Crime Immemorial

As the spring of 1993 came into full blossom, a distinguished athlete would be gunned down in his own home in Texas.

Fifty-six-year-old Colin Ridgway had been born in Melbourne, Australia, where he began his sports career playing Australian rules football and representing his country as a high jumper in the 1956 Olympics.

In 1965, he was recruited by the American football team the Dallas Cowboys, and played one season as a punter, making him the first Australian to play for the NFL. After retiring from football, he moved to University Park, Texas with his wife Joan and opened up a string of successful travel agencies.

On the evening of May 13th, 1993, Colin and Joan had been out for a late dinner. They had driven to the restaurant in separate cars; Joan reportedly arrived home first, and went out on the back patio to water some flowers.

When her husband Colin arrived home a short time later, he opened the front door and was immediately shot eight times at close range. He died at the scene, and neither Joan nor any of the neighbors claimed to have seen or heard anything suspicious; in fact, Joan initially reported to 911 dispatchers that she thought Colin had collapsed from a heart attack or a stroke.

From the outset, police did not believe Joan’s account of what had happened, and began looking into the possibility that she had hired a hit man to kill Colin Ridgway. Said hit man was thought to be an individual by the name of Kenneth Bicking III.

Fueling detectives’ suspicions in this regard was the fact that Bicking was a known associate of Joan’s, had deposited five-thousand dollars into his personal checking account four days after the murder, and had bought a boat and made a down payment on a house over the subsequent few months. In addition, Bicking was known to have been in the area on the night of the murder, and was ratted out by his own wife, who told police that he had confessed the killing to her. Further, Bicking’s father and Joan Ridgway held a joint bank account which contained a sum of about one-hundred-thousand dollars. From these intriguing tendrils, investigators surmised that Joan and Kenneth Bicking Jr. had hired Kenneth Bicking III to carry out the deed.

Joan vigorously denied the accusations, and subsequently passed a polygraph test. It was her opinion that her husband had gotten mixed up in drug trafficking, and that it was this involvement that had led to his death. The district attorney ultimately declined to press charges against Joan due to lack of evidence, and she was later released.

But Bicking did not get off the hook so easily. He was arrested for the murder of Colin Ridgway in 1996, but after his wife’s testimony was deemed inadmissible, the charges against him were dropped. He thereafter moved to Florida, where he was arrested numerous times over the following years, usually for robberies. One of his accomplices in a 1994 burglary, William Wells III, would later be convicted of murdering five people, and Bicking himself is also suspected of perpetrating the 1983 murder of drug kingpin Eugene Hicks in south Florida.

It would later come to light through DNA comparison that Bicking had perpetrated a violent, home invasion-style rape in April of 1992. He was eventually convicted of this crime in 2014, and while police were hoping to link him definitively with the slaying of Colin Ridgway through further DNA testing, the comparison of his profile with that of a hair found at Colin’s home did not produce a match. The case is therefore unresolved.