Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  SUE LAURIE, AGED 14, completely misinterpreted what she saw.

  It was a mild Saturday afternoon: 25 August 1973. Sue was standing on the southern bank of Adelaide’s Torrens River, looking across the water. On the opposite bank a catastrophe was unfolding. While a football crowd’s cheers sporadically exploded from the nearby oval, a thin hollow-cheeked man, wearing a checked jacket, brown trousers and broad-brimmed hat, was hurrying through grass along the water’s edge. Under his arm he carried a small girl.

  ‘The child was crying,’ Sue told radio station 5AA a quarter-century later. A second girl, who looked a few years younger than me, was running after the man, thumping him and punching into him and shouting, “We want to go back!”

  ‘I assumed – absolutely assumed – that the man must be the girls’ grandfather and that the girls were misbehaving. I watched it all for about 60 seconds – and my main reaction was surprise that the grandfather didn’t tell his granddaughter off for hitting him.’

  Next day Sue Laurie went to the country for a week’s holiday. In the way of many a carefree teenager she remained oblivious to the news from her home city. Not until she returned did she become aware of the horror that had blighted Adelaide Oval. And even then, she failed initially to connect the events at the football ground with the scene she had witnessed on the riverbank.

  IN THE ANNALS of South Australian football, it was the day that a crowd of 13,000 watched North Adelaide scrape home against Norwood. But it was also the darkly unforgettable occasion on which two little girls – Joanne Ratcliffe, 11 and Kirste Gordon, 4 -vanished from Adelaide Oval in the company of a gauntly thin man.

  As the massive police hunt for the monster and his victims stretched fruitlessly into days, and then weeks, families were gripped by fear. Parents escorted their children to and from school and forbade them to play outside. It was only seven years earlier that the Beaumont children, Jane, Arnna and Grant, had gone missing, forever, from South Australia’s Glenelg beach. Now the nightmare was repeating itself- and the authorities seemed powerless.

  Kirste and Joanne had never met before that fateful afternoon on which the preliminary final was played. But Joanne, accompanied by her parents, and Kirste, who was with her grandmother, happened to be sitting close to each other in the Sir Edwin Smith Stand. The adults struck up a conversation. At quarter-time, when Joanne told her mother and father she was off to the toilet, Kirste asked if she could accompany her.

  The two girls completed the 600-metre round trip without incident. During the third quarter, Kirste wanted to go again. Joanne, a sweet-natured girl who enjoyed mothering smaller children, volunteered to take her. After 10 minutes, when the pair had failed to return, Mrs Gordon and Les and Kathleen Ratcliffe became mildly anxious. Assuming that the girls were checking food stalls, or that there was a queue at the toilets, they went down to look.

  Joanne and Kirste were nowhere to be seen.

  Still confident that the children would turn up at any moment, the adults – just as an insurance – alerted the football ground’s management. After an intense search a senior manager called police.

  It quickly became clear that this was more than a routine ‘lost children’ case. Four witnesses said they had seen girls answering Joanne and Kirste’s description accompanying a thin-faced man wearing a flat-crowned, wide-brimmed hat of a type seldom seen in Adelaide. One described it as the type of headgear worn by Queensland farmers, for protection against the sun.

  The oval’s assistant curator, Ken Wohling, told police he had seen the children crouching near a toolshed alongside a thin man. All seemed to be trying to coax kittens from beneath a car. Wohling said he had sensed nothing amiss at the time.

  Anthony Kilmartin, a teenage confectionery seller, saw the man hurry toward the two girls near the southern gate, lift up the younger one and start walking fast. The older girl, whom he later identified from photographs as Joanne Ratcliffe, had looked frightened and tried to stop him.

  A motorist, who had been passing the oval, said he saw a lean man bounding along with a small child under his arm and an older girl in furious pursuit. The driver revealed that he had stopped his car, intending to intervene. But then, deciding that it was probably a family dispute, and none of his business, he drove on.

  Sue Laurie did not officially report her experience until years later. In 1980, married with a baby, she told her husband how she had once watched a seemingly rebellious young girl kicking a man who appeared to be her grandfather. About 10 days afterward, when she eventually read reports about the abductions from the oval, she had begun to wonder if she had actually seen the kidnap taking place. At her husband’s urging, Sue described the seven-year-old sighting to police – but they took no action. Then, in 1998 – 25 years after the kidnaps – she saw newspaper photographs of a man charged with child murders in Queensland. He was thin-faced and wearing a broad-brimmed hat – and she was convinced he was the ‘grandfather’ she had seen that day by the Torrens river.

  MULTIPLE SUSPECT Not until years later did investigators link an Adelaide police artist’s depiction of the abductor with photographs of a Queensland man accused of kidnapping and killing two Townsville sisters, aged seven and five. The man died before the case could be heard. Police Wanted Poster

  Within hours of the Adelaide Oval kidnapping, Senior Inspector Colin Lehmann of the CIB was placed in charge of investigations. His taskforce followed every possible lead. When witnesses phoned in reports of a man walking with two girls near the Southwark Brewery, police immediately door-knocked the area – without result. Police officers searched parks, drained the Torrens and questioned every known paedophile in prison and out, but could find nothing of substance. Premier Don Dunstan’s government offered a $5000 reward, later increasing it to $10,000.

  But people overwhelmingly felt it would be reward enough to find the children alive and to make them safe again.

  Day by agonising day, the case grew increasingly to resemble the still unresolved disappearance of the Beaumont children in the summer of 1966. Even the witnesses’ descriptions of the gaunt suspect were similar – and some believed that the same depraved psychopath might have engineered both tragedies. Seven years earlier a vast wave of sympathy from every corner of Australia had gone out to the poignantly bereaved Jim and Nancy Beaumont. Now it was the turn of parents Greg and Christine Gordon and Les and Kathleen Ratcliffe to receive the same empathy and kindness: not only from police but from thousands of letter writers who felt the pain as if it were their own.

  Les Ratcliffe was a breadcarter and self-described battler. His customers and friends had always known him as a free spirit – a happy-go-lucky working man who took few issues seriously. The kidnap of Joanne wrought a profound change in him. Unable to believe the police were doing enough he devoted most of his time to door-knocking, consulting clairvoyants and making tearful TV and radio appeals for news of his daughter. Despite attempts by friends and social workers to depress his hopes, he seemed genuinely convinced that Joanne would be returned to him one day. Slowly he disintegrated; collapsing one afternoon into Inspector Colin Lehmann’s arms.

  In the Advertiser of 22 August 1998 Inspector Lehmann – by then retired – discussed the devoted father’s slow breakdown:

  Poor old Les, I’ll never forget him. It was a very traumatic thing, it broke his heart.

  He never gave up – and that was the pathetic part of it. We couldn’t say anything to him, to bolster him or give him hope. We could almost see him dying of a broken heart.

  There’s little chance now of finding the poor girls’ bodies. My gut feeling is they were disposed of, possibly within a day of the disappearance. My theory is they were buried in a backyard grave and cemented over with a footpath or something, which could easily be done by a fellow who lived on his own.

  Joanne Ratcliffe’s disappearance eventually shattered her parents’ marriage. They separated in 1980. Shortly afterward, Les suffered a nervous breakdown – subsequently
learning that he was suffering from terminal cancer. He died in 1981 at the age of 46.

  Joanne today would be 44 years old; Kirste 37. Not everyone outside their families has forgotten them. While their abduction and almost certain murder was deemed an unsolved mystery at the time, some observers now believe that South Australian police should have looked further afield.

  A sinister fact that few, if any, investigators registered was that the Adelaide Oval abductions occurred within hours of the third anniversary of the rape and knife murders of two little girls in Townsville, Queensland. Seven-year-old Judith Mackay and her little sister Susan, age five, had been snatched while walking to school. One of the policemen who first saw the children’s poignant bodies in a dry creekbed vowed that he would not go home until he had found the evil degenerate responsible. He was as good as his word – working at Townsville police station day and night, with his worried wife bringing food and clean clothes. Within a fortnight he had died of a heart attack.

  Queensland lacked a Homicide Squad at the time – and the case remained unsolved. Over the ensuing three decades, further murders occurred. In December 1998, however, detectives felt confident enough to charge a local man, in his late 80s, with the Townsville double murder. The ailing defendant was tried in Queensland’s Supreme Court, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict. After two years of argument between prosecution and defence, the Queensland Attorney General’s Department declared the old man unfit to stand trial. He died soon afterward.

  I have not recorded the deceased suspect’s name here, because no court found him guilty. However, when Queensland police photographs of him are compared with the SA police sketch of the abductor at Adelaide Oval, the similarity – in the opinion of some observers – is strong.

  Did a gaunt-faced homicidal maniac, equipped with a broad-brimmed tropical hat, travel from Queensland to Adelaide to commit one of the 20th century’s most despicable crimes? That question, now, is unlikely ever to be answered.

  The Jinxed Ship – and Its Journey to Nowhere

  Maritime Mysteries

  In 1989, film-maker Emlyn Brown announced that he had possibly discovered the sea-entombed wreck of the Waratah: a luxury liner lost 95 years earlier with 102 Australian passengers aboard. But Brown – like investigators before him – had identified the wrong wreckage. The mistake only intensified the legend surrounding the ‘irretrievable’ ship. Although she vanished in a sea lane used without mishap by thousands of vessels, no trace of Waratah, or of the people aboard her, has ever been found. Intensive searches by the Australian and British navies failed to produce so much as a lifebelt. But strangest of all was the bizarre evidence given at the official enquiry: testimonies suggesting that, from her earliest days afloat, Waratah had sailed under a malign influence...

  THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF Blue Anchor liner Waratah came as no surprise to the superstitious workmen who had built her.

  Hundreds of witnesses appeared before the British government’s inquiry into the flagship vessel’s fate. Marine architects and a shipwright testified that many of the craft’s assemblers had considered her doomed – long before she touched the water.

  While the embryonic liner’s owners were advertising that she would be ‘hazard-proof her Scottish workforce had been forming a different view. Construction logs showed that work on the Waratah was repeatedly delayed by ‘unusual’ accidents. Tools malfunctioned – and steel plates and girders fell, injuring men below. Fears that the unfinished ship was jinxed were (perhaps unreasonably) exacerbated when one of the foremen failed to return home one night and was not seen again.

  Then there were engineer Claude Sawyer’s precognitive nightmares: dreams which he placed on the official record before the troubled vessel perished. And the belief of Captain Joshua Ilbery – which he confided to an officer during the trouble-free maiden voyage – that they were sailing on an ill-omened ship.

  THE twin-screwed steam vessel SS Waratah was constructed by Barclay Curie and Co, and launched from Glasgow’s renowned Clydeside shipyards in 1909. Capable of cruising at ‘quicksilver speed’ she was equipped with 16 lifeboats and eight watertight compartments built along the length of her hull.

  Blue Anchor Line had commissioned the ship for the increasingly popular emigration run to Australia and New Zealand – advertising her as one of the most lavish oceangoers ever built. More than three years before newspapers would describe the Titanic as ‘the ship even God could not sink’, Blue Anchor – full of pioneering hubris – dubbed Waratah ‘unsinkable’ and ‘the safest ship afloat’.

  Cursed? From her earliest days in the shipyards, liner Waratah was plagued by inexplicable accidents and deaths.

  Even her name suggested an affinity with the Antipodes. The waratah is the emblem-flower of New South Wales.

  On 5 November 1908 the coal-fired steamship left England for Australia on what would prove to be a largely trouble-free passage. Captain Joshua E. Ilbery was an experienced master who had spent 30 years on clippers and large steam vessels. But now, for the first time in his career, he found himself to be nervous at sea. For reasons as much visceral as practical, the Waratah worried him. It was on this journey – as the British court of inquiry would later learn – that a significant conversation occurred between Ilbery and his marine engineer Herbert Mason.

  Mason sought out the captain and warned, ‘If I were you, once we reach Australia I’d get away from this ship. She’ll make a big hole in the waves one day.’ To which Ilbery chillingly replied, ‘Yes – I’m afraid she will.’ It was not his first statement along these lines. Before leaving England he had confided to another witness that he believed Lloyds of London would regret insuring the Waratah. He admitted to the conviction (engendered perhaps by incidents at the shipyards) that there was ‘bad luck aboard’.

  The passengers knew nothing of their captain’s unease. To the 689 emigrants insalubriously crammed into the third-class dormitory holds, and to the 67 first-class travellers enjoying their drawing rooms and saloons on the upper decks, Waratah’s maiden voyage was a miracle of modern engineering: unarguable proof that mankind had triumphed at last over the ocean’s vicissitudes.

  The liner berthed. In suffocating heat its travellers swarmed ashore, anxious to begin the better lives promised to them in this strange, sun-struck land. The Waratah bobbed at anchor on the vast continent’s edge. Joshua Ilbery remained aboard. His ship, visitors recalled, seemed to have become a black obsession with him. He was determined to find a rational explanation for the anxiety that nagged at him so remorselessly. Could it be a matter of stability, he wondered aloud to associates and technical advisers. Might the ship need ballast?

  Claude Sawyer, a British engineer and company director, had been tempted to ask himself similar questions. As his choice of profession might indicate, Sawyer was an intensely practical man. But from the day he booked a cabin aboard Waratah for her voyage back to London, his sleep had been riven by horrifying dreams. Ugly sleep-visions in which he was gulping seawater, drowning in the whirlpooling descent of a stricken ship. As Sawyer subsequently told the official inquiry, he wondered briefly whether the nightmares might be telling him something. Determined to be ‘sensible’, he dismissed the speculation from his mind. But not before he had enjoyed port with George Lascelles, a business associate in Melbourne – and confided the content of his dreams. ‘If I were you,’ Sawyer advised Lascelles, ‘I would not allow my daughter to sail on that ship.’

  This conversation occurred before the Waratah was so much as a steam-smudge on Australia’s horizon. But when she stood in dock, magnificently limned by harsh Australian sunlight, and when her passengers, chattering cheerfully, disembarked with their sea-chests, everything seemed normal again and far from the reach of the darkest nightmare. Miss Lascelles already had a ticket for London and was determined to use it. And her father no longer minded – because even Mr Sawyer had now disowned his dreams (probably the result of too much cheese) and would be sailing as pla
nned. Broad daylight had given commonsense a chance. The Waratah, after all, was the product of the finest shipbuilders on earth. Ultra-modern and, thanks to her watertight compartments, unsinkable.

  Captain Ilbery was more confident too. Yes, he conceded to Australian colleagues, Waratah did under certain circumstances suffer a stability problem, but nothing that a load of cargo, correctly positioned, could not set right. Blue Anchor had already contracted with Australian firms to carry 10,000 tonnes of export material, including frozen meat, wheat, flour, lead concentrate and hides. Under the captain’s exacting supervision workmen positioned this cargo in the holds as ballast, ensuring (theoretically) that the vessel would weather the wildest storm. But Ilbery always saw this as a temporary measure. He intended, on returning to London, to demand that his employers return Waratah to Clydeside for restructuring.

  At the captain’s insistence, the ship had been in dry-dock, undergoing closer than usual examination. The experts could find no significant flaw.

  On 27 April Waratah set sail from Adelaide for England. The plan was that she would stop first at the South African ports of Durban and Cape Town before proceeding to London. On board was a crew of 119, including a dozen Australian seamen, 102 passengers from Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales – and an Englishman: the engineer Claude Sawyer. In pursuing rich contracts around the world, Sawyer had become a seasoned ocean traveller. This was his 16th major sea journey.