In February 1975, a 9-year-old Girl Scout crossed a quiet Nashville street to collect her cookie money and vanished.
[music] 33 days later, she was found barely 200 yd from home in a place searchers had already checked.
It would take 33 more years to learn who left her there.
This is the story of Marsha Trimble.
And this is Gravedoc.
Before we open this case, tell me where you’re watching from tonight and what time it is.
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Marsha Virginia Trimble was born in March of 1965, [music] the youngest child of Virginia and Charles Trimble, and the little sister of her older brother, Chuck.
The people who knew her described the same girl over and over, bright, curious, kind, [music] and quick with a wide, easy smile.
She had a way of making everyone around her laugh.
[music] And in the Treble household, she was the center of the joy.
She was happiest outside.
On most afternoons, you could find her rolling down the neighborhood sidewalks on her roller skates, taking in every corner of the world around her.
When she came inside, she drew and wrote.
She painted landscapes.
She copied out Bible verses in her own careful artwork.
She even created her own comic book, [music] a story the people who read it called Thoughtful and Surprisingly Deep for a girl her age.
Home was Green Hills, an affluent treelined part of Nashville.
Even today, it’s one of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods, anchored by one of the busiest shopping districts in Middle Tennessee.
In the mid 1970s, it was the kind of place where kids played outside until the street lights came on and parents didn’t think twice about it.
In 1975, Marsha was 9 years old and in the fourth grade.
Her classmates knew her as one of the funniest kids in the room, and her teachers knew her as one of the sharpest.
That year, she added something new to her life.
She joined the Girl Scouts.
Her mother, Virginia, led [music] her troop, and Marcia was thrilled.
It was her very first year in scouting.
[music] That February, the troop kicked off its annual cookie sale.
The money paid for camping trips and activities, and the girls sold doortodoor, usually in pairs.
Any scout who sold 50 boxes earned a badge for the sash on her uniform.
For a firstear scout like Marcia, that badge meant something.
[music] On Tuesday, February 25th, 1975, she went to school that morning like any other day.
She came home for lunch, watched a little television, and in the early afternoon headed back out to keep selling.
She teamed up with a 10-year-old boy from her street, a classmate, and a friend of her brother, Chuck.
The two of them had made their rounds together before.
This time, part of the job was collecting money from neighbors who had already received their cookies but hadn’t paid yet.
They were never alone on these trips.
Virginia always walked with them.
Along the way, they stopped at Marsha’s grandmother’s house, and Marca and her mother went inside for a short visit.
Marsha’s friend wandered off to a nearby court where [music] a group of neighborhood boys, Chuck among them, had a basketball game going.
By the time Marsha was ready to get back to work, he was having too much fun to leave.
So, Marsha made a small decision.
She would handle the next stop herself.
The Maxwell family lived directly across the street from her grandmother.
Marsha knew them well.
They had a new baby, and whenever she visited her grandmother, she’d run over to play with the little one.
A few days earlier, she had sold cookies [music] to Mrs.
Mary Maxwell, and this was a chance to collect.
It would take no time at all.
[music] That’s why she left her coat behind.
She told her mother and grandmother she’d be right back.
Virginia stayave inside.
It was around 5:20 in the evening when Marsha Trimble stepped out the door and started [music] across the street.
It was a walk she’d made more times than anyone could count.
But on this evening, she wasn’t the only one out on that street.
By 6:00, the sky over Green Hills had gone dark, and Marsha still hadn’t come back.
Virginia stepped onto her mother’s front porch and called her daughter’s name.
There was no answer.
At first, it was the kind of call every parent makes.
A little impatient, [music] expecting a voice from somewhere down the block.
Then she called again, then again.
Marca knew the rules.
The neighborhood was quiet and safe, but she wasn’t allowed to wander off alone.
And she was a girl who listened.
40 minutes for a trip across the street didn’t [music] make sense.
The family started searching.
They checked the yards, the sidewalks, [music] the houses where Marsha might have stopped to sell a box or two.
Word spread fast the way it does on a close street.
And soon, friends and neighbors were pulling on jackets and joining in.
[music] Flashlights cutting across lawns and driveways in the cold February air.
Virginia went straight to the one place her daughter had said she was going.
She knocked on Mary Maxwell’s door.
Mary remembered seeing Marcia but not at her door.
She told Virginia that earlier that evening she’d noticed Marcia out front but at the house next door standing on the neighbor’s property.
And Marcia wasn’t by herself.
There was a man with her and a child who looked younger than Marcia.
Mary hadn’t thought twice about it.
In a neighborhood like Green Hills, a little girl chatting with someone on the sidewalk didn’t look like anything at all.
She figured Marcia had run into a friend [music] and would wander over in a minute to see the baby and collect her cookie money.
So, she waited.
But Marcia never came up the walk.
She never knocked.
After a while, Mary assumed the girl had moved on to other houses and would swing by later.
Now, standing across from a mother whose daughter was missing, Mary tried to remember the man.
She couldn’t give a face.
She hadn’t been paying that kind of attention.
What she could describe was his size.
He was tall, well over 6 ft, maybe 6’3 [music] or more with a heavy, powerful build.
And he’d been wearing an armystyle camouflage shirt.
That was it.
At around 7:00, an hour after the first call from the porch, the family phoned the police.
Officers arrived and launched a search right away.
Volunteers who’d already been combing the block were joined by more and more people as the news traveled across Green Hills.
Through the night, the search kept going.
Helicopters thudded overhead, sweeping search lights across rooftops [music] and backyards and the dark gaps between houses.
People walked the streets until [music] morning.
They found nothing.
Not a mitten, not a cookie box, not a single sign of where Marsha had gone.
By the next day, this was no longer a neighborhood search.
Nashville police, state investigators, and the FBI were all on the case, and the working theory was the one every parent fears most.
Investigators believed Marsha Trimble had been taken.
Somewhere in that first long night, Virginia had started going back over every house Marsha had sold to, [music] every customer, every stop on her route, and one name kept coming back to her.
There was a teenage boy who lived nearby.
A few days earlier, he’d bought cookies from Marsha, and he [music] still hadn’t paid.
If Marsha had decided to collect from him on her way, his house was close [music] enough that it would have been an easy detour.
And there was something else Virginia couldn’t stop thinking about.
Marsha had told her and told some of her friends that she was afraid of this boy.
Police found the boy that same night.
His name was Jeffrey Wulmarmac and he was 15 years old.
Around the neighborhood, he had a reputation.
He got [music] into fights, picked arguments, and had a habit of bothering the younger kids on the street.
That was why Marsha had confided that he scared her.
To a 9-year-old, a teenager like that was someone you went out of your way to avoid.
Jeffrey didn’t deny seeing her.
He told investigators that yes, Marsha had come by his house that evening to collect for the cookies, but he [music] said he’d sent her away.
He didn’t have the money, he explained, [music] and his mother wasn’t home from work yet to give it to him.
After that, he said he’d gone over to his boss’s house nearby and stayed there the rest of the evening.
Then officers searched him.
In his [music] pockets, they found a handful of coins.
Cookies in 1975 cost very little, the kind of amount a boy could cover with pocket change, which made his story that he couldn’t pay look shaky.
They also found a sealed condom.
For a 15-year-old being questioned about a missing little girl, investigators saw it as one more reason not to take his word at face value.
And there was another detail that tightened [music] the knot.
Virginia told police that Marsha had left that afternoon carrying some coins from her sales and what was in Jeffrey’s pockets looked uncomfortably similar to investigators.
It was starting to add up.
A teenager Marsha was afraid of a visit he admitted to a story about money that didn’t hold [music] together.
Police wanted to take him in, but Jeffrey had something they couldn’t get around.
[music] He had an alibi, and it was solid.
At the time, Mary Maxwell saw Marsha standing outside the house next door, [music] Jeffrey was already sitting down to dinner with his boss’s family.
He’d stayed at their house the entire evening, right up until a/4 to 10 that night when police showed up at the door looking for him.
Multiple people could vouch for where he’d been.
Without evidence placing him with Marsha at the critical moment, police couldn’t hold him.
Jeffrey went home.
Later, he explained the condom.
He said he was seeing a girl who lived on the street, but walking free wasn’t the same as being cleared.
Jeffrey remained a person of interest.
His mother hired a lawyer and made it clear her son wouldn’t be answering any more questions unless a court ordered it.
To many in Green Hills, that looked like a family with something to hide.
Neighbors turned cold.
People [music] talked.
Jeffrey and his family found themselves treated as outcasts on their [music] own street.
Meanwhile, the case was everywhere.
By the second day, Marsha Trimble’s disappearance had become one of the biggest stories in Nashville.
A little girl scout had vanished in the middle of an affluent neighborhood just steps from her grandmother’s house in the early evening [music] without a single witness who could say what happened next.
It didn’t seem possible.
The search only grew.
Hundreds of officers took part.
Search dogs worked the yards and wooded lots.
Helicopters made pass after pass over green hills.
Volunteers turned out by the hundreds, walking the same streets, checking the same garages and sheds and crawl spaces day after day.
Day after day, they came back with nothing.
February turned into March.
The posters faded on the telephone poles.
And then a date arrived that the Trimble family had been dreading.
March 28th was Marsha’s birthday.
She would have been turning 10.
It had been 31 days since she walked out her grandmother’s door, and [music] on what should have been a day of cake and presents, her family spent it searching for her.
Virginia sat down with reporters that week, and [music] she didn’t sound like a woman who had given up.
“Easter was coming,” she [music] said, and Easter is a time when miracles happen.
She believed her daughter would be found soon.
2 days later on Easter Sunday morning, a man in the neighborhood walked out to the garage behind his house to grab a few things before his family arrived for lunch.
John Thorp was expecting a house full of relatives that Easter Sunday.
Before they arrived, he headed out to the old garage at the back of his yard to dig out a few things he needed for the afternoon.
It was cool and dim inside, crowded with the usual clutter of a suburban backyard.
He moved past the tools and stacked supplies toward the back.
In a tucked away corner, he saw something that stopped him cold.
A little girl was lying there, face down.
It took him only a moment to understand who she was.
Everyone in Nashville knew that face by now.
It had been on every newscast and every front page for more than a month.
He had found Marca Trimble.
She was gone.
33 days after she walked out of her grandmother’s house, 2 days after what should have been her 10th [music] birthday, on the morning her mother had hoped would bring a miracle.
And the garage where she lay was only about 200 yd from her own front door.
The discovery raised a question that would haunt this case for decades.
How had no one found her?
That garage wasn’t some forgotten corner of the county.
It sat right in the middle of the search zone, [music] and it had been checked.
Not once but several times, including with search dogs.
Police couldn’t understand how they’d missed her.
The first theory was that someone must have brought her there recently, long after the searches had moved on.
The medical examiner shut that idea down.
[music] The evidence showed Marsha had been in that exact spot since the day she disappeared.
She had been there the entire time.
Police took John Thorp in for questioning, as they would anyone who made a discovery like that.
He agreed to a polygraph, passed, [music] and was ruled out as a suspect.
But it was his wife’s story that left investigators shaking their heads.
Just 2 days before Easter, [music] she had gone into that same garage looking for a flower pot.
Worried there might be snakes, she brought along the family’s German Shepherd.
She would later insist that she looked directly at the area where Marcia was found.
She even walked into that very corner.
She saw nothing.
And the dog, an animal with a nose built for this, never reacted at all.
Marcia wasn’t buried or concealed.
She was lying in plain view.
In total, more than 20 people had stood inside that garage during the month she was missing.
Police officers, special agents, volunteers, [music] the family who lived there.
Every one of them had looked around.
Not one of them saw her.
To this day, no one has ever been able to fully explain how that happened.
Marca was found fully dressed in the clothes she’d worn that afternoon.
She was lying on a bag of fertilizer, a shower curtain draped partly over her, and on top of her sat several of the Girl Scout cookie boxes she’d been carrying.
The garage’s [music] cool, dry air had preserved her remarkably well over those 5 weeks.
The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide.
Investigators also recovered biological evidence from her clothing.
Evidence that could one day point to [music] the person who’d been with her in that garage.
But in 1975, the science to read it didn’t [music] exist yet.
So it was carefully collected, sealed, and stored away, waiting.
Nashville had spent a month praying Marsha would come home.
Now it wanted answers, and it wanted someone to blame.
And as the cameras crowded around the Trimble family, [music] the city’s attention began to drift somewhere no one would have expected toward Marsha’s own mother.
In the days after Marsha was found, the Trimble family couldn’t step outside without a camera in their faces.
The story had gripped Nashville for a month, and now it consumed the city.
Reporters camped near the house and called at all hours.
Every network wanted the first sitdown with the grieving parents.
According to some accounts, one of the people who came knocking on their door was a young Oprah Winfrey.
Virginia and Charles turned them all away.
They were worn down by 33 days of searching, hoping, and waiting.
And now they were burying their little girl.
They didn’t want to share that with anyone.
But the public kept watching, and some people didn’t like what they saw.
Through the entire ordeal, Virginia Trimble had kept an unusually steady face.
At press [music] conferences, on the street, in front of the cameras, no one ever saw her break down.
No tears in public, no outbursts.
To a city expecting a mother shattered by grief, her composure looked wrong.
And slowly, quietly, people began to wonder [music] whether she knew more than she was saying.
Rumors started to circulate that Marsha’s own mother might somehow have been involved.
The people closest to Virginia were furious.
Friends and relatives spoke up to defend her.
Virginia, they said, was a woman of deep faith [music] who trusted God through everything, and she refused to be seen as [music] weak in front of strangers.
What the cameras never saw was what happened after the front door [music] closed.
Inside that house, she cried.
She [music] grieved.
She was falling apart like any mother would.
The whispers eventually faded.
But the investigation was heading towards something [music] just as painful.
It was running out of road.
Despite the manpower, despite the FBI, despite a month of searching in a crime scene less than a mile from home, investigators had nothing concrete to follow, no murder weapon, no [music] confession, no witness who could put a name to the tall man and camouflage Mary Maxwell had seen.
That left one person, Jeffrey Wulmarmac, the teenager with the coins in his pocket [music] and the story about money that didn’t quite add up, was still the only person of interest in the case.
His alibi had kept him out of a cell, but it hadn’t kept him out of the spotlight.
Police kept watching him.
Two years passed.
By then, Jeffree was 17, working at a local restaurant.
One [music] day, a new co-orker showed up on the job, friendly and easy to talk to.
The two hit it off.
[music] The new hire was an undercover police officer.
The plan was simple.
Get close, earn his trust, [music] and wait for him to slip.
Somewhere in the late night shifts and casual conversations, [music] maybe Jeffrey would say something about February 25th, 1975.
He never did.
Not a word.
Jeffrey went on to take two more polygraph tests.
Neither one produced enough to charge him, but investigators weren’t letting go.
In 1980, 5 years after Marsha disappeared, police arrested Jeffrey Wac [music] and charged him with her murder.
For the Trimble family, it may have felt like the moment they’d been waiting for.
It didn’t last.
The court threw out the charge for lack of evidence.
Once again, Jeffrey walked free.
Once again, the case went cold.
For years, it stayed that way.
[music] The file sat on the shelf.
Marsha’s school picture faded in the old newspaper [music] clippings, and somewhere in a police evidence room, the clothing she’d been found in sat sealed away, holding a secret no one in 1975 had been able to read.
Then, as the 1980s came to a close, a new kind of science began changing criminal investigations across America.
For the first time, detectives in Nashville had a way to ask that evidence a question.
By 1990, DNA testing had moved out of the laboratory and into the courtroom, [music] and Nashville investigators were ready to use it.
They went back to Green Hills with a court order.
Every man and teenage boy who could realistically have been involved was asked for a sample along with anyone whose name had ever come up, anyone with access to the neighborhood, and anyone [music] the original investigation had circled.
In all, 96 different DNA profiles were collected and compared against the evidence from Marsha’s clothing.
One of those samples belonged to Jeffrey Wac.
For 15 years, he had carried the weight of this case.
He’d been searched, watched, befriended by an undercover cop, run through polygraphs, arrested, and charged.
A whole neighborhood had decided what kind of person he was.
His DNA didn’t match.
Neither did anyone else’s.
96 profiles, and not a single one lined up with the evidence.
Whoever had been in that garage with Marsha, wasn’t [music] on the list.
And the investigation’s only real suspect, the boy so many people had been certain [music] about, was now clear.
The case went quiet again for most of another two decades.
Then in 2007, a cold case review put Marsha’s file back on the table.
This time, a forensic specialist went over her clothing with techniques that hadn’t existed in 1975 or even in 1990.
And on one of the garments, the specialist recovered a new DNA profile.
That profile was entered into COTUS, the FBI’s national DNA database.
[music] It was built in the late 1990s and holds samples from convicted offenders along with evidence from crimes that remain unsolved.
Detectives had run long shots before.
This time, the system came back with something.
It wasn’t a name, not yet.
But the DNA in Marsha’s case matched evidence from a different unsolved [music] Nashville case.
A case that had happened just 23 days before she disappeared.
Her name was Sarah De Prey.
Sarah was 19 years old, a student near Vanderbilt University about 4 miles from the garage where Marsha was found.
She lived on her own in an apartment by campus and she was the daughter of a professor at the university she attended.
By every account, she had a bright future ahead of her.
Her case, like Marsha’s, had gone unsolved for more than 30 years.
And no one in all that time had ever connected the two.
Two homicides 3 weeks and a few miles apart [music] in the same city in the same winter.
The killer of a college student and the killer of a 9-year-old girl scout had always been treated as two different people.
Now, the science said otherwise.
Investigators started pulling other files from the same months and the same part of Nashville, looking for anything that fit the pattern.
And on December 3rd, 2007, nearly 33 years after Marsha stepped out her grandmother’s front door, [music] detectives stood up in front of the cameras with an announcement Nashville had been waiting more than three decades to hear.
They had a name.
The man’s name was Jerome Barrett.
When detectives arrested him in December 2007, he was 60 years old.
But in the winter of 1975, he had been about 29 or 30.
That made him a grown man moving through Nashville at the very moment two families there [music] lost everything.
And he was no stranger to the justice system.
In February of 1975, about 2 weeks after Sarah Dup Prey was killed and just days before Marsha vanished, [music] Barrett kidnapped and assaulted a young woman who was a student at Belmont, one of the colleges a short drive from Green Hills.
He was finally identified and arrested on March 12th, around 2 weeks after Marsha disappeared.
At that moment, the girl everyone was searching for was still lying in a garage less than a mile from where he’d been working.
At least one source says his record also included other convictions for violence against women and children.
He was tried and convicted in the Belmont case, though the records available don’t say how long he actually served.
Then investigators uncovered the detail that made the Green Hills connection click into place.
In February of 1975, Jerome Barrett had been doing work in Marsh’s neighborhood.
He wasn’t a stranger passing through.
He’d been on those streets among those houses, close enough to see a 9-year-old girl in a Girl Scout uniform, going doortodoor with her cookie order.
On June 6th, 2008, Jerome Barrett went on trial before a jury in Davidson County charged with firstdegree murder in the death of Marcia Trimble.
What came out in that courtroom was hard for anyone who’d followed this case to hear.
Prosecutors presented evidence that back in 1975 [music] after his arrest in the Belmont case, Barrett had talked about Marsha’s case during a conversation at Nashville’s Criminal Justice Center.
During that interrogation, he allegedly made statements that amounted to taking responsibility for it.
He denied one part of what happened to her, but he didn’t deny being there.
And nothing happened.
He wasn’t arrested for it.
He wasn’t charged.
Somehow those statements never made it into the police system as [music] a lead.
For the next three decades, while Jeffrey Wac carried the suspicion [music] of an entire neighborhood, the words of the man the DNA would one day identify sat buried and forgotten.
It went further.
While Barrett was serving time, he reportedly told another inmate that he’d killed four girls with blue eyes.
That claim didn’t lead anywhere either.
No one connected it back to the little girl from Green Hills.
Barrett never gave a full account of what happened on February 25th, 1975.
But investigators pieced together what they believe took place.
He was working in the neighborhood that afternoon.
He saw Marsha walking alone, likely on her way across the street to the Maxwell’s house to collect for her cookies.
He stopped her before she ever reached the door.
And that, police believe, was the moment Mary Maxwell glanced out [music] and noticed a little girl talking with a tall, powerfully built man and thought nothing of it.
From there, he led her to the garage.
Investigators don’t believe any of it was planned.
[music] They describe it as a crime of opportunity.
And they’ve said that if Marca hadn’t been on that street, it would likely have been another child who happened to be alone in the neighborhood that day.
Even now, one piece of the scene has never [music] been explained.
Mary Maxwell had seen a second child standing with Marsha and the man.
No one ever learned who that child was.
After 33 years, the Trimble family had a name, a face, [music] and a trial.
All that was left was the verdict.
On July 18th, 2009, [music] Jerome Barrett stood before the court to hear his sentence for the death of Marsha Trimble, 44 years in prison.
By then, he had already faced a jury for Sarah De [music] Prey.
In that separate trial, he was sentenced to life in prison.
The two cases that Nashville had kept apart for more than three decades finally ended in the same place with the same man behind bars.
For the families, there was relief.
But there was no way to give back what had been taken.
For Virginia and Charles Trimble, the years after Marcia’s death were a slow, quiet unraveling.
They stayed married for 14 more years after they lost her, but they carried the loss in very different ways.
Virginia couldn’t bring herself to leave the house.
Every room held a memory of Marcia, [music] her laugh in the hallway, her drawings, the sound of her skates on the sidewalk out front.
For Virginia, staying meant staying close to her daughter.
For Charles, it was the [music] opposite.
The same walls that comforted his wife were tormenting him.
Everywhere he looked, he saw the little girl who was supposed to grow up in that house, and it wore him down a little more every day.
He needed to get out.
In 1989, Charles asked for a divorce.
He wanted to leave the house behind [music] and finally have some room to breathe.
He never got the chance.
On September 11th, 1989, just 3 days after the divorce was finalized, Charles Trimble died.
He had spent 14 years waiting for someone to answer for what happened to his daughter.
He died 18 years before anyone ever spoke Jerome Barrett’s name.
Virginia lived to see it.
She sat in the courtroom through the trial.
The mother who had once been [music] whispered about, who had kept her grief behind closed doors while the city judged her for it.
And when it was over, she said what she felt was relief.
After all those years, her little girl had finally gotten justice.
Marsha Trimble was 9 years old.
She loved roller skates and Bible verses and making people laugh.
She was proud of her Girl Scout uniform [music] and determined to earn that badge.
On a February evening in 1975, she walked across the street in a neighborhood where everyone felt safe.
And it took this city 34 years to learn the truth about what happened next.
Behind that answer were decades of mistakes.
There was a garage that was searched again and again while she lay inside it.
There was a teenager who spent years under suspicion for [music] something he didn’t do and a mother who was doubted for grieving in private.
There were words from the real killer that sat ignored in a forgotten file.
And in the end, it was a few traces of evidence kept carefully on a shelf for 32 years that finally spoke for her.
If you stayed with me to the end, leave the words justice for Marsha.
It tells me who was here for the whole story and it helps make sure this isn’t just another case file.
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