Jordan Ratcliffe was dropped off in Manchester by his aunt with a bag of crisps and £5 in 2008 but he has not been seen since in 17 years
A teenager was dropped off in the middle of a major UK city with a bag of crisps and £5 but he was never seen again.
Jordan Ratcliffe, aged just 16 at the time, was dropped off near a hostel in Manchester city centre, where he was due to stay, by his aunt. She told Jordan to call her after he had settled into the hostel, on August 31 2008, but the teen vanished that day and has not been heard from since. Greater Manchester Police said there have been no updates in Jordan’s missing persons case in almost 17 years, despite several public appeals.
Jordan, from Moston, in Greater Manchester, had agreed to spend some time at a hostel in the city centre after his grandfather became ill. The 16-year-old had only been carrying a small black rucksack containing a packet of crisps and £5 in cash.
His aunt Kimberley Pierce, who had cared for him since he was 20 months old, dropped Jordan off on Tib Street for the Men’s Direct Hotel, but he never arrived at the hostel. Jordan was reported missing days later on September 8 and a huge police investigation into the teen’s disappearance was launched.
Police said Jordan could not be spotted on CCTV within the city centre because of the gap in time between his last sighting on Tib Street and the missing report being made, according to Manchester Evening News.
Kimberley and the police have made several public appeals and have urged Jordan to get in contact with her or the cops. In 2011, she said: “He was perfectly normal, there was no bad feeling or anything like that. I just don’t know what happened to him. Jordan, I hope you’re ok. We all really love and miss you and can’t understand why you’re doing this. Please just contact us to let us know you are safe.”
Several possible sightings were reported but none of these led to finding Jordan, with police worried he might be homeless in another UK city. A possible report from 2012 in Liverpool was discounted.
In 2010, a young man was stopped by a police officer in Waterloo Station, who thought he looked like Jordan, and the man said he was from Manchester. This notable sighting generated extensive enquiries in the London area amid concerns that Jordan was sleeping rough however the information led nowhere.
Police then visited Portsmouth in 2014 after reports of a possible sighting, but Jordan was not found. In 2017, when the case was passed on to Greater Manchester Police’s murder team, a section of the Rochdale Canal, close to the Piccadilly Village apartments, was drained as part of the search for Ratcliffe, though no body was found. Since then, there have been no new leads on the case.
A digital computer-generated image of what Jordan could look like years later was issued in 2015 by the police and a £20,000 reward for any information that could help find him, which is still in place today.
Jordan is described as white, of medium build, tall with short ginger hair and brown eyes. He was last seen in 2008 wearing a black and grey jacket, black Nike tracksuit bottoms and black trainers.
Kimberly, in 2015, told Manchester Evening News that is was out of character for Jordan to go missing and described him as “a nice lad, very outgoing, spoke to a lot of people”. She said: “It’s been so hard not having him here,” she said. “It never gets any easier. It just sits at the back of your mind.
“Every time you hear about someone found in the canal, you think ‘is that Jordan?’ and you’re waiting for a phone call or a knock at the door. We just don’t understand why he would just disappear.”
The Mirror is using its platform to launch Missed – a campaign to shine a light on underrepresented public-facing missing persons in the UK in collaboration with Missing People Charity. Because every missing person, no matter their background or circumstances, is someone’s loved one. And they are always Missed.