Lead detective on the Adelaide Oval abduction case, Detective Sgt Megan Kelly, confirmed that Alexander Bone features in the first statement of Mr Ratcliffe, saying he had attended the footy with his father.

The detective also confirmed Alex Bone gave a formal statement to SAPOL in 1974 and that he was contacted by Major Crime in 2013 after Littlely revealed in an article in The Advertiser the long hidden detail of insurance investigator Frank Bone being at the footy with the Ratcliffes that day.

“We just thought they would come back... that they had taken a wrong turn or got playing,” Mr Bone recounted this week. “Dad and Les stayed watching the footy as David and I went looking for the girls, and Kath had gone to check the toilets and then had a huge argument with the SACA person on the entrance of the members because they would not let her in to look for the girls.

“She had tried to get me and David in there to look too, and also asked them to make an announcement and they ignored her. I never saw Kath more angry than I did at that moment,” Mr Bone added. “It was towards the end of the game when we realised that something was seriously wrong, and it got frantic. Both Les and Dad were looking for the girls, and so was the grandmother of the little girl... everyone was looking.”

Disturbingly, despite a lifetime of searching for answers in the case of her missing sister, and a decade of campaigning with state and federal police to raise the profile of missing persons cases, Suzie Ratcliffe, 49, has never been told about Alex Bone or his crucial evidence. The shocked founder of missing persons foundation Leave A Light On Inc is furious SAPOL Major Crime detectives did not tell her about Mr Bone when they contacted him in 2013.

“I have never heard of Alex Bone, not from anyone,” said Mrs Ratcliffe, who last month gave a harrowing account of the heartache her family suffered as part of The Missing Australia podcast. “I have been pushing the police for answers, to follow leads, to do something to bring results in this case for over a decade… to learn now that police have known this information all of that time, I’m in shock. What else are they sitting on? This changes everything. Police have to take action.”

Frank Bone was never mentioned in media reports and did not attend the 1979 inquest into the abduction, despite suggestions he was subpoenaed three times. Alex says his father boycotted the inquest when he learned SACA officials central to the Ratcliffe’s complaint would not face the Coroner.

The major development comes on the back of revelations aired in The Missing Australia Podcast last month that bikies breathed new life into the search for answers in the case when they obtained secret documents from the Mullighan Inquiry. The documents included a statement and maps of a suggested burial site from convicted pedophile Mark Trevor Marshall who alleged his grandfather Stan Hart was central to the kidnapping and killing of the girls.

SAPOL have searched the Yatina property named in those documents in 2008 and again in 2014 and confirmed last week they are continuing to forensically study a distinctive hat the bikers removed from the property in 2009 that was last July identified by key witness, Adelaide Oval lolly seller Anthony Kilmartin as ‘the hat worn by the abductor’.

Police have been provided fresh samples of materials taken from two barrels found by the bikies secreted in a tunnel at the Pekina Dam, Orroroo, which was marked in Marshall’s confession as the place the girls’ bodies would be found. Major Crime detectives in 2008 determined the tunnel did not exist, advising the bikies they were welcome to continue their own investigations.

A GoFundMe drive by the private investigation team to raise $20,000 to be used to independently test samples of that material, and prepare the area of the tunnel and its surrounds for a search has raised $1600.

Alex Bone, the only surviving member of the Ratcliffe and Gordon football group, said he and David searched all over Adelaide Oval for the girls as the match continued, including up around the heritage scoreboard. He and David joined police in their search for the girls late into the night, traveling in the back of a police car in areas surrounding the oval in case they could recognise the girls.

“If we went to a place that could have been a disturbing scene, like a block of public toilets, they got us to wait back away from it while they checked first,” Alex said. “David stayed at our place for a few nights from that day, too.

“My father went to the Angas Street police station many times to assist. He remained close friends with Les and we would see them regularly. I nursed Suzie as a baby and David and I continued to play footy together through to our late teens, both striving to play for Norwood (see photo above - Editor). And we kept going to the footy together or watching it together on the TV… all of us.”

Mr Bone said after Les died in 1981, his father felt he would be a burden to Kath, a bad memory of that day, and they ceased contact. While always wanting to know what happened to the sister she never met, Suzie says it was her father’s request before he died to Kath and David that they drop their search for answers as it had “killed him” and he did not want them to suffer the same.

- provided by Bryan Littlely, presenter of True Crime and a Glass of Wine Case 1.

If you have any information regarding this case, please contact Crimestoppers.