Joanne Ratcliffe went to the football game with her parents Les and Kathleen Ratcliffe, and a family friend, "Frank". Kirste Gordon was at the game in the care of her maternal grandmother while her parents were visiting friends in the Riverland. Ratcliffe's parents and Gordon's grandmother allowed the two girls to go to the restroom together. The Ratcliffe family rule was that children were not allowed to go to the toilet during the breaks in the game, or during the last quarter.
Investigation
Ratcliffe's father told the Coroner's Court in 1979 that his daughter had been to the Oval dozens of times, that she would not have left voluntarily, and that she knew how to use a telephone to call an emergency number. He said she had not met Gordon before that day, and he did not know her parents. They were seen several times in the 90 minutes after leaving the oval, apparently distressed and in the company of an unknown man. They vanished after the last reported sighting. Many of the suspects in the Beaumont children disappearance are also suspects in the Ratcliffe and Gordon case. Witness reports led police to believe that they were abducted by a middle-aged man. Further, the police sketch of the man last seen with the two girls resembles that of the man last seen with the Beaumont children. One possible suspect is Stanley Arthur Hart. Properties previously owned by Hart were investigated in 2009 and again in 2015. He reportedly rarely missed a North Adelaide match and was likely at the game, and a decade after the Adelaide Oval Abduction, he was found to be a child abuser. 25 August 2013 marked 40 years since the disappearance of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Jane Gordon. An article in the South Australian newspaper, The Advertiser, detailed Ratcliffe's sister, Suzie Wilkinson, appeal to the authorities to look into the role that "Frank," a male family friend may have played in the disappearance of the girls. Frank had accompanied the families to the Oval on the day of the girls' abduction, but may not have been formally questioned by police. Frank is alleged to have had intimate knowledge about the girls' routine behaviors during football match outings. Kathleen Ratcliffe, Joanne's mother, said that Frank left his seat for approximately 30 minutes before the girl's disappearance, but later remained seated and did not participate when others formed search parties to look for the girls. Gordon's grandmother also took notice of Frank's behavior during the search for the girls saying, "the other man stayed in his seat." Suzie Wilkinson expressed her desire that authorities continue to actively work on her sister's case: "The case has never been officially closed but I would like further investigations into it,'' said Ms. Wilkinson, who was born 14 months after her sister vanished. "I want investigations into more recent developments. I certainly want a little bit more logic put behind why police have dismissed evidence which has been put before them and why things haven't been followed up. We seem to be left in the dark. It might be 40 years to them and just another case, but to us it is 40 years of us not getting to watch Jo grow up. That's 40 years of not having a daughter, a sister, an aunty."
