Retired Georgia minister found not guilty in 1975 killing of girl in Pennsylvania

MEDIA, Pa. — A retired minister from Georgia was found not guilty Friday in the killing of an 8-year-old girl whose remains were found in a southeastern Pennsylvania park almost a half-century ago.

A jury acquitted David Zandstra, 84, of the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, after deliberating for an hour following a four-day trial.

Zandstra was charged in the summer of 2023 with kidnapping and killing Gretchen Harrington, who disappeared in 1975 while walking alone to a Bible camp at a chapel where Zandstra was a pastor. Her body was found two months later by a jogger in Ridley Creek State Park in Media, Pennsylvania.

Harrington was offered a ride by Zandstra the day she disappeared, the Delaware County district attorney said when the charges were filed. Prosecutors said Zandstra had confessed to the killing after investigators received new information and then interviewed the retired minister.

His attorney, Mark Much, told jurors that detectives pressured and tricked Zandstra into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. Defense attorneys said there was no physical evidence linking the retired minister to the girl’s death and that police had investigated other suspects who were more likely to be the killer.

Defense attorney Christopher Boggs told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Zandstra’s family was glad he could come home after 18 months in custody.

In the days after the girl disappeared, hundreds of people searched nearby wooded areas, and authorities distributed more than 2,000 leaflets and set up a 24-hour hotline that took hundreds of calls, The Inquirer reported.

When the girl’s body was found, her clothing was “folded and in a neat pile” near her body with her underwear hanging from a tree branch “like a flag … as if to call attention to the place,” the newspaper said at the time.