NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A childhood friend of Marcia Trimble is sharing more about the events that she said changed her life.

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Meredith Harris has not talked about Trimble’s slaying in 33 years.

Trimble’s neighborhood went from a picture of suburban perfection to suspicion, and a young man went from baby sitter to suspected rapist and killer in the aftermath.

There may be no Nashville address with a legacy like 4009 Copeland Drive. People still refer to it as where Trimble lived.

“I love going back to the neighborhood, it’s beautiful,” Harris said.

Harris lived across the street from Trimble. She said in many ways, her life has been shaped by Trimble's death by what was said and what went unspoken. Trimble was found dead about a month after disappearing in 1975. She was last seen delivering Girl Scout cookies in her Green Hills neighborhood.

“I had never heard the word rape in connection with Marcia until I was 18 or 19. … They had said something about the girl who was raped and murdered and I thought, ‘Raped and murdered? What?’ For me, what I had made peace with as a little girl was my friend had been kidnapped and strangled,” Harris said.

At the time, police focused almost exclusively on Trimble’s neighbors. Former officers on the case have since said that was a mistake.

Even while rapes had increased at a startling rate the month Trimble was slain -- at least one young woman had been strangled to death -- the suspicion was on people close by and on something unsavory.

“I was infuriated the first time I read those reports about the sex games the neighborhood kids played. We played lots of games. We played, you know, water gun fights and we played tag, and we played swinging statues. I told my mom, I said, ‘What are they talking about?’ And Mom said, ‘I think one of the older kids talked about going to a party where they played spin the bottle, and they wrote it up in the paper as a sex game,’” Harris said.

Harris said every adult man except her father was seen as a potential suspect. He escaped scrutiny because he was arguing a case in a New York City courtroom that day and dozens of people could vouch for him.

It was different for her neighbor, 15-year-old Jeffrey Womack, who was charged four years later in Trimble’s death. He was later cleared but never truly exonerated.

“And I remember one of the questions was, ‘Is he scary? Was he scary?’ Well, I think any 15-year-old boy is going to be scary to a little girl. He was very sociable. I had a chance to talk to him a long time ago, we walked into Burger King and it was him, I recognized him immediately. I thought, ‘That has got to be Jeffrey.’ And I've always been a little sad that I didn't say something to him, you know, I didn't, so I think I would say that I want him to know that we never thought he did it, that we believed that he was innocent,” Harris said.

Jerome Barrett’s name has entered into the history of the case in recent months.

He still hasn't been charged, but according to sources close to the case, his DNA matches evidence from the Trimble crime scene.

Meredith said she prays there hasn’t been a mistake like there was with Womack. She said she's also troubled by the inference that even the sight of a black man would have sounded alarms in Green Hills. She said that's to a degree racist thinking and that it’s just wrong.

“You know, I just don't think that even then, things were like that. I think a black man in our neighborhood might have just as easily have been overlooked because he was clearly a handyman, a worker man. I don't think it would have been particularly noteworthy. … What I wonder is why he was so excluded? The cynical part of me feels like they just picked somebody who was unprotected and they targeted him. … They really believed they knew who did it,” she said.

Few of the families stayed in the neighborhood after Trimble’s death. Most of them moved away.

Harris said she wants to dispel a perception that the children from Copeland Drive didn't amount to much. She said they are doctors, lawyers, parents and professionals who were forced -- in a way -- to grow up too soon.