For more than 50 years, the heartbroken families of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon have clung to the hope that they’d be able to bring their girls home.
Joanne, 11, and Kirste, four, disappeared from Adelaide Oval on August 25, 1973, and have never been seen since. But new evidence could soon come to light after a private search was launched in two new sites in South Australia’s mid-north region in late March.
“We’ve always continued to hold on to hope, that there’ll be answers,” Joanne’s younger sister, Suzie Ratcliffe, told The Advertiser.
“We’ll never have closure, because that doesn’t exist.”
“Once you answer questions, there is a whole new set of questions that will come forward.”
In mid-March, SA Police confirmed a private search had been planned following a series of revelations by a convicted paedophile.
At the time of publication, a team of private investigators were preparing to search a farm north of Yatina and a tunnel at the nearby Pekina Reservoir.
The tunnel was previously searched in 2009. Barrels allegedly containing samples of blood and acid were found inside at the time.
The new search sites were named in a series of handwritten claims by Mark Trevor Marshall who accused his grandfather, Stanley Arthur Hart, of abducting Joanne and Kirste. Police raided Hart’s farmhouse in 2014 but found no evidence.
South Australian journalist Bryan Littlely said the investigators planned to remove barrels from the tunnels and hand them over to police for further testing. He is confident the team, which includes a geologist, cadaver dogs and an excavator operator, will discover something new.
“We are 100 per cent confident that we will find the evidence to support Mark Marshall’s statement,” Bryan told The Advertiser.
“There is going to be something at the end of this, something for police to look at properly.”
Bryan added to 9News: “The statement that Mark Marshall made, put an X on the map on that exact spot, and said this is where the two girls were buried and disposed of in barrels.
“If it’s thoroughly excavated and thoroughly searched, then we can rule that out.”
A police sketch of Joanne and Kirste’s kidnapper was created after a witness described seeing a man pick up the girls at Adelaide Oval. The drawing bears an uncanny resemblance to Hart, a known paedophile who’d been previously charged with six sexual offences against an 11-year-old girl.
He was interviewed multiple times by police before his death in 1999.
For Suzie, who was born 14 months after Joanne disappeared, the new search is one of the family’s last chances at “putting an end to the living nightmare”.
“I always say, don’t get my hopes up … but you can’t help but feel hopeful,” she told 9News.
“We’re still very much hoping for answers and still very much hoping to bring the girls home.”
Police are appealing for anyone with information to come forward and call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
