A dark, unresolved story from Charlotte’s past crept back into the light last week.
In the summer of 1990, a 32-year-old woman named Kim Thomas was murdered in her Cotswold home. She was handcuffed, and her throat and neck had been slashed and stabbed more than 20 times. Her 10-month-old son was in his crib.
There were, and are, two main suspects. The first is Thomas’ husband, Dr. Edward Friedland. He had been having an affair and had talked to a lawyer about a divorce. Four years after Thomas’ death, police charged Friedland with murder. But prosecutors eventually dropped the charge.
The other suspect is Marion Gales, a handyman who had done some yardwork at Thomas’ house. He has a long criminal record and is currently in prison for manslaughter in the death of another woman. Friedland sued Gales for wrongful death in civil court and won. But the criminal standard is higher, and police have never charged Gales in Thomas’ case.
Those last few sentences do not begin to cover how the Kim Thomas murder haunted Charlotte for years, and lingers even now. You won’t have a hard time finding people who can still argue in detail whether Friedland committed the murder, or whether Gales did it, or whether somehow they were in on it together.
Now, Friedland’s lawyer says there is new evidence.
You might remember David Rudolf. He defended former Carolina Panther Rae Carruth in his trial for the death of Carruth’s pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams. He also defended Michael Peterson, the Durham writer convicted of murdering his wife in 2001. After being granted a new trial, he gave an Alford plea to manslaughter—not admitting to guilt, but conceding that a reasonable jury might find him guilty. That whole saga generated two miniseries, both called “The Staircase,” one a documentary and the other a fictional version on HBO.
Rudolf represents Edward Friedland. And in a court filing last week, as reported by Michael Gordon at the Charlotte Observer, Rudolf says a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police detective gave him a tip that police matched Gales to DNA evidence found at the Thomas crime scene. If true, that would be the first physical evidence placing Gales there.
A CMPD attorney emailed Rudolf to say that its cold case unit is still working on the case, and didn’t say much more than that.
David Rudolf is a very good lawyer with a tremendous sense of drama. Did he really get a solid tip? Will that tip lead to a break in the case? Who knows?
I know just three things for sure.
One, for many of us, this is turning over some long-buried memories.
Two, for Kim Thomas’ family and friends, those memories have never gone away.
And three, whether it happens now or later, those folks deserve a final answer.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
