US pastor arrested for killing of eight-year-old girl unsolved for half a century

David Zandstra, 83, has been charged with murder and kidnapping of Gretchen Harrington in Pennsylvania in 1975

For nearly half of a century, police investigators in a south-eastern Pennsylvania community had struggled to figure out who had taken eight-year-old Gretchen Harrington into the woods, struck her in the head and killed her.

All signs now indicate it was the Christian pastor in charge of the Bible camp to which Harrington was heading in 1975 when some of her loved ones last saw her alive, authorities alleged in a bombshell news conference this week.