paramount responsibility to get it right. But that’s not the world we’re living in, which means the Trimble case is still in limbo, justice is not served, clouds of suspicion linger, Virginia Trimble lacks the closure she deserves, and everyone connected to this case awaits the next ham-handed detective or callow reporter disrupting their lives for no productive reason.

Nonetheless, I challenge the police to open their files—and the press to demand that they do so. Perhaps the best course would be for the chief of police to hand the entire file, every scrap, over to an outside agency of some sort—one with no baggage or agenda, no sacred cows or incompetent cops to protect, and no other interest than to find out who killed Marcia Trimble.