In 1975, nine-year-old Julia Green School student Marcia Trimble disappeared from her Green Hills home and was eventually found strangled nearby. I was 11, a fifth-grader at Percy Priest. I never knew her, but girls in my class did. My Boy Scout troop went out to search for her while she was missing: I remember asking what to do if we found her, unable to imagine we would not find her alive.
Since 1998, I have lived a couple of hundred yards from the site on Estes Road where her body was discovered. My own daughter went to Julia Green, as did my wife Nicki, who grew up on the same street where we now live, Sneed Road. I was a business partner of John Egerton, whose son was one of the last people to see Marcia alive. I am acquainted or connected with many people whose lives this murder impacted. And between 2007 and 2009, I covered the resolution of the Trimble case for NashvillePost.com and the Nashville City Paper.
I deeply dislike the genre of “true-crime” reportage, which I find inherently exploitative. I have written about this case only because circumstances have called for me to do so. I do not wish to be known as an expert on it, but the fact is that it has been part of my experience of living in Nashville for more than 35 years. This page collects my reporting and commentary on the Trimble case.
Call-in TV show discussing case
Nashville television station WTVF devoted an hour-long episode of its call-in news show “Openline” to the Trimble case in June 2008. Anchor Rhori Johnston and I fielded the calls. Here’s the audio:
- Part 1 — Anchor’s intro.
- Part 2 — “People who have moved here in the past 20 years would probably have a hard time understanding how intimate it all felt.”
- Part 3 — On lost innocence.
- Part 4 — Could killer have worked in neighborhood?
- Part 5 — Footage of June 2008 press conference with Thurman, Serpas.
- Part 6 — On treatment of Womack and Egerton.
- Part 7 — The Barrett mystery.
- Part 8 — An almost-miscarriage of justice.
- Part 9 — Marcia Trimble’s mother calls in to the show.
- Part 10 — Womack’s “use immunity” agreement; upcoming Des Prez trial.
