Former Church Minister Charged With 1975 Murder of 8-Year-Old Girl
It is such a sad and tragic story, obviously for Gretchen to have her life ended so early, but also for her family and friends having to endure almost 50 years of not knowing what happened. That wait is now over, but why such a long time? It is one of the remaining mysteries of how “The Law of Cause & Effect” plays out in terms of the time frame required for the “Effect” side of the equation to be expressed. In this case, why did it take the woman who eventually came forward with the information that broke the case, so long to do so? We can’t know that answer right now, except that she now has, and the 83 year-old perpetrator will spend the rest of whatever life he has left in prison! Also, the intervening years were most likely hell for him in multiple ways, impossible for us to evaluate. Regardless, the Life Principle that “What. Goes Around Comes Around,” is reaffirmed yet again! Former Church Minister Charged With 1975 Murder of 8-Year-Old Girl
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
Former Church Minister Charged With 1975 Murder of 8-Year-Old Girl
The disappearance and killing of Gretchen Harrington in Broomall, Pa., had been a mystery for decades. The authorities said on Monday that a former leader at the girl’s church had been charged.
On the morning of Aug. 15, 1975, Gretchen Harrington, 8, left her home in Broomall, Pa., for summer Bible school. The Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church was less than half a mile down the road, but Gretchen never made it.
Skeletal remains found nearby in Ridley Creek State Park on Oct. 14, 1975, were later identified as Gretchen’s. The cause of her death, which was ruled a homicide, was found to be injuries to her head. But, for decades, no one knew who killed her.
On Monday, the district attorney’s office in Delaware County, Pa., west of Philadelphia, announced that it had filed charges against David Zandstra, 83, of Marietta, Ga., in Gretchen’s murder. Mr. Zandstra, who was a minister at the church in the 1970s, was charged with criminal homicide, kidnapping of a minor, possessing an instrument of crime and murder of the first, second and third degrees.
Mr. Zandstra was taken into custody in Georgia on July 17, the authorities said. He is being held in Cobb County, Ga., where he has been denied bail.
Jack Stollsteimer, the Delaware County district attorney, said at a news conference on Monday that Mr. Zandstra was fighting extradition to Pennsylvania, and that his office was seeking a governor’s warrant to bring Mr. Zandstra to Delaware County.
“We’re going to try him, we’re going to convict him and he’s going to die in jail,” Mr. Stollsteimer said. “And then he’s going to have to find out what the God he professes to believe in holds for those who are this evil to our children.”
The charges filed against Mr. Zandstra have brought a sense of closure to Broomall, which has been haunted by Gretchen’s abduction and murder for nearly 48 years. Chief Brandon Graeff of the Police Department in Marple Township, which includes Broomall, said at the news conference that Gretchen’s murder had “transformed this community.”
“Pre-August 1975, it was Any Town, U.S.A.,” he said. “Post- that day, it changed everything for the kids, for the parents, for the families, for everybody because nobody could do anything anymore in the innocence that they used to do it before this happened.”
Gretchen’s family said in a statement on Monday that they were “extremely hopeful that the person who is responsible for the heinous crime that was committed against our Gretchen will be held accountable.”
“It’s difficult to express the emotions that we are feeling as we take one step closer to justice,” the family said. “The abduction and murder of Gretchen has forever altered our family and we miss her every single day.”
It was unclear if Mr. Zandstra had a lawyer. His wife, Margaret Zandstra, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
The website of the Christian Reformed Church lists Mr. Zandstra as a retired minister and says he was ordained on Sept. 20, 1965. In addition to the Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church in Broomall, Mr. Zandstra also served at churches in New Jersey, California and Texas between 1965 and 2005.
The Christian Reformed Church said in a statement on Monday that it wanted to “extend our condolences to the family of Gretchen Harrington.”
“We are additionally grieved to hear that a C.R.C. pastor has been arrested for her murder,” the church said. “We recognize that we live in a broken and sinful world where violence can happen anywhere by anyone — even within our churches and by leaders we hold to the highest standards.”
The Delaware County District Attorney’s Office said it had collected from Mr. Zandstra a DNA sample that would be compared to DNA collected in other open cases in Pennsylvania and across the country.
“We are concerned that there may be more victims who might have been sexually assaulted by this man,” Mr. Stollsteimer said. “We want to hold him accountable for everything he did.”
Joanna Sullivan, a co-author of “Marple’s Gretchen Harrington Tragedy: Kidnapping, Murder and Innocence Lost in Suburban Philadelphia,” which published in October 2022, said on Tuesday that she was “stunned” when she learned that Mr. Zandstra had been charged in the case.
Ms. Sullivan, who grew up in Broomall, was 9 when Gretchen went missing. In reporting for the book, Ms. Sullivan and her co-author, Mike Mathis, interviewed Mr. Zandstra, his wife and his daughter. Mr. Zandstra had a “murky recollection” of the day Gretchen went missing, Ms. Sullivan said.
After Gretchen’s abduction and murder, Ms. Sullivan said there was a sense of fear and apprehension in Broomall. She said she remembered seeing a helicopter flying over her neighborhood in the search effort for Gretchen.
“That image stayed with me for the rest of my life,” Ms. Sullivan said of the helicopter.
‘I think it was Mr. Z’
Gretchen was supposed to be at Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church by 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 15, 1975, according to a police criminal complaint. She was among a group of children who were then expected to be taken to a different church, the Broomall Reformed Presbyterian Church, where Harold Harrington, Gretchen’s father, was the reverend.
Around 11 a.m. that day, when Mr. Harrington learned that she hadn’t shown up at his church, he searched for her and then called the Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church and spoke with Mr. Zandstra’s wife. Mr. Zandstra then called the Marple Township Police Department at Mr. Harrington’s request and reported Gretchen missing, according to the complaint.
In the weeks that followed, the police spoke with several people to piece together what had happened to Gretchen. They interviewed Mr. Zandstra twice, on Aug. 19 and again on Oct. 30. He told them that he had picked up some children and driven them to the church the day Gretchen went missing, but he denied having seen her that day, according to the complaint.
The police were unable to find any leads that could steer them closer to discovering who had killed Gretchen, and the case went cold. Then, earlier this year, investigators interviewed a woman, identified in the complaint as “CI #1,” who had come forward and said she went to school with Gretchen and Zoey Harrington, one of Gretchen’s sisters.
The woman told investigators on Jan. 2 that she was friends with Mr. Zandstra’s daughters, and that she would often play at the Zandstra home and stay overnight. The woman told the police that, during two sleepovers, she was awakened by Mr. Zandstra touching her groin area.
Eventually, the woman said, she told her parents, and a short time afterward the Zandstras moved to Plano, Texas, a Dallas suburb, according to the complaint.
As the woman was being interviewed, she showed investigators a diary that she kept when she was a girl. In one entry, dated 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.
The interview and the journal entry prompted investigators to track down Mr. Zandstra, who was living in Marietta, northwest of Atlanta.
Investigators interviewed Mr. Zandstra at Cobb County police headquarters in Marietta on July 17. At first, Mr. Zandstra denied having seen Gretchen on the day she went missing, according to the police complaint. But eventually, it said, he confessed.
He told the police that he saw Gretchen walking to church that morning, and that he picked her up in his green A.M.C. Rambler station wagon. But instead of taking her to church, Mr. Zandstra told investigators, he drove her to a wooded area nearby, parked the car and then told Gretchen to remove her clothes, and she refused.
He told the police that he ejaculated while Gretchen was in the vehicle with him, according to the police complaint. After that, Mr. Zandstra said, he struck Gretchen with his fist and she began bleeding from her head. Realizing that Gretchen appeared to be dead, Mr. Zandstra told the police, he “attempted to cover up her half-naked body with sticks and then he left the area,” the complaint said.
“He murdered, with his bare hands, this poor young girl and then lied about it for 48 years,” Mr. Stollsteimer said at the news conference on Monday.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
A correction was made on
An earlier version of this article misidentified the church where Harold Harrington was the reverend at the time of Gretchen Harrington’s disappearance. It was the Broomall Reformed Presbyterian Church, not the Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church.
Kirkus Reviews, the gold-standard for independent & accurate reviews, has this to say about
What Goes Around Comes Around:
A stable, positive, non preachy, objective voice makes the book stand apart from others in the genre. A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.
~ Kirkus Reviews
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
Former Church Minister Charged With 1975 Murder of 8-Year-Old Girl
Former Church Minister Charged With 1975 Murder of 8-Year-Old Girl
Here’s a case of “Group malfeasance, blamed on poor judgement, from the consumption of too much wine!” A nine month investigation of the American chapter of “The Court of Master Sommeliers” has revealed a widespread expectation/demand of sexual favors in return for mentoring female applicants, undergoing the rigorous exam process, required for membership and recognition as an official Sommellier.
This follows the complaint of 21 women that their supposed mentors, had pressured them for sex, apparently a well-established condition with a long history. So far 22 men have been investigated.
The point being, that when a lowly activity becomes “institutionalized” in a grouping of people, ie: company, sport, union, association, religion, etc, it can go on undetected for a long time. It may even acquire an almost “accepted as part of the game” kind of cover, with those participating considering it, “just one of their perks”, and no big deal! That is, until someone blows the lid off.
That’s when everything changes for those who took part. It is not after all, that they didn’t know there was something amiss about the game they were playing. They just thought they had a really good cover! Instead, that cover just went poof, as all covers eventually do. Just another example that, “What Goes Around Comes Around!” Its just difficult to predict when.
Colombo Family Crime Boss and 12 Others Are Arrested, Prosecutors Say
An indictment unsealed on Tuesday accuses the organization of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort a labor union.
For two decades, the leadership of the Colombo crime family extorted a Queens labor union, federal prosecutors said — an effort that continued unabated even as members of the mob clan cycled through prison, the family’s notorious longtime boss died, and as federal law enforcement closed in.
Over time, what began as a Colombo captain’s shakedown of a union leader, complete with expletive-laced threats of violence, expanded into a cottage industry, prosecutors said, as the Colombo organization assumed control of contracting and union business, with side operations in phony construction certificates, marijuana trafficking and loan-sharking.
On Tuesday, 11 reputed members and associates of the Colombo crime family, including the mob clan’s entire leadership, were charged in a labor racketeering case brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
All but two of the men were arrested Tuesday morning across New York and New Jersey, prosecutors said. Another was surrendered to the authorities on Tuesday; another defendant, identified as the family consigliere, remained at large, prosecutors said.
The indictment accuses the Colombo family of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort an unnamed labor union that represented construction workers, using threats of violence to secure payments and arrange contracts that would benefit the crime family.
The charges are an ambitious effort by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take down one of the city’s five Mafia families. In addition to the union extortion scheme, which is the heart of the racketeering charge, the indictment charges several misdeeds often associated with the mob, including drug trafficking, money laundering, loan-sharking and falsifying federal labor safety paperwork.
Detention hearings for the defendants in Brooklyn federal court continued into the evening Tuesday, as they entered not-guilty pleas to the charges; prosecutors had asked the court to keep 10 of the defendants in custody.
“Everything we allege in this investigation proves history does indeed repeat itself,” Michael J. Driscoll, F.B.I. assistant director-in-charge, said in a statement. “The underbelly of the crime families in New York City is alive and well.”
Around 2001, prosecutors said, Vincent Ricciardo — a reported captain in the family, also known as “Vinny Unions” — began to demand a portion of a senior labor union official’s salary. When Mr. Ricciardo was convicted and imprisoned on federal racketeering charges in the mid-2000s, prosecutors said, his cousin continued to collect those payments.
Starting in late 2019, prosecutors said, the senior leadership of the Colombo family became directly involved in the shakedown, which extended to broader efforts to siphon money from the union: for example, manipulating the selection of union health fund vendors to contract with entities connected to the family, and diverting more than $10,000 each month from the fund to the family.
Andrew Russo, 87, who prosecutors describe as the family boss, is accused of taking part in those efforts, as well as a money-laundering scheme to send the proceeds of the union extortion through intermediaries to Colombo associates. He was among nine defendants charged with racketeering.
Mr. Russo appeared in court virtually from the hospital Tuesday; he is set to be detained upon his release, pending a future bail hearing.
The family’s infamous longtime boss, Carmine J. Persico, died in federal custody in North Carolina in March 2019.
Federal law enforcement learned of the extortion scheme about a year ago, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Tuesday; investigators gathered thousands of hours of wiretapped calls and conversations recorded by a confidential witness, wrote the prosecutors, who also described law-enforcement surveillance of meetings among the accused conspirators.
The authorities said they repeatedly captured Mr. Ricciardo and his associates threatening to kill the union official. “I’ll put him in the ground right in front of his wife and kids,” Mr. Ricciardo was recorded saying in June.
On another occasion cited by prosecutors in the memo seeking his detention, Mr. Ricciardo directed the union official to hire a consultant selected by the Colombo family, saying: “It’s my union and that’s it.” Prosecutors said his activities were overseen by a Colombo soldier and the consigliere who remains at large.
Much of the activity outlined in the indictment took place while the defendants were either in prison or on supervised release for prior federal mob-related convictions. Theodore Persico Jr., described as a family captain and soldier, was released from federal prison in 2020 and, despite a directive not to associate with members of organized crime, “directed much of the labor racketeering scheme,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Persico, 58, is set to inherit the role of boss after Mr. Russo, prosecutors wrote.
Several of the defendants were named in what prosecutors described as a fraudulent safety training scheme, in which they falsified state and federal paperwork that is required for construction workers to show they have completed safety training courses.
One of the defendants, John Ragano — whom prosecutors say is a soldier in the Bonanno crime family — is accused of setting up phony occupational safety training schools in New York, which prosecutors said were “mills” that provided fraudulent safety training certificates to hundreds of people.
In October 2020, prosecutors said, an undercover law enforcement officer visited one of the schools in Ozone Park, Queens, and received, from Mr. Ricciardo’s cousin, a blank test form and an answer sheet; weeks later, the agent returned to pick up his federal safety card and paid $500.
The purported schools were also used for meetings with members of La Cosa Nostra — the group of crime families commonly known as the Mafia — and to store illegal drugs and fireworks, according to the indictment.
Mr. Ragano wasn’t charged on the racketeering count, although prosecutors also sought his detention pending trial. In addition to the racketeering count, several defendants, including Mr. Ricciardo and his cousin, were charged with extortion, conspiracy, fraud and conspiracy to make false statements.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people identified in an indictment as members of the Colombo crime family. It is 11, not more than a dozen.