The Most Famous Missing Persons Case In Nashville We Will Never Ever Forget
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Meghan Kraft
Author
Every city has a crime that changes the face of its social landscape forever. Whether it’s the loss of a family or a child, a heinous crime or a simple omission of fact, there’s always one. And Nashville is no different. Marcia Trimble grew up in the city, made it her home with her family by her side. Unfortunately, the Trimble family’s joy was not long lived — and the reverberations of a high-end criminal case were far-reaching.
Marcia Trimble lived with her close-knit family in Green Hills, a highly affluent neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee. The area was considered safe for both adults and children and was a highly sought-after place to grow up.
She was a happy child; a lively little girl that had a gaggle of friends and a bright smile.
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You can see her attending a friend's birthday party, caught on camera for the last time.
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Marcia Trimble was nine-years-old when she went missing while selling Girl Scout Cookies in her neighborhood on February 25th, 1975.
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The disappearance was devastating to the community. Local and state police were involved in the supposed kidnapping, and the FBI even worked on the case for a period. It seemed as if the little girl, once so bright and full of life, had simply disappeared into thin air.
She was found thirty-three days after her initial disappearance, her body fully clothed next to bags of fertilizer in a local garage. She had been sexually assaulted and her hyoid bone had been broken, leading investigators to believe she was strangled to death.
A local neighbor boy, Jeffrey Womack, came under high suspicion. He was one of the last people to see her alive when he turned down a cookie sale at his front door. The fifteen-year-old then came under scrutiny for years by law enforcement in hopes of extorting a guilty confession.
The case went definitively unsolved for thirty-three years, unwittingly matching the number of days Marcia was missing. DNA evidence in 2008 indicted Jerome Sydney Barrett, who had been working in the neighborhood around the time of Marcia's disappearance. DNA evidence excluded Womack from suspicion and exhumed Barrett's expansive criminal record.
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The case changed the landscape of Nashville forever. Police Captain at the time, Mickey Miller, said: "In that moment, Nashville lost its innocence. Our city has never been, and never will be, the same again. Every man, woman, and child knew that if something that horrific could happen to that little girl, it could happen to anyone." Learn more about this tragic story here:
What a heartbreaking story, what a horrible season in Nashville.
You can delve into the Nashville supernatural here, though sometimes we just don’t want the horrors to be true.
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