Скачать или смотреть Fifty Years On: The Mystery of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon in Adelaide

On a crisp Saturday afternoon, August 25, 1973, more than 12,000 fans filled the Adelaide Oval to watch a football match between Norwood and North Adelaide. Among the crowd were two young girls — 11-year-old Joanne Ratcliffe and 4-year-old Kirste Gordon — attending the game with their families. What began as an ordinary outing would soon turn into one of Australia’s most haunting and enduring mysteries.

Around 3:45 p.m., the girls left their seats to use the toilet facilities. They never came back. Despite being sighted several times around the grounds with an unidentified man, the pair vanished without a trace. Within hours, a massive search began — but no sign of Joanne or Kirste was ever found. Their disappearance would become known as the Adelaide Oval Abductions, one of the most notorious unsolved cases in Australian history.

Over the following decades, investigators chased countless leads, questioned potential witnesses, and even linked the case to other infamous South Australian crimes, including the disappearance of the Beaumont children and the crimes of Bevan Spencer von Einem. Yet no one was ever charged, and the mystery only deepened as time passed.