Disappearance of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon

Joanne Ratcliffe (born 1962) and Kirste Jane Gordon (born 1968) disappeared on 25 August 1973 while attending an Australian rules football match between Norwood and North Adelaide at Adelaide Oval. Ratcliffe was there with her parents, Les and Kathleen Ratcliffe, her older brother, and a family friend referred to as "Frank." Gordon was in the care of her maternal grandmother while her parents were away visiting friends in Renmark. The two families, who knew each other, were seated together in the Sir Edwin Smith Stand and had allowed the girls to go to the toilet together twice that day.

The girls left around 3:45 pm and did not return. The Ratcliffe family search began around 4:00 pm, and after an unsuccessful attempt, an announcement was made over the oval's PA system shortly after the game ended around 5:00 pm. Police were notified at 5:12 pm. In the roughly 90 minutes following their disappearance, witnesses reported seeing the girls several times — once trying to attract a stray cat, once with other children, and later appearing distressed in the company of an unknown man who was carrying Gordon. Witnesses at the time assumed the man was simply a parent. The last confirmed sighting placed them near a bridge close to Adelaide Zoo, though another witness later reported seeing them between North Adelaide railway station and Port Road, Thebarton. Despite searches, a $5,000 reward, and significant media coverage, the case went cold.

In 1979, Ratcliffe's father told the Coroners Court of Queensland that his daughter would not have left voluntarily and knew how to contact emergency services by phone, and that she had not previously met Gordon. On the fortieth anniversary in 2013, Ratcliffe's sister, Suzie Wilkinson, publicly asked authorities to continue investigating and criticized the handling of evidence. In 2014, the South Australian government offered a $1 million reward. In March 2025, a private search was conducted near Yatina, roughly 200 km north of Adelaide; police stated they had previously searched the area in 2014 and did not believe further searching there was warranted.

The disappearance is widely linked by police and media to the unsolved 1966 disappearance of the Beaumont children, partly because a police sketch of the man last seen with Ratcliffe and Gordon resembles the sketch associated with the Beaumont case. Several uncharged individuals have been publicly discussed as possible suspects over the decades, including a man compared via facial recognition software to the identikit sketch in a 2022 television program, a man whose former properties were searched in 2009 and 2015 and near one of which a possible bone fragment was later found in 2025 pending forensic testing, and a man who was investigated by authorities before his death in 2022. No one has been charged in connection with the girls' disappearance, and their fate remains unknown.