On a summer morning in 1975, eight-year-old Gretchen Harrington set out from her home in Broomall, Pennsylvania, to walk to summer Bible school. The church was less than half a mile away, and the route was familiar. She never arrived. Her father, a pastor at a secondary church location, was friends with David Zandstra, the pastor of the church Gretchen was heading toward that morning.
After hours of searching, he asked Zandstra to contact the authorities. An extensive search began, but there was no sign of the girl. Nearly two months later, on October 14, skeletal remains were discovered in Ridley Creek State Park, not far from where Gretchen had disappeared. They were identified as hers, and the cause of death was determined to be injuries to the skull.
The case was ruled a homicide, but the investigation soon went cold. Then, in 2023, almost 48 years after the murder, an arrest was made. On July 24, the Delaware County District Attorney’s office announced that 83-year-old David Zandstra had been charged with criminal homicide in the first, second, and third degrees, along with kidnapping of a minor and possession of an instrument of crime. The break in the case had come just one week earlier, when investigators decided to re-interview Zandstra, the man who had been the pastor of the church Gretchen was attending on the day she vanished.
Chillingly, he was not only a devoted family friend, but one of his daughters was Gretchen’s closest companion. During the 2023 interview, Zandstra initially denied any involvement. But when confronted with evidence of past sexual misconduct, he broke down and told detectives what had happened. He said he had seen the little girl walking alone on the road that morning and offered her a lift to the church.
She accepted because she knew and trusted him. Instead, he took her to a nearby wooded area, parked the car, and asked her to remove her clothing. The eight-year-old refused. Enraged, he struck her with his fist, leaving her bleeding.
Believing she was dead, he covered her body and fled the scene. District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer called Zandstra a monster, describing him as a remorseless child predator who had acted as a friend, a neighbor, and a man of God while having killed the child. He noted that Zandstra played the part of a family friend for years after Gretchen’s death. Investigators had decided to revisit Zandstra after a woman came forward in the autumn of 2022 wishing to speak about Gretchen’s case.
She told an officer she thought she knew who the killer was. She had kept diaries from the 1970s, when she was just ten years old, and had written down some of the information in them. At the time of the murder, she lived in Havertown, about three miles east of where Gretchen had gone missing. As a child, she, too, had been friends with one of Zandstra’s daughters.
She recalled frequently sleeping over at their house. On one such night, she awoke to find Zandstra molesting her. When she moved, he hurriedly left the room, but he returned the next night and did it again. When she asked her friend about his behavior, the girl replied that he does that sometimes.
After returning home, she told her parents, who immediately forbade her from sleeping at the pastor’s house again. Her diaries also contained a troubling entry about an abduction attempt involving a friend named Holly. She had written, Guess what, a man tried to kidnap Holly twice. 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. Zandstra. Witnesses on the day of Gretchen’s disappearance had reported seeing her speaking with a man inside a car, and some accounts said the car matched Zandstra’s. But investigators back then could not concretely connect him to the crime.
DNA was collected from Zandstra at the time of his 2023 arrest and submitted to see if it matched any other open unsolved cases, as investigators expressed concern that his role as a pastor may have given him access to many more victims. In 1981, another young woman’s life was cut short under violent circumstances. Twenty-three-year-old Laura Kempton was found dead on September 28 in her ground-floor apartment on Chapel Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had last been seen in the early hours of that morning entering her home.
Her body was discovered by a police officer who had come to serve her a court summons for unpaid parking tickets. He noticed the front door showed signs of a break-in and spotted a body through the half-open door. The crime was brutal. Laura had been covered with a mattress and bedding, her ankles tied with an electrical cord.
She had been sexually assaulted before death, and authorities believed a wine bottle had been used to attack her. She had suffered blunt force trauma to the side of the head, and investigators determined she likely died shortly after arriving home. Laura was a student at the Portsmouth Beauty School, studying to become a hairdresser, and worked at the Marco Polo gift store and Karen’s Ice Cream Parlor. Described as hardworking, social, and a free spirit with a big personality, she was well known in the community.
But weeks of detective work turned into months, then years, and the case went cold. In 2023, an announcement came that her killer had been identified. Ronnie James Lee was a 21-year-old man living and working in Portsmouth at the time of the murder. Assistant Attorney General Rachel Harrington noted there was no evidence the two knew each other.
Lee was born in 1960 and served briefly in the military until 1981, before working for MBI Security at Liberty Mutual in Portsmouth. In November 1982, he was arrested for theft and was living with his mother at the time. Laura’s murder was not his only crime. Lee had been convicted of a string of offenses, including five burglaries and a sexual assault in 1987, which stemmed from another burglary.
He served three years in prison for that conviction. Lee could not be charged in Laura’s case because he had died in 2005, aged 45, of acute cocaine intoxication. Had he lived, investigators said, he would have been facing first-degree murder charges. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, another cold case stretched back even further.
On July 26, 1974, the decomposing body of a woman was found in the dunes at Race Point, among shrubbery yards from a road. She had been dead for about two weeks. She was lying face down on half of a beach blanket, and investigators theorized she knew her killer or had been killed while asleep, since she had no defensive injuries and there were no obvious signs of a struggle. She was described as around five feet six inches tall, weighing 145 pounds, with red hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Her toes were painted pink, and a blue bandana and a pair of Wrangler jeans were placed beneath her head. She had extensive expensive dental work but was also missing several teeth. Her hands and one forearm had been removed, likely to prevent identification through fingerprints and dental records. The cause of death was a head injury.
One side of her head had been crushed, possibly with a military-type entrenching tool. She was nearly decapitated, and her body showed signs of sexual assault, most likely postmortem. Investigators soon hit a dead end and could not put a name to her face. She was buried in October 1974 and dubbed the Lady of the Dunes.
The case lay dormant for decades until 2015, when a suggestion emerged that the Lady of the Dunes had been an extra in Jaws, the 1975 Steven Spielberg film shot on Martha’s Vineyard about 100 miles south of Provincetown. An extra in the film’s Fourth of July beach scene wore a blue bandana and jeans similar to those found with the body. Nothing came of that lead, and years passed with no progress. In 2022, however, Othram Inc.
, a corporation specializing in forensic genetic genealogy, began testing the Lady of the Dunes’ skeletal remains. On October 31, the FBI announced that Jane Doe had finally been identified. She was Ruth Marie Terry, born on September 8, 1936, in Whitwell, Tennessee. Not much is known of her upbringing, but in 1957, at the age of 21 and following a brief marriage, she moved to Leonia, Michigan, where she began working at the Fisher Body automotive plant.
Her sister-in-law remembered that she loved her family, and her brother described her as a free spirit, looking for something more than a country life. In 1958, Ruth gave birth to a son, Richard, but could not afford to care for him. She agreed to let the superintendent at her workplace and his wife, who were close friends, adopt him in exchange for paying off her expenses. Afterward, she moved to California.
She reached out to her son in 1972, when he was a teenager, but he was not ready to connect with her. At some point in the following years, Ruth met Guy Rockwell Muldavin. The pair married on February 16, 1974. Muldavin was an antique dealer from Reno, Nevada.
Her family took a dislike to him when they met four months before her body was found. Her grandniece recalled that the 38-year-old was not herself in her husband’s company, and family members observed his possessive behavior. The couple then visited her brother Ken in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they spoke about traveling the country to pick up antiques and discussed visiting Massachusetts. In the late summer of 1974, Muldavin returned to Tennessee alone.
He told Ruth’s family she had gone missing from their shared home in California. Her sister-in-law noted how blunt he was, saying he did not know where she was, and he did not stay long. Ruth’s brother James traveled to California and hired a private investigator. The investigator revealed that all of her belongings had been sold and suggested she had left the state voluntarily after getting involved with a religious cult.
One family member theorized she had entered witness protection. Ruth’s son told reporters that they could not find anything and that when confronted, Muldavin simply said she left, being free-spirited. Her sister-in-law said she always had a bad feeling about the man she married. For decades, the family went without answers.
When the identification was announced in 2022, they were relieved, at least to know what had happened and to find some closure. A month later, investigators began looking into Muldavin, believing he was the last person to see her alive. They noted that in 1974, he was driving Ruth’s car and told several people she was dead. They then learned of his extensive criminal past.
Muldavin was born on October 27, 1923. In 1958, he married his second wife, Manzanita Ryan, who disappeared in April 1960 along with her 18-year-old daughter, Dolores, from a previous marriage. Muldavin was the prime suspect and fled Seattle shortly after the disappearance but was later apprehended by the FBI. True crime writer Ann Rule alleged in her 2007 book Smoke, Mirror, and Murder that police found body parts in Muldavin’s septic tank but could not prove they were from the missing women.
Prosecutors were reluctant to press charges without a body, and he was never charged in connection with the disappearances. Muldavin married for a third time on July 29, 1960. Shortly afterward, he faced larceny charges for stealing $10,000 from his second wife’s family around the time she and her daughter went missing. In 1961, he was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but a judge suspended the sentence in March 1962 on the condition that he repay the money.
In 2023, investigators announced that Muldavin had been identified as Ruth’s killer. He could not be charged because he had died in 2002 at the age of 78. But with his identification, investigators considered Ruth’s case closed.