standardizing differently formatted varchar field to date in sql server

I know similar questions have been asked in the past, but they still haven't given me a proper solution for my case.

I have a database table (third party) that has a varchar column for a datetime value.

It contains dates in the following formats.

  11181980 
  8 18 1960 
  10/01/1960 
  04-12-1953 
  041371 
  7/29/44
  Empty String 
  NULL

When I select this column, I want to bring the date in a standard format (say mm/dd/yyyy) when available or NULL.

I can only think of a function to do this, but I don't want to do a UDF as I need to make sure it does not error out while trying to convert. There is no try/catch in UDF. I could do a CLR function to make use of more powerful .net features though I would like to avoid it.

Is there any other better way to handle this conversion in SQL Server? Also how should I go about doing this conversion if possible in SQL.