Daily Mail
May 11, 2015
The mother of a girl who was murdered 40 years ago has spoke of the horror of recently seeing crime scene photos of her daughter’s body.
Virginia Trimble Ritter’s daughter, Marcia, was raped and choked to death by Jerome Sydney Barrett in 1975.
Marcia’s body was found 33 days after she disappeared and Ritter’s then-husband advised her against seeing the body and the crime scene photos.
Charlie, who died in 1989, wanted their last memory to be of her running in and out of the house, ‘the real Marcia.’
But Ritter told The Tennessean, last year it was a decision she now regrets.
‘I have never seen a close-up photo and I want to. I’m going to.’
She had declined to see the photos for several decades, and not even after Barrett was convicted 33 years later.
But last year she asked Mickey Miller, Metro police lead investigator who worked on the case if she could see them.
She says he tried to convince her not to see them, but she persisted and she viewed them on his laptop.
‘Her mouth was black,’ Ritter said.