The Lindbergh Baby
Adam Walsh
Jon Benet Ramsey
Caylee Anthony
In Nashville, in 1975, the name was Marcia Trimble, a 9 year old Green Hills Girl Scout who vanished taking her last order of cookies across the street.
They would come to call it Nashville's crime of the century.
The unsolved mystery that would change the way children played, the way parents watched, and how neighbor treated neighbor.
Hundreds, if not thousands of people searched.
The story made the New York City papers.
It took 33 days to find Marcia, just yards away from her home.
She had been strangled and sexually assaulted.
It took 33 years to solve the crime
And in those 3 decades, one young man, Jeffrey Womack, would be whispered about, blamed, followed, charged, and ultimately disproven as a suspect.
But the stain of suspicion remained indelible.
INDELIBLE: THE CASE AGAINST JEFFREY WOMACK is a one hour Channel 4 investigation into the stories never told, the voices never heard, and some astounding mistakes made in the pursuit of justice.
Culled from the Channel 4 news archive, the Metro police case file and in never before heard recordings, the case unfolds like it was 1975 all over again.
Jeffrey speaks for the first time.
Marcia does too.
Principal photographer and editor Jim Garbee
Produced, reported, researched and edited by Demetria Kalodimos
In case you missed Demetria Kalodimos' documentary Indelible: The Case Against Jeffrey Womack when it aired on WSMV-Channel 4 Saturday night, it's screening 7:30 p.m. tonight at The Belcourt in an extended cut that adds 25 minutes of detail.
That can only be a good thing. While doing a story on Kalodimos and the documentary — which covers the sensational 1975 murder of 9-year-old Marcia Trimble and the subsequent pursuit of a teenage neighbor, Jeffrey Womack, who had to wait decades to be cleared by DNA evidence — I got to see some of the on-the-spot footage from WSMV's vaults that'll be shown tonight. It's nothing short of remarkable, not least of all as a time capsule of the city.
It's also worth reading the excerpt in The City Paper this week from The Suspect: A Memoir, the book Womack wrote with his longtime attorney John J. Hollins Sr. (and an assist from longtime Scene contributor and local author-journalist E. Thomas Wood). In it Womack writes to clear up misperceptions about the case that persist to this day (even in the comments thread on the Scene story):
I also hope that by speaking out publicly, I can put to rest the misconceptions that even some well-meaning people have voiced about me ever since my nine-year-old neighbor Marcia Trimble went missing the night of February 25, 1975, 33 days before she was found strangled in a shed near her home. The half-truths and outright lies repeated about me over the years are like a series of viral syndromes. There’s the “you must have done something to get into that much trouble” syndrome. After all, the police don’t throw massive resources into tormenting a teenaged boy for no good reason, do they? Well, I don’t know.I do know this much: I did not kill Marcia Trimble. I did not have anything to do with Jerome Barrett, the man convicted in 2009 for her murder on the basis of solid DNA evidence. I did not know anything about her murder. I did not sexually abuse her or any other child. And I never “confessed” to anyone that I had killed her.
But I have heard it plenty of times: “Jeffrey brought this all on himself.” So I did. I brought it on myself because I was your basic 1970s wise-ass kid, a long-haired dope-smoker. I brought it on myself because I was having an affair with a woman more than twice my age — sure, that means I must be a pedophile, right? I brought it on myself because I had lawyers who were so good the police were scared of them. Most of all, I brought it on myself because I did not let them break me.
Womack, Hollins, Wood and Kalodimos will all be at the screening and book signing at The Belcourt tonight.
