Science says that Jerome Barrett was there, in that neighborhood garage where Marcia Trimble lay dead.
The FBI's scientists say the DNA proves it, beyond a statistical doubt. It's Barrett's semen on the shirt the 9-year-old wore the night she was strangled to death, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty.
That DNA is the only piece of evidence that led to Barrett, 62, and put him in the garage on Feb. 25, 1975. At least, that's all the jury knows.
Marcia Trimble's death came in the middle of a crime spree for the then-27-year-old Barrett. He killed just three weeks before Marcia Trimble went missing. All told, he has been charged with six crimes that happened in the early months of 1975. He was caught one night in March 1975, and he became the prime suspect in a string of sex crimes. But it was the DNA that told detectives who to arrest for the homicides.
When 12 people deliberate, they won't know about Barrett's past crimes. All they will know is the DNA, and the lack of any explanation of how it got there without anyone seeing.and this..is what the jurors will not know
Crime spree
In February and March of 1975, police say, Barrett forced himself on several women and told them not to scream — or he would strangle them.
He killed Sarah Des Prez, a Vanderbilt University student who had a few beers on a date and was dead hours later. She probably was raped and suffocated there in her own apartment. Barrett's semen was in the bed, his skin under her fingernails.
Nobody saw him come in. Nobody saw him leave. Nobody charged him for three decades.
Two weeks later, he broke into a Belmont University dorm looking for unlocked doors. He raped a girl at knifepoint, and stole her cufflinks engraved with her initials. A few days after that, Marcia Trimble disappeared while delivering Girl Scout cookies, and the decades-long search began for the young white man from the Green Hills neighborhood who must have done it.
A Hillsboro Village woman was grabbed the next week from behind as she tried to close her umbrella on a rainy night. She fought him off, but she will never forget the eyes.
A young wife walking out of her home to pick up her husband was the next victim. She was forced back into her home, raped for hours at gunpoint. Her husband made it home and was promptly robbed of a watch by the man who assaulted his wife.
On March 12, 1975, Barrett and the police finally met while he rummaged around an apartment complex with a ski mask and two pairs of gloves on. He was on parole out of Shelby County then, for carnal knowledge of a child over 12.
He was soon charged with many of the crimes, and taken to trial for raping the Belmont student when police found her cuff-links in his Jefferson Street apartment.
He was sentenced to 60 years, and nobody thought he would see the light of day again. Police dropped the rest of the assault and rape charges, not knowing modern science would link him to the murders they had investigated that same month.
Collecting DNA
Despite a bad behavior record in prison, state sentencing laws changed, and his release was mandatory 26 years later.
A letter was written by the district attorney to the parole board in 2000, begging that Barrett be kept behind bars.
"It is clear that he is a sexual predator who has already devastated the lives of three women while on parole for raping a fourth," Assistant District Attorney General J. Carlton Drumwright said in the letter.
The known tally grew just a few years later, when cold case detectives reopened the case of who killed Sarah Des Prez. Barrett was a likely suspect. Detective Bill Pridemore and Sgt. Pat Postiglione drove to Memphis, and soon knocked on Barrett's door with a warrant and a cotton swab.
"You're not going to pin that one on me," Barrett told the detectives.
At the time, his sister Gwen Barrett-Lewis said he was a changed man, a role model for her children because of the way he turned his life around after prison.
In Memphis, he spearheaded a neighborhood watch and kept gang members away from his family. He watched over his mother, now in her 80s.
The sister didn't believe her brother, someone she called a gentle giant, was capable of murder.
But investigators returned to Memphis with handcuffs and arrested Barrett
The DNA was a total match to the evidence the killer left behind at Des Prez's Vanderbilt area apartment. He was taken into custody, and the conversation quickly turned to another decades-old murder — Marcia Trimble.
Once Barrett was charged with killing Des Prez, his DNA was entered into the federal CODIS database, where it matched again to an unknown sample from an unsolved crime — the semen stain on Marcia's shirt.
The likelihood of another person with the same DNA would be rarer than 1 in 6 trillion.
"The DNA is Mr. Barrett's to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty," said Jennifer Luttman, chief of the CODIS database at the FBI.
Barrett admitted that the DNA was his, according to the men he lived with while awaiting trial. Sheldon Anter remembers Barrett saying as much after a TV report came on in their cell block about the case.
"He said his DNA is on the young girl, Marcia Trimble," Anter said. "He said he didn't rape her, he killed her." The child's body was found in a neighbor's garage about 100 yards from her home 33 days after she disappeared.
Anter said Barrett was referred to around the jail as a baby killer.
Barrett, watching from a few feet away, lifted his hand and waved away Anter's accusations.
Anter, from Trinidad, was being held under a federal immigration bond at the time. He had been deported once and was facing sure deportation again. But this week, he appeared in court in a suit. He is staying at home with his family, because the state asked the federal government to make him available to testify.
Andrew Napper, a seven-time felon who was also there, says he remembers hearing Barrett say the same thing. Napper will be serving his probation violation sentence in Florida, a transfer arranged by the state.
The jury in Davidson County this week heard from Anter and Napper. They were told of the confession Barrett supposedly made to them, and learned the science behind the DNA match made nearly 33 years after Marcia was murdered.
There are no witnesses who told the jury whether Barrett was in Green Hills that day. Nobody took the stand and said they saw who killed Marcia. And prosecutors, who rested their case Thursday, are counting on jurors to let the stains, and the word of two cellmates, tell the story.
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