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    Marple’s Gretchen Harrington Tragedy: Kidnapping, Murder and Innocence Lost in Suburban Philadelphia
    Marple’s Gretchen Harrington Tragedy: Kidnapping, Murder and Innocence Lost in Suburban Philadelphia
    Marple’s Gretchen Harrington Tragedy: Kidnapping, Murder and Innocence Lost in Suburban Philadelphia
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    Marple’s Gretchen Harrington Tragedy: Kidnapping, Murder and Innocence Lost in Suburban Philadelphia

    By Mike Mathis and Joanna Falcone Sullivan

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    About this ebook

    Friday, Aug. 15, 1975 began as a typical summer day in the suburbs. Young children played with their friends, adults prepared for work or planned for their vacation at the Jersey Shore...

    That all changed in the hours before noon, when Gretchen Harrington, the 8-year-old daughter of a Presbyterian minister and his wife, was kidnapped while walking to a vacation Bible school less than a quarter-mile from her house. Her body was found by a jogger in a state park nearly two months later.

    The crime forever changed the lives of the children who were near Gretchen's age and their parents, many of whom chose to live in Marple Township because they considered it a safe refuge from the crime-ridden streets of Philadelphia.

    Journalists Mike Mathis and Joanna Falcone Sullivan examine the kidnapping, murder and the nearly five-decade long investigation through rare access to police files in what is still considered an open investigation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateOct 31, 2022
    ISBN9781439676738
    Marple’s Gretchen Harrington Tragedy: Kidnapping, Murder and Innocence Lost in Suburban Philadelphia
    Author

    Mike Mathis

    Mike Mathis and Joanna Falcone Sullivan grew up in Marple Township and vividly recall the kidnapping and murder of Gretchen Harrington and its effect on their community. Like with the people interviewed in this book, the tragedy was forever seared in their memory. Both authors started their journalism careers at the Paxon Hollow Junior High School newspaper, the Hollow Log, and have worked for decades in the newspaper and communications industry. As adults, they long talked about writing this book and finally saw an opportunity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Read more from Mike Mathis

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      Book preview

      Marple’s Gretchen Harrington Tragedy - Mike Mathis

      1

      MISSING

      August 15, 1975: The helicopter hovered over the woods near Lawrence Park Swim Club, cutting into the calm of a typically quiet August afternoon at the pool. Kids who were playing shuffleboard and volleyball and diving off the high dive rushed to see what was happening.

      Parents at the sprawling swim club seemed unusually quiet, even tense. If they knew what was going on, they weren’t saying.

      Those kids would later learn that the helicopter was searching for Gretchen Harrington, an eight-year-old girl who disappeared on her way to Vacation Bible School at the Trinity Chapel, just a short walk from her home in the generally peaceful Philadelphia suburb of Marple Township, Pennsylvania, commonly known by the name of its primary post office, Broomall.

      What remained of her body was found two months later about eight miles away from her home in a wooded area of Ridley Creek State Park. The crime has never been solved.

      Gretchen’s killing received little attention outside the Philadelphia area. It was a time before the internet and all-day cable news, but nearly fifty years later, her abduction and murder still haunt those who remember that day. The pain remains searing for her family members and close friends, who detail years of trauma after losing Gretchen. Yet there are many more strangers whose only connection to Gretchen was living in the same town who still think about the crime as a seminal moment in their lives—an event that signified a loss of innocence. Her death remains a topic of conversation in Facebook neighborhood groups, with current and former Broomall residents offering eerily similar recollections of that day, the whirring helicopter playing a big part in their memories.

      This hand-drawn map shows the route Gretchen was believed to have taken from her home en route to the vacation bible school at Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church. Marple Township Police Department.

      Trinity Chapel Christian Reformed Church as it appeared on August 15, 1975. Marple Township Police Department.

      Gretchen’s murder left an indelible impression on a generation of kids who, until then, thought their suburban world—just thirteen miles from the city line—was incredibly safe. They didn’t grow up with electronics—video games were just starting to enter the picture. Cellphones wouldn’t come along for more than a decade.

      The kids of Broomall in 1975 played outside until well after dark. They rode bikes to their friends’ homes without helmets. They walked to nearby stores and shopping centers in search of candy and soda. Parents often had no idea where their kids were, expecting them to only come in for dinner. It was a measure of freedom now considered idyllic in a time when kids aren’t really allowed to roam anymore.

      It’s considered too dangerous today to wander, even on what are considered the safest of streets, until dark. Parents nowadays can track their children through an app on their cellphones and often ask them to check in when they’re not with them.

      That’s why it’s not surprising that this seemingly idealistic 1970s childhood is often thought of wistfully in a time when kids are glued to their phones, often eschewing the outdoors for a screen. Parents who let their children wander freely, even in the leafiest of suburbs, are labeled free-range parents and are looked down on by their more cautious peers. While the world today is considered far more dangerous for kids, it’s a perception that isn’t backed up by statistics.

      The ’70s were a tumultuous and crime-ridden era in the United States, when the nation’s largest cities saw homicide rates soar. New York City was dubbed Fear City in the 1970s. The city’s homicide rate more than doubled between 1960 and 1970. It was a trend fueled by economic uncertainty and social upheaval of the 1970s that made its way through cities across the nation.

      David Schmid, an English professor at University of Buffalo, said there was a general lack of direction in the 1970s following the Vietnam War and the mass protests it triggered. Then the Watergate scandal created disillusionment among the populace. Inflation and a gas shortage literally added fuel to the fire. There was that sense of being unsafe, of being that no one is looking out for us, Schmid said of the 1970s.

      In Philadelphia, the number of homicides soared to 435 in 1975, more than doubling the 205 murders in 1965. Climbing street crime and the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 fueled an exodus of families from Philadelphia to suburbs like Broomall. The suburban building boom that started after World War II reached a frenzied level.

      The ’70s were also a time when a handful of the nation’s most notorious serial killers began their killing sprees. The ’70s brought Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy (the Killer Clown), California’s Hillside Strangler and serial murderer Henry Lee Lucas, the latter even named a potential suspect in Gretchen Harrington’s murder.

      Whether Gretchen’s murder was the work of a serial killer remains unknown, though police strongly believe it could have been the act of a known child rapist who died in jail. He was never charged with the crime. Back then, serial killing was as common as it ever was, said Thomas Hargrove, a retired investigative journalist and founder of the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project. "Back in 1975, it didn’t even have a name. Investigators with the FBI invented the serial killer name ten years later.’’ Still, FBI statistics show that serial murder makes up less than 1 percent of killings in any year. But that fact hasn’t made it any less frightening for generations who, since the late 1970s, have feared being killed by a lone madman.

      Hargrove’s Murder Accountability Project tracks the nation’s unsolved homicides using FBI statistics and an algorithm that shows patterns or clusters of killings that could signify a serial killer was involved. Hargrove’s interest in identifying serial killers came from his time spent as a reporter covering the Atlanta child murders, a series of twenty-four to thirty murders that rocked the southern city in the early 1980s. For that case, Wayne Bertram Williams is serving life imprisonment in Atlanta. He is believed to be responsible for twenty-four of the thirty child murders that took place between 1979 and 1981, but he was never tried for those crimes. Some doubts remain about whether he was truly the killer or made a convenient scapegoat by police. Williams remains in prison and has been denied parole repeatedly. Meanwhile, the case was reopened in 2019 so authorities could check DNA evidence in the child murders. Police have activated cases across the country to apply new DNA technology that can finally link suspects or even exonerate them in some cases.

      Hargrove’s database, which uses FBI crime statistics, offers stats for unsolved murders starting in 1976, so it doesn’t include Gretchen Harrington’s murder. Nor does it include several other high-profile murders of girls or young women that occurred in Delaware County, including the infamous Tinicum Swamp murders, in which the bodies of four girls were found in the waterways near Philadelphia International Airport. Those crimes were also never solved.

      During the Atlanta child murders, police were roundly criticized for not recognizing the patterns, Hargrove said. Different detectives were assigned to different cases. It’s a real problem. Criminologists think most series go unconnected for that reason.

      Hargrove says the database of FBI crime statistics from the years following Gretchen’s death do show an unusually high number of unsolved child murders—sixteen—that occurred in Delaware County between 1976 and 2020. He didn’t spy a pattern of a serial killer, but he says that the high number and lack of clearance of the cases is unusual.

      However, Hargrove said child murders have always been rare; few children are abducted and killed these days by strangers because parents don’t let their kids out of their sight. Back then, people weren’t scared enough, he said. Now, they’re probably too scared.

      Those who remember that fateful day in Broomall when Gretchen disappeared don’t need data to disprove the notion that kids were safe then. Many kids never felt safe again. Their parents, in many cases, drew the reins tighter, no longer allowing their children to go on solo walks to the Lawrence Park Shopping Center or the Wawa convenience store.

      Gretchen’s older sister Harriet Ann Myers said her sister’s death dispelled the romantic idea of a carefree childhood. Harriet, Gretchen and their oldest sister, Zoe, were among those kids who chased fireflies and played capture the flag and tag with the neighbor kids after the sun set. The three Harrington girls lived with their parents, Ena and the Reverend Harold Harrington at 27 Lawrence Road, a small brick Cape Cod–style home near the Broomall Reformed Presbyterian Church, the congregation their father presided over.

      The girls’ mother had come home with their infant sister, Jessyca, the day Gretchen disappeared. Until then, by many accounts, the family led a quiet and happy life surrounded by friends at church and in their tight-knit neighborhood. In the summertime, we all played together, Myers recalled fondly, joking that she also spent a lot of time in church as the daughter of a minister. Everybody was outdoors. Her fond memories unfortunately have been replaced with sinister ones. People thought you didn’t have to worry about the children, said Myers in an interview from her home in York, Pennsylvania. They were wrong. They weren’t safe—ever.

      No, it wasn’t safe—Marple Township police chief Brandon Graeff agreed. And though he said a prime suspect was not formally identified, he seemed determined that it will one day be solved for the sake of the Harrington family.

      Gretchen’s death remains one of Marple Township’s few recorded murders to this day. Another is the unsolved case of Mary E. Hannig from 1972; she was shot in

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