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WORDS TO DISCOVER
Stories Worth Turning the Page For
Digging Up Bones
What happens when the dead refuse to stay buried?
For decades, Robertson County’s funeral industry operated behind a veil of trust, tradition, and silence. But when graves were opened and long-buried questions began to surface, a troubling story emerged-one involving funeral homes, missing records, community loyalties, and allegations that shook an entire region.
Digging Up Bones is a gripping investigation into the life and legacy of funeral director Robert Lewis Wilks and the funeral business that surrounded him. Through historical records, court documents, local accounts, and cultural reflection, this book explores the hidden world behind the business of death and the people entrusted with caring for the dead.
More than a true-crime story, this is an examination of memory, accountability, grief, and the secrets that small communities often keep buried for generations. As graves are reopened and old wounds revisited, readers are confronted with difficult questions about trust, justice, and the stories we tell about the dead.
Part investigative narrative, part social history, and part reflection on mortality itself, Digging Up Bones takes readers on a haunting journey through one of the most controversial funeral home scandals in Tennessee history.
Some secrets die with the dead. Others wait to be uncovered.
Mother Martyr
Mother Martyr: The Murder of Marcia Trimble is the story of a child’s disappearance, a mother’s transformation, and a city forced to confront the darkness beneath its polished image.
In 1975, Nashville imagined itself as an Emerald City—prosperous, ambitious, musical, and secure. Its neighborhoods appeared orderly, its institutions dependable, and its families protected by an unspoken faith that terrible things happened somewhere else. Then nine-year-old Marcia Trimble disappeared while delivering Girl Scout cookies near her Green Hills home.
Her murder shattered more than one family. It exposed the machinery behind Nashville’s
carefully guarded reputation: police rivalries, political pressure, media spectacle, public panic, false suspects, and a growing industry built around fear. Search teams, helicopters, volunteers, reporters, psychics, and investigators descended upon the case, yet the abundance of attention did not bring swift justice. Instead, confusion hardened into mythology, and suspicion spread across the city.
At the center stood Virginia Trimble, a mother consumed by grief but transformed into a public symbol. Before Marcia, she was a wife and mother shaped by family, faith, duty, and Southern expectations. After Marcia, she became the face of a city’s sorrow—expected to remain dignified while enduring questions, rumors, failures, and decades without answers. Her private loss became public property.
Mother Martyr examines how one murder changed the way Nashville understood childhood, safety, policing, schools, neighborhoods, and strangers. The Emerald City did not disappear, but its illusion of innocence did. Behind the music, monuments, churches, and civic pride remained a harder truth: a city can celebrate progress while failing the people who need it most.
This is not only the story of who killed Marcia Trimble. It is the story of what her death made Nashville become—and what it demanded that her mother become in order to survive. Her name would never leave its conscience.
