A former minister was acquitted on Friday of murder in the 1975 killing of Gretchen Harrington, who was 8 years old when she was abducted on her way to a Bible camp outside Philadelphia and beaten to death.
It took jurors about an hour to reach a verdict in the case of the former minister, David Zandstra, 84, whose lawyers had vigorously argued during the four-day trial that their client had been coerced into confessing to a crime that had confounded investigators for decades.
In addition to being cleared on counts of first-, second- and third-degree murder, Mr. Zandstra was also found not guilty on all other charges, including criminal homicide, kidnapping of a minor and possessing an instrument of crime.
Mr. Zandstra had served as a pastor at the Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church in Broomall, Pa., which is where Gretchen was headed on morning of Aug. 15, 1975, when she disappeared. The church was less than half a mile down the road from her home.
A hiker discovered her remains two months later in Ridley Creek State Park, which is about 25 miles west of Philadelphia in Delaware County, Pa.
In a statement issued after the verdict, Christopher Boggs, one of Mr. Zandstra’s lawyers, said that his client had steadfastly maintained his innocence over the years.
“We are happy to have Mr. Zandstra returned to his family,” he said. “Criminal trials in this country are amazing things and we thank the jury for their hard work this week. Our hearts along with all of Delaware County still break for the Harrington family who deserve an end to the nightmare of losing a family member.”
Prosecutors did not immediately respond for a request for comment on Friday, but in remarks to reporters after the verdict in the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas, the county’s deputy district attorney, Geoffrey Paine, stood by the decision to charge Mr. Zandstra in 2023. Still, Mr. Paine acknowledged the difficulty of getting a conviction in the case and said that the prosecution’s case had been hindered by some witnesses being unavailable, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
“We have made a commitment to the families of all of our cold-case victims,” he said, “and we’re not going to change that commitment based on one verdict in one case.”
Representatives for the Harrington family did not immediately comment on the verdict.
Mr. Zandstra’s defense team sought to portray him to the jury of six men and six women as a confused man who had been manipulated by investigators. Mark P. Much, Mr. Zandstra’s other lawyer, said they had exploited his age and his trustingness during an hourslong interview.
Detectives with the Pennsylvania State Police had said that Mr. Zandstra, who was living in Georgia at the time that they questioned him in 2023, admitted that he had driven Gretchen to a wooded area and then told Gretchen to remove her clothes.
She refused, according to a criminal complaint, which said that the former pastor told the authorities that he had ejaculated while Gretchen was in the vehicle with him. After that, investigators detailed in the complaint, he struck Gretchen with his fist and she began bleeding from her head. Mr. Zandstra proceeded to tell the police that he had “attempted to cover up her half-naked body with sticks and then he left the area,” realizing that Gretchen appeared to be dead, the complaint said.
During the trial, Mr. Zandstra’s lawyers argued that prosecutors had tried to compensate for the lack of physical evidence connecting him to Gretchen’s murder by coercing him into confessing.
One of the detectives who interviewed Mr. Zandstra was questioned on Thursday about claims that he made that investigators had recovered blood from rocks at the crime scene, The Delaware County Times reported. The detective told Mr. Zandstra that the authorities would send his DNA to other states where he had served as a minister to see if he had been involved in any other crimes.
“I was being deceptive,” the detective said.
“You were lying,” Mr. Much replied.
“I was being deceptive,” the detective repeated.
Mr. Zandstra emerged as a potential suspect after the 2022 release of a book about Gretchen’s abduction and murder that was written by two journalists, Mike Mathis and Joanna Falcone Sullivan.
He agreed to be interviewed for the book, telling one of the authors that one of the Bible school’s teachers had asked him if he had seen Gretchen when she was missing and that he had answered “no.”
“The jury spoke,” Ms. Sullivan, who attended most of the trial, said in an interview on Friday. “The case wasn’t strong enough.”
Not long after the book was published, a woman contacted the police and pointed them to Mr. Zandstra as a possible suspect, saying that he had molested her around the same time as Gretchen’s disappearance.
She told investigators that she had gone to school with Gretchen and was also friends with Mr. Zandstra’s daughters. During two sleepovers at the Zandstra home, the woman said, she had been awakened by Mr. Zandstra touching her in the groin.
She also provided investigators with a diary that she had kept as a child. In one entry from Sept. 15, 1975, she wrote: “Guess what? A man tried to kidnap Holly twice,” referring to a girl in her class.
“It’s a secret so I can’t tell anyone, but I think he might be the one who kidnapped Gretchen. I think it was Mr. Z,” she wrote, referring to Mr. Zandstra.
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