MEDIA, Pa. (AP) – A retired Georgia minister was found not guilty Friday of killing an 8-year-old girl whose remains were found in a southeastern Pennsylvania park nearly half a century ago.
A jury acquitted 84-year-old David Zandstra of the Atlanta suburb of Marietta after an hour of deliberation following a four-day trial.
Zandstra was charged in the summer of 2023 with the kidnapping and murder of Gretchen Harrington, who disappeared in 1975 while walking alone to Bible camp at a chapel where Zandstra was a pastor. Her body was found two months later by a jogger at Ridley Creek State Park in Media, Pennsylvania.
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Harrington was offered a ride by Zandstra the day she disappeared, the Delaware County district attorney said when charges were filed. Prosecutors said Zandstra confessed to the murder after investigators received new information and subsequently interviewed the retired minister.
His attorney, Mark Much, told jurors that detectives pressured and tricked Zandstra into confessing to a crime he did not commit. Defense lawyers said there was no physical evidence linking the retired minister to the girl's death and that police had been investigating other suspects who were more likely to be the killer.
Attorney Christopher Boggs told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Zandstra's family was happy he could come home after 18 months in custody.
In the days after the girl disappeared, hundreds of people searched nearby wooded areas, authorities distributed more than 2,000 fliers and set up a 24-hour hotline that answered hundreds of calls, The Inquirer reported.
When the girl's body was found, her clothes were “folded and in a neat pile” next to her body, while her underwear hung from a tree branch “like a flag … as if to draw attention to the spot,” the newspaper said . the time.
