Tag: Marcia Trimble

Most Nashvillians know her name even if they were not alive when Marcia Trimble was murdered in 1975…Nashville was never the same again.

I saw it all happen on the news when I was 8 years old. That is when I learned that the world wasn’t a nice safe place. I’ve seen it written many times…1975 is when Nashville lost its innocence. It was never crime free…no city ever is but this changed people forever here. It became high profile and went national.

Marcia Trimble was a 9-year-old Girl Scout selling cookies on February 25, 1975, and disappeared where she lived in Green Hills…a very affluent part of Nashville then as well as now.

My Uncle Fulton was a Sergeant in the Vice Squad at that time. We were at my grandmother’s for Easter and I saw his car pulling up the drive and his three girls looked shocked. I saw him walking over to my mom so I walked over also. I remember he looked at my mom and then me and said…we found her and it’s beyond bad. He didn’t have to say who or what…we knew what he was talking about.

Marcia was found murdered and sexually assaulted under a tarp in a garage near her Green Hills home 33 days after she was declared missing.

The prime suspect was Jeffrey Womack…a then 15-year-old neighbor who had told the cops that Marcia had been by his house but he had no money and didn’t buy anything. The police later thought he kill Marcia…and he was suddenly the prime suspect… until 2008.

There has been plenty of crime here before and after this murder but none had the impact of this horrible event. I live north of Nashville but it affected everyone around middle Tennessee.  At the time parents were obviously more on guard and kids would stick together while out.

From the Nashville Scene…about the neighborhood it happened in.

Former homicide Lt. Tommy Jacobs, who investigated the murder, says that for whatever reason, many of the children in the neighborhood stagnated in the years after the killing. “We interviewed the kids when they were 9 and 10 years old and went back and interviewed them 20-some-odd years later,” he says. “You won’t believe how many of the kids wound up in a mental institution or working at a gas station. Several of the kids were still living at home.”

60-year-old Jerome Sydney Barrett was convicted after DNA was examined in 2008 and he was sentenced to 44 years in prison in 2009…Barrett had killed more people in Nashville in 1975 and was finally connected to Marcia.

Jeffrey Womack, the kid that was falsely accused, was finally free of suspicion after 33 years.

For more of the details…  https://www.insidehook.com/article/action/city-shadows-1974-murder-marcia-trimble-changed-nashville-forever