For three decades Nashville, Tenn., police followed the murder case of 9-year-old Marcia Trimble, who disappeared while selling Girl Scout cookies in 1975.
Police were so desperate to solve this case that, by the mid-1990s, they acquired more than 200 blood samples from people living across an entire neighborhood. A teenager had been arrested years ago in the case. Lab results and polygraph exams set him free, but even so, his name became forever linked with the case.
Now, police say he is innocent.
On Friday, a grand jury charged another man -- a 61-year-old convicted rapist -- with the murder.
Police now say they were following the wrong profile. They thought the criminal lived near the crime scene. They thought he was young. They thought he was white. The man they arrested fit none of these descriptions.
Follow the coverage of this story and ask yourself a few questions:
- What are the most infamous cases in your city? Who is working on them?
- How does the arrest in the Trimble case resonate with cold case detectives and victims' families everywhere who live for "the big break"?
- Look back at the assumptions of cold cases in your communities. What are those assumptions based on? Clinical fact?
- Many newsrooms have lost the most senior journalists who know the history of their town. Who will you turn to on deadline to help you sort through the background of old cases that readers/viewers/listeners may have more institutional background on than reporters?
The Trimble story serves as a good reminder that newsrooms should build splash pages for ongoing stories. Links to stories and videos can be added as the story unfolds throughout the years. When you don't do this, the coverage becomes disjointed, and online users miss the depth of coverage you have provided over the years. When the story breaks, you rarely have time to compile these kinds of massive Web collections. Do them as the story unfolds.
Here are some links to news organizations' coverage of the Trimble case:
