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 . The mother of a girl who was murdered 40 years ago finally asked to see the crime scene photos of her daughter 's body and now says she wants revenge . 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 . Jerome Sidney Barrett , 68 , was found guilty of second-degree murder six years ago and a Davidson County Criminal Court jury imposed a sentence of 44 years ( pictured in 2009 ) 'Her mouth was black , ' Ritter said . 'And her face , her head was swollen . It did n't look like Marcia . But to see her other parts of her body looked like Marcia . She said her daughter had vomit across her , her hair was pulled out in parts and there was blood on her scalp . Ritter said she shouted , 'If I had a gun I 'd kill him ! ' Marcia 's body was found 150 yards from her home amid the clutter of a rarely used , windowless garage , under a shower curtain and a child 's wading pool . She had been strangled and sexually assaulted , and her cookie money was missing . Cookies were scattered around the clothed body . A neck bone was fractured . The case was Nashville 's most notorious unsolved murder for 33 years . In 1979 police charged a Trimble neighbor with the slaying , but prosecutors dropped the charges about a year later because of lack of evidence . He was 15 at the time of the crime . Barrett , 68 , was living in Memphis when he was arrested in 2006 . He was brought in after police matched the DNA on the murdered child 's clothing to that of his . The match happened after he was arrested for the 1975 murder of Vanderbilt University student Sarah Vannatta Des Prez . Barrett had been in prison on sex charges between 1974 and 2002 except for about a year when Marcia disappeared . In 2009 he was found guilty of second-degree murder of Marcia and a Davidson County Criminal Court jury imposed a sentence of 44 years .
Virginia Trimble Ritter 's daughter , Marcia , was raped and choked to death by Jerome Sydney Barrett in 1975 . The case was Nashville 's most notorious unsolved murder for 33 years . Ritter , who did not see her daughter 's body at the time , recently asked to see the photos investigators took at the scene . She said she found them disturbing because they showed a man with no shirt on being dragged into an alley behind his house.