MEDIA, Pa. — A retired Georgia minister was found not guilty Friday in the slaying of an 8-year-old girl found in a southeastern Pennsylvania park nearly half a century ago.
A jury acquitted David Zandstra, 84, of the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, after deliberating for an hour after a four-day trial.
Zandstra was accused Along with the kidnapping and murder of Gretchen Harrington in the summer of 2023, who disappeared in 1975 while on her way to a Bible camp alone at a chapel where Zandstra was the pastor. His body was found two months later by a jogger at Ridley Creek State Park in Media, Pennsylvania.
Harrington was offered a ride by Zandstra the day she disappeared, the Delaware County attorney said when the charges were filed. Prosecutors said Zandstra confessed to the killing after investigators received new information and later 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 investigated other suspects who were more likely to be the killer.
Defense attorney Christopher Boggs told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Zandstra’s family was happy to be home after 18 months in custody.
In the days following the girl’s disappearance, hundreds of people searched nearby wooded areas, and authorities distributed more than 2,000 flyers and set up a 24-hour hotline that took hundreds of calls, The Inquirer reported.
When the girl’s body was found, her clothes were “folded and in a neat pile” next to the body, her underwear hanging from a tree branch “like a flag … as if to call attention to the place”, the paper said. the time
