Colin Ridgway endured a kidnapping in Mexico before his life ended in a brutal Dallas murder

His new sport was couch surfing.

His host was his friend Michael Gerety.

They had met when Ridgway was still a Cowboy, working between seasons as a salesman for a transport company.

PART I: Cold case murder of an Aussie pioneer

Gerety was the regional manager in Dallas for the MGM movie studio. One of his jobs was celebrity wrangler, managing the stars who came through to promote their latest film. Gerety had been offered a joint in the back seat of a limo by Robert Mitchum, and sent flying through the air by a kick to the chest from Bruce Lee. He knew something about charisma and personality.

Ridgway came to his office unannounced, pitching the transport company for work shipping film reels and anything else between Dallas and Los Angeles. Thanks, but no thanks, Gerety said. But they chatted for a while anyway, and hit it off.

A week or so later, Ridgway called, inviting Gerety out to a dance hall with some friends. “I was happy to be included,” Gerety said.

Later, Gerety came to be included in Ridgway’s larger circle of friends, which included former tennis pro Warren Jacques, and other Australians from that realm of sporting celebrity who made an annual stop in Dallas for the World Championship Tennis playoffs. WCT was born of the chaos of the early days of professional tennis, rivalling the Grand Prix circuit for tournament locations and the participation of the best players. Its year-end championships, called The Finals, were played in Dallas.

“Emerson, Stolle, Roche and Rosewall,” Gerety said. “Rosewall always behaved himself, but those guys, they could really party. Colin knew all of them.”

Gerety considered himself useful at the table tennis table. The Australians thought his skillset could be expanded.

“Warren Jacques came to me one day and said, ‘You’re going to learn to play tennis’,” Gerety said. Jacques handed him a racquet, obviously of high quality. Gerety asked where it came from.

“I took it out of John Newcombe’s locker,” Jacques replied.

This entree was only possible because Ridgway had become a high-flying businessman, in every sense of the expression.

It started with Ridgway‘s first venture, The Bright Spot Fun Club, coupon books offering 2-for-1 discounts to club members. Gerety came home to his apartment one day to find his kitchen cupboard jammed with coupon books. “It became quite a successful one-man band.”

The subscription offers eventually expanded to include travel, and the travel began to include jaunts into Mexico and throughout North America, including Las Vegas.

By the late 1960s, Ridgway decided he needed a plane to keep up with the demand, and bought a DC-7. The Bright Spot Fun Club became Club America, with a logo of a hot-air balloon. Still it kept growing.

Gerety had moved back to MGM headquarters in Los Angeles by then. Still, he and Ridgway stayed close. Occasionally, Ridgway would call, “What are you doing this weekend? I’ve got a seat on the plane, c’mon down,” to Acapulco, or the Mexican fishing and diving haven of Cozumel.

“Oh yeah. Life was always interesting.”

Bart McLendon, who first made Ridgway’s acquaintance as an attendant in the Cowboys’ locker room in 1965, knew a rising business when he saw it.

“It was very, very successful,” he said. “It was that because of Colin. Everybody wanted to have fun with Colin.”

Eventually that came to include Joan Arnold Jackson. They met in 1973. She was divorced with two young daughters.

“She may not have been the best woman in the world, but Colin never understood that,” McLendon said. “While they were together, he was extraordinarily happy.”

Ridgway’s friends found Joan to be an attractive but enigmatic figure. She had barely escaped with her life from a high-speed car accident. Its circumstances were vague – in a later account in Melbourne in 1980, and her ghostwritten semi-fictionalised memoir, Joan would say the accident occurred near Chicago. Gerety believed it happened outside Dallas.

Gerety was told that Joan was admitted to Parkland Hospital, where doctors initially could find no signs of life. The faintest of breaths was accidentally detected and a long journey back to health began. She has carried various legacies of the accident throughout her life.

The most apparent were a scarred neck and a croaking whisper of a voice. Less obvious were the psychic scars.

Erinn, the younger of Joan’s two daughters, later described her mother as a “free-spending, inveterate liar and an unstable, chronic abuser of alcohol and prescription drugs.”

Ridgway had experienced his own brush with death, and also bore its scars, although in this case they seemed to be purely physical. The ordeal, however, tapped a well of insight and self-reflection that few of his friends would have believed existed.

He spelled it out in a letter to Gerety later that year, 1983.

He had flown into Mexico and was driving to Ixtakpan del Sol, a town known for its spa resorts, southwest of Mexico City, where Joan was recovering from two recent bouts of pneumonia.

Driving a rented car on a deserted road, he was hoping Joan wouldn’t wait up for him, but secretly guessed that she would, “and that made me feel good”.

It was raining and his destination was just 16 kilometres away.

That was when a car pulled alongside him. Two shotguns were aimed at him, the occupants yelling in Spanish to pull over.

Ridgway was hustled out of his car at gunpoint, hooded and put in the back seat of the car that had pulled him over. He considered his options. What stayed with him later, he said, was the crystalline nature of his thoughts and images, the layout of the small town he had just driven through, the place where he could make his escape attempt.

It was unsuccessful, and came at the cost of a rain of blows to his head and face from the pistol butts. With that came the realisation: he had already been robbed of everything except his clothes. He was going to be kidnapped or killed.

His thoughts moved further down that path as the car bumped over a dirt road, heading higher into the rugged Sierra Madre mountains.

“If they killed me, they would probably bury my body or dispose of it so that I would never be found,” he wrote in the letter to Gerety. “God! What a devastating affect this would have on Joanie. It’s one thing to lose a loved one but when you bury them you know it’s final.

“With me, Joanie would never be able to bury me – there would always be a question – there would never be a closing of the grave. I made up my mind not to put Joanie through that.”

As engrossing and agonising as Ridgway’s account was, written with a few months to gather his thoughts and recover from his injuries, what made it even more compelling was another aspect. This was a love letter, composed from the soul, shot through with emotion, experience and hard-earned perception; a vow, of sorts.

Ridgway’s grasp of Spanish was basic. After the car stopped he heard the command that translated to, “Kill the gringo”.

“They were going to pay a price if they were going to kill me,” he decided.

Ridgway feigned unconsciousness under the hood as he was dragged from the car, then punched and kicked blindly. The blows connected. He pulled off the mask and ran into the darkness.

He heard gunshots and fell twice. After an hour he could run no farther, and collapsed. He came to in darkness, with wolves howling. At sunrise he could see a road in the distance, about 5 kilometres away. The only way to reach it unnoticed was to crawl on his stomach.

Five vehicles ignored him as he stood by the highway, drenched in blood and covered in mud. The sixth, a stock vehicle, stopped. An understanding of sorts was reached, “Hospital Ixtapan. One hundred dollars.” Lying on a pool of blood and manure in the back of the truck, he vomited.

Two hospital transfers followed, and then an air ambulance transfer to Dallas. Ridgway had six facial fractures and his nose was broken in two places. A permanent souvenir of the ordeal remained: a .45 bullet lodged in his left lung.

He said of the bullet: “I guess we’re going to have to learn to get along with each other as the doctors tell me it’s going to stay there for the rest of my life.”

If there was a lesson there about mortality, flying too close to the sun, or any other parable, Ridgway chose to ignore it.

Club America was going from strength to strength, from Rio to Acapulco to Vegas to Dallas Cowboy away games, where Ridgway always seemed to have tickets.

Eventually, the company outgrew both its DC-5, and DC-6 jets.

“What I remember mostly is he bought a 707,” McLendon said, recalling this as being in the late 1980s. With that, the description of the other Colin Ridgway emerges. The Midas touch extended to ideas and especially to people, but not to running a business.

“He loved to entertain,” Gerety said. “Gregarious, larger than life, but scattered. Always looked as though he’s just woken up. Clothes that barely fit.”

“Well,” McLendon replied, when asked about Ridgway’s business nous, “Colin was very, very good at conceiving a business, but he wasn’t the best businessman who ever lived. He could get people in, but he didn’t know how to manage money very well.

“He just wasn’t a businessman. He didn’t know how to handle his success from a business standpoint, and I think it took Club America under.”

“He was always flying by the seat of his pants,” Gerety said.

The 707 was a weight Club America couldn’t carry. McLendon remembered a frantic scramble for funds for jet fuel with a planeload of clients stranded in Rio de Janeiro.

“There was no way to save it after that,” McLendon said.

Ridgway lowered his sights. He went to work for a video company that offered a $70,000 life insurance policy as an employee benefit.

The climate had changed at home, too. There were repeated separations. Joan left to live in Austin, Texas and California. Colin stayed in Dallas.

Gerety had a long distance relationship with Ridgway’s office assistant, and was updated about the marital travails.

“I knew they would have these bouts of yelling and carrying on,” he said. “I don’t know if it ever got physical. I would hear certain things. I knew that some stories from Joanie, they had to be taken with a grain of salt and it was none of my business.”

“I just knew there was a lot of friction,’ Gerety added later. “It was heated and it wasn’t a solitary occurrence.”

Joan filed for divorce in 1990. The couple were separated for a year and Colin took up with another woman in Dallas.

In an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 2011, Joan described “a 16-year marriage filled with troubles and happiness, but not much middle ground. The highs made me hang on through the lows. But when I came back, we decided we’d be committed for life.”

However long that was.

In late 1992, the couple increased the personal insurance policy on Colin’s life to $590,000. Joan was the sole beneficiary.

Earlier, Joan suffered an unspecified and extended bout of illness. She was nursed back to health by her friend, Sabra Bicking.

Sabra was the second wife of Kenneth Alfred Bicking Jr. Kenneth’s son from a previous marriage, Kenneth III, was a ne’er-do-well, living in Florida. He was the suspect in the murder of Eugene Hicks, a drug dealer and business partner of Bicking’s in June, 1983.

On the night Ridgway was murdered, May 13, 1993, the couple joined a gathering of former Cowboys players and their spouses.

Husband and wife drove back to the duplex in separate vehicles. In her account to police and in interviews, Joan said she had gone to the back of the building to water or move potted plants.

Colin opened the front door. According to accounts, the killer emerged from the bedroom and began firing. Four shots struck Ridgway’s upper body. After he fell, another three were fired into his head, just above his right ear.

The Dallas Observer, a local weekly, showed a copy of the autopsy report to an independent medical examiner. From him it was able to provide a brief, speculative narrative of Ridgway’s last moments.

There were two graze wounds on the back of his left hand; gunpowder marks indicated at least one of those shots was fired at very close range, suggesting, the medical examiner told the paper, that Ridgway may have been aggressively reaching toward his assailant as the shots were fired.

The next two shots were fired downwards, from right to left. One of them pierced his heart. The fifth and sixth shots hit his upper right arm and shoulder. The final three shots appeared as a cluster around Ridgway’s right ear, fired at close range.

Coup de grace-type shots, said Dr Vincent DiMaio, chief medical examiner of Bexar County, Texas.

The Bubble

University Park and the adjoining Highland Park are known collectively in Dallas as the Park Cities, and more dismissively as The Bubble.

Which is to say, good schools, low crime, expensive real estate.

The initial incident report of Ridgway’s death by the University Park Police Department inspires little confidence.

The unnamed complainant – the 911 call was made by Joan Ridgway – rang at 10.30pm. The prevailing conditions were described by Officer T. Spillman as “clear/warm/dark”.

The initial description of Ridgway’s injuries was “gun shot woond”, the second o appeared to be written over, replaced by a u.

In the officer’s defence, University Park was unused to this type of crime.

From 1985 to 2005, it averaged less than one murder per year – 2005 is notable because it was the last time a homicide was reported in the city of 25,000.

The investigating parties into the Ridgway murder included University Park PD, psychological profilers from the FBI, and then, suddenly, a third party: Joanna Windham, a former National Enquirer reporter, New York restaurateur and, in Dallas, a public relations agent.

Windham was recommended to Joan Ridgway by acquaintances as someone who could help her deal with the onslaught of attention she was facing in the wake of her husband’s death and the murder investigation.

The cutthroat approach to the gathering of relevant facts that was an Enquirer trademark guided Windham through all that followed as an extra, if unauthorised, pair of hands for the Dallas County district attorney, the FBI and to a lesser extent the University Park Police Department.

There was a crime. There was a perp/conspiracy, and all that remained was to reveal them.

“Honey (always honey, as the form of address to male callers) … I’m sort of seriously well-known here in Dallas.”

Windham arranged TV interviews with a local station and then nationally, with A Current Affair, and saw from the inside how Joan Ridgway was dealing with the pressure of the investigation. One of them was to start clearing out the house.

“You find so much information in the garbage,” Windham said. “I found all kinds of stuff.”

The bin would be wheeled outside, into an alley behind the Ridgway duplex, on garbage collection morning.

Bright and early, Windham made the five minute drive from her home, scooped the bag into the boot of her car and headed home again.

There, Windham emptied Joan Ridgeway’s trash in her driveway, let it dry for a couple of hours, then picked through it.

Windham’s dumpster diving bore fruit: In Ridgway’s trash was a bank statement showing Joan and Kenneth Bicking Jr. held an account containing $100,000.

At the same time, other information came to light.

It was an affidavit for an arrest warrant for Kenneth Bicking III, filed with the Dallas County District Attorney, based on information from a then-unnamed informant.

As with much else in the case, the statement of facts supporting the June, 1996 arrest warrant reveals behaviour on the part of the alleged conspirators so brazen and inept as to strain credulity.

The source for the affidavit was later revealed as Bicking’s estranged wife, Katherine.

The pair were in the midst of a bitter divorce, with Dallas Child Protective Services eventually finding that Bicking had physically abused their two children aged five and three, as well as her two older children.

The affidavit filled in some of the gaps that had been exposed by Joanna Windham’s discovery.

By the affidavit’s account, Joan allegedly paid the younger Bicking $5000 in cash to kill her husband.

According to the affidavit, The alleged arrangement was made through Bicking’s father, who, his son claimed, had bragged about what a professional job he had done.

A cash deposit of $5000 was made by the younger Bicking into his bank account four days after the murder, according to the affidavit.

One week after that, he bought a boat for $2500 with separate funds.

In the affidavit, Bicking III was said to have confessed to his wife that he killed Ridgway, telling her he waited for Ridgway in the bedroom of the residence.

He was glad, Bicking said, that his first shots felled Ridgway “because he was a big man”.

Although implicated in the affidavit, Joan Ridgway was cleared of any involvement in the murder by an earlier grand jury hearing.

As was her legal right, she refused to testify before that hearing.

On the night of the murder, a downstairs neighbour told police that he heard voices and the sound of something hitting the floor, but did not hear gunshots. Bicking told his wife that he used a silencer on his handgun.

The affidavit, which came three years after the murder, provided a timeline and helped put some otherwise puzzling behaviour in context.

As the focus of the murder investigation, Joan had “almost broken down twice”, according to the affidavit.

By way of assistance and diversion on Joan’s behalf, Bicking’s father had cut the brake lines on her Mercedes. During a routine traffic stop in University Park on New Year’s Day, 1994, Joan told the officers she was in danger, and that her personal vehicle – the Merc – had been involved in an accident and had been towed to “a place of secrecy”, where a mechanic told her it had been tampered with.

She refused to tell the officers the secret location. According to the affidavit, she then drove away in a small SUV, registered to Bicking’s father.

This appeared to deliver Kenneth Alfred Bicking III to justice, gift-wrapped and ribboned.

Not so fast, said State District Judge Mark Nancarrow.

Dismissing the capital murder case against Bicking III in February, 1997, Nancarrow said the prosecution was relying on inadmissable evidence. To wit, a conversation between a husband and wife was privileged, and, therefore, could not be used in court.

University Park Police Department investigators travelled to Florida and California to unravel the case, said Assistant Chief Travis Vavra, who was also involved in the investigation.

“Eventually, they knew who did it,” he said. “But unfortunately, Texas law …” Alan Mizrahi, a state’s attorney in Florida who assisted in the prosecution that eventually put Bicking III behind bars on unrelated charges, was more dismissive than resigned, referring to the doctrine of spousal privilege as “This archaic British law. In my opinion, that’s not really relevant.”

For investigators and Colin Ridgway’s family, there was a final glimmer of hope – a glimmer being a faint, narrow reflection of light. It came years later, in this case a single strand of hair, found at the scene of the murder.

In 2011 a new type of DNA test, known as mitochondrial DNA was applied to the strand. The results were inconclusive. The test known as nuclear DNA might have revealed more, Vavra said, but it required an intact follicle attached to the hair.

“It was our last-ditch effort,” he said.

“We know Mr Bicking did it. We believe it was a murder-for-hire, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to prove it.”

University Park PD Assistant Chief Travis Vavra, then Sgt. Vavra when he investigated the murder, met Bicking in Florida at the Broward County Sheriff’s office, where he was in custody. They spoke for three minutes.

“He was stone cold,” Vavra said. “Kind of a short, stocky guy, 5-9, 5-10, sandy blonde hair. You just got the sense that if you had to deal with him, he would be a tough customer.” The impression was confirmed by Alan Mizrahi, who assisted in the prosecution of Bicking in 2014 on sexual assault and kidnapping charges, in his capacity as assistant state’s attorney in Jacksonville, Florida.

“You don’t get to meet and speak to the defendant,” Mizrahi said, while noting that as the assistant prosecutor, he was in the same space as Bicking for an extended period during his trial.

“I think he’s dangerous. It’s just that aura you get that was clouded by what you know of him. He’s a big guy – I remember just being thick. I was glad he was in shackles.”

Bicking, 60, is now Florida Department of Corrections inmate number 398719, housed in the Wakulla Correctional Institution outside Crawfordville, Florida. He is serving two life sentences, an extended postscript to a criminal history that began with an arrest in 1982.

As well as Ridgway’s death, Bicking was also the primary suspect in the murder of Eugene Hicks, a criminal associate, in June, 1983.

“With the homicides, and the American justice system, what you prove in court has to be beyond reasonable doubt,” Mizrahi said. “It’s inherent in our system that people are going to escape our clutches.”

Postscript

The gentleman who answered the call in Corsicana, Texas on Wednesday night, said Joan Ridgway was unable to come to the phone. She had just returned home from an extended stay at hospitals in Waco and Dallas. She had been diagnosed with Stage 4 Congestive Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

“It’s terminal,” he said.

They had been together for quite a while, a couple of decades. “God put us together,” he said. That the call was connected to Australia appeared to strike a chord. Joan had been there, he said, she studied with a famous Outback artist.

Yes, Pro Hart, he said, to the guess. “She studied with him as a guest,” he said. The result was she had turned her efforts to a landscape style of painting. “I’m looking at some of them now.”

He could well guess what the call was about, but preferred not to discuss it.

“I’ve tried to stay out of this fiasco for quite a few years,” he said.