The Killing of Kathy Ann Stembridge

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the night of March 28, 1980, twenty-one-year-old Kathryn Ann “Kathy” Stembridge was attacked while closing up the C&M Laundromat on Paluxy Road in Granbury, Texas. Stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen, she managed to crawl more than 170 feet across a vacant lot to the porch of her neighbors, Bill and Mary Lou Carney, where she collapsed after telling them, “I’ve been stabbed.” Despite an immediate response and appeals to anyone who might have been driving by that night, no weapon was ever recovered, and no eyewitnesses came forward to name a suspect.

The case soon focused on Robert Lowell Combs, who lived across from the laundromat at the time of the murder. With a violent history that included armed robbery and assaults against women, he was indicted for capital murder in 1981, but the charge was reduced and later dismissed when witnesses changed their stories and prosecutors admitted they lacked evidence strong enough to move forward. Years later, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas tried to claim responsibility, but his version of events didn’t match the facts, and local investigators dismissed him as “all wet.” In the 1990s, DNA tests on hair and blood evidence proved inconclusive, leaving the file open but unsolved. Even decades later, investigators described the crime as a likely passion killing committed by someone close to home. Kathy’s family never stopped pressing for answers, and the community never forgot her final words on a quiet Friday night in Granbury.

If you have any information about the murder of Kathy Ann Stembridge, please call the Granbury Police Department at (817) 573-2648.

Sources: The Hood County News, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Houston Post, The Austin American-Statesman

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Killers don't just take lives.
0:06.0	They reshape everything they left behind.
0:09.7	A quiet backroad, a busy stretch of highway, a house that once felt safe, now a shrine
0:16.2	to everything that went wrong.
0:18.9	Across Texas, deserts, fields, and bayous keep their secrets buried,
0:23.6	but not forever. From the creators of Gone Cold comes of Hell, Texas True Crime, a podcast
0:31.5	about the state's most depraved killers and the scars they left on every town, every family, every mile marker they touched.
0:40.9	Stories that ask one burning question, were there more victims?
0:46.0	Some folks aren't just from hell, they're of it.
0:50.3	Of Hell, Texas True Crime, coming soon.
0:54.4	Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
1:01.2	Gone cold podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter.
1:05.1	Listener discretion is advised.
1:08.7	Granbury, Texas, 1980. On the surface, it was just another small county seat tucked into the
1:16.3	bends of the Brazos River, the kind of place where life revolved around family and church bells.
1:23.5	But in reality, Granbury was changing at a rate most people couldn't keep up with.
1:29.7	In the decade before, Hood County had exploded in size.
1:34.6	Between 1970 and 1980, it ranked among the fastest growing counties in the entire nation.
1:42.4	For a rural patch of North Texas, that kind of growth was dizzying.
1:48.3	Families were arriving from Dallas and Fort Worth. Retirees were building lakeside homes.
1:54.7	Developers were buying up ranchland. Grandbury wasn't just a sleepy square on the prairie anymore.
2:02.7	The engine behind it all was Lake Granbury, a reservoir carved out of the Brazos in
	...

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