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 didn'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 . After seeing the photos, Ritter said she shouted, 'If I had a gun I'd kill him!'