On Saturday 25th August 1973, a South Australian National
Football League game was in progress at Adelaide Oval. North Adelaide was
playing Norwood. Joanne Ratcliffe, aged 11, was at the match with her
parents. Kirste Gordon, aged 4, was there with her grandmother.
The families did not know each other but were sitting close to one another. When Joanne went to the toilet, Kirste Gordon's grandmother asked her to take Kirste. They returned after a few minutes. A little over half an hour later, Kirste again wanted to go to the toilet. Again, Joanne took her, but this time they did not return. Fifteen minutes later Mrs Ratcliffe went looking. The girls were not at the toilet. Mr and Mrs Ratcliffe, and Kirste's grandmother, spent the rest of the football match searching for the girls.
The Assistant Curator of the oval, Ken Wohling, saw the girls leaving the Oval with a man. Had he realised what he was seeing, a tragedy might have been averted, and the Beaumont case solved. However, he suspected nothing amiss, and the girls and the man were soon out of sight.
Over the next 90 minutes, four different sightings of the man and the
two girls were made. In three of these sightings, Joanne appeared
distressed. In one case a man driving past went so far as to stop his
car, but then decided that it was none of his business, and drove on.
Twenty years later similar scenes would occur in Liverpool, England,
with the abduction and murder of toddler Jamie Bulger. A child was in
distress, and was observed by people who wrongly believed it to be an
innocent situation, and who did nothing. If only people were willing to
stop, to appear foolish, to cop some foul-mouthed abuse when the
situation really was innocent, then one or two lives would have been
saved.
Kirste Gordon and Joanne Ratcliffe were seen with the man about 3 kilometres from the Oval, 90 minutes after they had left it. This was the last sighting. Neither they nor the man were ever seen nor heard from again.
It needs little imagination to suggest that the Beaumont disappearance and the Oval abduction were the work of the same man. The identikit pictures are very similar. The modus operandi, or what was known of it, was similar. And in both cases the suspect and the children vanished, as though into thin air. Months of intense investigation produced no identity for the suspect, and nothing to go on.