Vigil held in Charlotte for victim of 25-year-old cold case

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It’s been 25 years since a woman was found dead inside her south Charlotte home, and the homicide case remains unsolved.

Kim Thomas was found handcuffed, with her throat slashed, in her home on Churchill Road July 23, 1990.

On Saturday Thomas’ sister, Lynn Thomas, held a vigil in Freedom Park to mark the 25th anniversary of her sister’s death.

"Whoever is arrested for this, that will be a very sweet day the wheels of justice have turned and things are being resolved and it's just time,” Lynn Thomas said.

In the 1990s after the homicide, police eventually arrested her husband, Edward Friedland, who was a doctor in Charlotte at that time. The district attorney later dismissed the charges due to lack of evidence.

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With the 25th anniversary of Thomas’s death just past, Friedland told Channel 9 he wants his wife’s killer brought to justice.

He spoke with Eyewitness News reporter Alexa Ashwell by phone from Florida, where he lives.

“I was innocent. I am innocent. I will always be innocent and I should never have been charged,” Friedland said. “It was a terrible thing I was charged and it set back the case.”

Friedland believes detectives should have built their case against a man named Marion Gales, who was a handyman who lived nearby.

Gales was never charged in the crime but is currently incarcerated for a series of convictions including the manslaughter of a pregnant woman in 2008, decades after Kim Thomas’s murder.

Even though Friedland won a civil suit against Gales in the 1990s, police have maintained over the years that no evidence linked him to the case.

The case grew cold but Thomas’s family hasn’t given up hope it will one day be solved.

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