Lawsuit alleges misconduct by state troopers investigating death of Delaware County girl murdered in 1975

David Zandstra, the former Marple Township pastor acquitted last year in the 1975 murder of an 8-year-old girl in Delaware County, has died, and a federal lawsuit has been filed alleging misconduct by two Pennsylvania State Police investigators in the case.

The lawsuit said that the 85-year-old Zandstra, who lived in Georgia, “has passed and his family seek redress for this extreme and immoral prosecution.”

No further information about his death was included in the complaint. The Delaware County Daily Times, citing his death certificate, reported that Zandstra died Dec. 15 at a hospice, and the cause of death was skin cancer.

Mark Much, one of Zandstra’s lawyers during the trial but who is not an attorney on the lawsuit, said in an emailed statement Tuesday night that “Zandstra passed away last month, peacefully, and surrounded by his loving family.”

Much said that Zandstra “was a God-fearing man, unsuspecting and trustful of law enforcement, naive of their unscrupulous interrogation tactics, all in the name of ‘solving’ a cold case.”

The defendants in the lawsuit, filed on Jan. 10 in Philadelphia, are Andrew Martin and Eugene Tray, who were the most recent state police investigators for Gretchen Harrington’s murder.

Tray declined to comment on the lawsuit. Martin could not be reached for comment.

The plaintiff is Margaret Zandstra, the administrator of the estate of David Zandstra, who allegedly had his civil rights violated by the defendants, the lawsuit states.

Zandstra, who was held in custody for 18 months, was found not guilty in January 2025 by a Delaware County jury of murder and kidnapping in the killing of Gretchen Harrington. The jury took about an hour to deliberate after a four-day trial.

In 2023, Zandstra was charged after he confessed to driving Gretchen to a secluded section of Ridley Creek State Park and beating her to death. The lawsuit says the investigators “illegally coerced an admission of guilt from Mr. Zandstra, a then-83-year-old stroke and cancer survivor.”

Mark Much argued during the trial that state police investigators had coerced and manipulated Zandstra into confessing to a crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime and DNA found on Gretchen’s clothing belonged to two unidentified men and one unidentified woman.

Testimony during the trial revealed that before Zandstra’s confession, the state police had developed several other suspects in the decades since Gretchen’s body was found.

The lawsuit provides alleged details about what the investigators did before finally going after Zandstra.

“These Defendants caused evidence of the alternative suspects and Mr. Zandstra’s exclusion as a contributor of DNA to be withheld until the eve of trial, after Mr. Zandstra had been incarcerated and his cancer had returned and gone untreated,” according to the complaint.

Zandstra was the pastor at Trinity Chapel in Marple Township, a Christian reform church near the Harrington family home. On Aug. 15, 1975, Gretchen was last seen walking to the church for the final session of vacation Bible school before disappearing.

Her unclothed body was found two months later near a walking trail in Ridley Creek State Park. An autopsy revealed that she died from blunt-force trauma to the head.

Deputy District Attorney Geoff Paine said during the trial that two state police investigators interviewed Zandstra after a woman who was a lifelong friend of Zandstra’s daughter told police in 2022 that he had groped her at a sleepover at his home in 1975, days before Gretchen’s disappearance. At the time, Paine said, the woman was the same age as Gretchen and looked like Gretchen.

Much told the jury that another suspect who was investigated was Gretchen’s sister, Zoe Harrington, who in 2021 claimed to have killed her sister with a rock during an incident involving her father, who was also a pastor, and members of the congregation he led.

Much said the state police at one point considered Harold Harrington, Gretchen’s father, a potential suspect. Harold Harrington died in 2021.

The prosecutor told the jury that Zoe Harrington’s confession wasn’t credible because she had a history of mental-health illness.

According to the lawsuit, Andrew Martin, one of the defendants, went to the first assistant district attorney in Montgomery County to seek a court order to allow a secretly recorded conversation between Zoe Harrington and her father, who was in very poor health at the time.

After several interviews with Zoe Harrington — including with another state trooper who is not named as a defendant — Martin signed an application to the court for a wiretap authorization on Aug. 9, 2021, according to the lawsuit. The next day, however, Zoe Harrington allegedly backed out because she said she was too afraid.

The lawsuit states that when defendants Martin and Tray provided their sworn affidavit supporting the arrest of Zandstra, they summarized their August 2021 activity in the investigation as: “On August 9, 2021, investigators conducted an interview of Zoey HARRINGTON (sister of Gretchen HARRINGTON) relative to this investigation. Zoe HARRINGTON related that ZANDSTRA was the minister at the time, and his daughter was Gretchen’s best friend.”

The lawsuit also states that the state police had another suspect, Richard Bailey, who was investigated in 2017. Bailey was a convicted child rapist and kidnapper, who was seen a mile from where Gretchen disappeared on the day she was abducted. Bailey died in state prison in the 1990s.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and costs.