'Leave your light on for Eloise'

Fifty years after Eloise Worledge disappeared, her aunt is still hoping for justice

- Alix Davis

The beachside suburb of Beaumaris, 20km from Melbourne on the shores of Port Phillip Bay, was a sleepy one back in the mid-'70s. It was the sort of place where you didn't really bother locking your front door, but that all changed around 8am on January 13, 1976, when Patsy Worledge realised her eight-year-old daughter Eloise, the eldest of her three children, was missing.

Neighbour and friend Jane Mirvis heard Patsy's screams.

“We got up and had a look and unfortunately her bike was there,” Jane told the ABC. “Otherwise I would’ve said, she’s out riding the bike for sure.”

Eloise’s new bike, a Christmas present, was leaning against the house but there was no sign of the little girl that Patsy’s close friend Megan Walton described as lovely. “She was never loud or aggressive or rude or naughty.”

“I recall the day when she disappeared very well,” Eloise’s aunt Margie Walton tells Woman’s Day. “I was outside in my back garden when I heard the phone ring. It was my sister, highly upset. ‘[She’s] not here, we can’t find her, come round.’

“It seemed only a few minutes later that tall men wearing suits stormed in. I knew something very serious had happened.”