Blazing a trail came naturally to Colin Scotts.
Scotts, a powerful athlete who grew up on the northern beaches of Sydney, was the first Aussie to receive a college football scholarship in the United States and be drafted into the NFL.
He was part of the undefeated 1981 Australian Schoolboys rugby union team to tour Ireland and the UK, which included future Wallabies Michael Lynagh and Brett Papworth.
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That team scored 48 tries and conceded just one. Some keen judges say Scotts could have been anything in the 15-man game but after being spotted by a coach during a rugby game, Scotts left Australia and eventually became the first Australian player to play in the NFL.
Or at least, so he thought.
“There was no social media, barely any media around it at the time,” Scotts told Wide World of Sports.
“I thought I was the first and everybody else thought so too. I was with the Houston Oilers, and a reporter came up to me and said, ‘Hey we just found out there was another guy (Australian) before you’.”
“I didn’t know anything about it and the whole thing. He had an interesting background to say the least. He made the Dallas Cowboys. The whole story was all a big mystery, it’s a weird one.”
That other guy’s name was also Colin, and he too was a gifted athlete. Scotts’ statement that his story is “a weird one” could be the understatement of the century.
In the 1960’s Melbourne-born Colin Ridgway played three games as a punter for the Cowboys.
Before he was signed as a free agent in 1965, he played under-19s for VFL powerhouse Carlton and later their reserves team. He also represented Australia at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics in high jump, but missed out on on the team for the 1960 Games.
That led to Ridgway moving to the US on a track and field scholarship, which eventually brought him to his brief stint in the NFL.
According to archived reports, then coach Tom Landry had tipped him to be one of the league’s top punters, but Ridgway had several bad punts early on and his career was short-lived.
However, the details of his death would have far more reach than his athletic feats, when he was brutally murdered in his home, in the inner Dallas suburb of University Park, in 1993.
The 56-year-old was shot at least seven times by an intruder as he entered his home after a night out with his wife, Joan Jackson.
Jackson found her husband in a pool of blood with gun shot wounds to the back of his head when she entered through the backdoor, after driving home in a separate car.
Of the seven shots. three of them were situated around Ridgway’s right ear, in close proximity to one another and fired at close range.
Joan told emergency services her husband had suffered a heart attack.
“His back was the only thing I could see and I grabbed him and I said: ‘Colin, are you alright?'” she told a US TV program at the time.
“He just kept heaving. I thought he had finally suffered a heart attack or a stroke coming up the stairs.”
Soon suspicions around Jackson’s potential involvement started to intensify when Ridgway’s friends offered a reward for information relating to the murder.
Ridgway had a brush with death in the past when he was kidnapped by Mexican bandits while driving from Texas to join his wife at a Mexico resort. It was thought the violent incident, that saw Ridgway live the rest of his life with a bullet lodged in his lung, was connected to a failed business deal. But nobody really knew.
Things between Ridgway and Joan were on and off. In 1990 Joan filed for divorce. The couple were separated for a year and Colin hooked up with another woman in Dallas. But then in late 1992, the couple reportedly increased the personal insurance policy on Colin’s life to $590,000. Joan was the sole beneficiary.
On the night of his murder, Colin and Joan attended a gathering of former Cowboys players and their spouses.
According to reports at the time, police tried to pin a murder-for-hire plot on Jackson even though she told police she’d been watering flowers out the back of the house and had not heard any shots as she entered the house.
Police said the apartment had been ransacked, with clothing strewn all over the floor and certain documentation examined and removed.
Jackson was not indicted by a judge over the murder and always maintained her innocence.
At one point Jackson had accused Ridgway of being a drug smuggler in a television interview, claiming he could have been killed by “business associates”.
She said he was in a state of fear on the night of his death
“I’d never seen Colin just falling apart on the inside and literally … afraid to talk.
“He said, ‘My biggest fear is dying, Joan’.
“The only thing that had been dumped upside down in my closet were business records and personal records.”
A man known to her, Kenneth Bicking III, was accused of carrying out the murder in 1996, which he denied.
Yet chances of securing a conviction were dashed when an alleged murder confession by Bicking to his wife was ruled out of evidence by a judge the next year.
Police hoped a hair found at the crime scene would match Bicking’s DNA but they were forced to wait because the hair could not give a strong enough reading.
Twenty years later police finally got the hair tested with improvements in technology, but it did not match Bicking’s DNA.
Bicking has since received two life sentences for the historic kidnap and rape of a young woman.
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