Age 45, James “Jim” Wright was found dead inside his small rental home at 810 South Sledge Street in Kyle, Texas, on the evening of June 25, 2015. Officers arrived for a welfare check after family couldn't reach him, forced entry when no one answered the door, and discovered two bodies: the 45-year-old James “Jim” Wright in the hallway and 44-year-old Tina Combs in the master bedroom. Autopsies concluded both deaths were homicides.
Wright died instantly of a gunshot wound to the head; Combs suffered both gunshot and stab wounds. The discovery stunned a town unaccustomed to such violence.
In the early months that followed, investigators kept a tight hold on details, but a case summary released through public records identified two early suspects: Larry Simon, who knew the 45-year-old male victim, and Ryan Kidd. Friends and relatives described the 45-year-old man as gregarious and generous, a contractor who had recently settled in Kyle; Combs had traveled from the Dallas–Fort Worth area to visit. The silence around the crime scene specifics fed anxiety, but the broad contours were clear: whoever attacked them moved through the narrow hallway toward the bedroom, leaving Wright where he fell and Combs fatally wounded behind the door.
Years later, a break came. On February 3, 2021, Kyle police announced that Larry Simon, then 47, had been charged with two counts of capital murder in the killings of the 45-year-old male victim and Combs. Simon, a known associate of Wright and early person of interest, was already in the Hays County Jail on unrelated charges when detectives secured the warrants. The department credited thousands of investigative hours and assistance from the Texas Rangers in bringing the case to that point. News reports at the time echoed the department's statement and added that police believed Simon had been living with and working for Wright.
Court records later shifted the trajectory. On March 4, 2024, a district judge dismissed the capital murder charge against Simon “for further investigation,” just days before a scheduled jury trial. Reporting on the dismissal recounted investigative details contained in affidavits—among them Simon's inconsistent account of his whereabouts, evidence he'd pawned items belonging to the 45-year-old male victim, and a witness statement from 2021 claiming Simon had described aspects of the crime that matched nonpublic evidence. Although the dismissal left open the possibility of refiling, it meant that as of that date there was no active prosecution and no conviction in the killings of Wright and Combs.
Today, the case remains defined by that arc: a quiet Kyle neighborhood, a welfare check that revealed the 45-year-old male victim slain in his hallway and a visitor cut down in the bedroom; an investigation that named early suspects, led to an arrest six years later, and then, nearly nine years after the crime, retreated back into the realm of “further investigation.” For Wright's family and Combs's children, the official updates have offered only partial answers, while the most basic facts—the date, the address, the manner of death—stand fixed in the record, awaiting a resolution that has yet to arrive.
