Part 1 - A Death In Denver

It was late on New Year's Eve, the early hours of 2002. The emergency call came in at 1:40 A.M., and Denver police arrived at the Victorian house on Clayton Street within minutes. The officers crossed the lawn and scaled the porch, and through the glass in the front door, they saw a dark-haired man dressed in a semiformal outfit—black blazer, black shirt, and black pants.

The man, who had called 911, appeared to be disoriented and distraught and was slow to respond. He came to the door but called out that he couldn't open it; the dead-bolt lock needed a key even from the inside, and he couldn't find it. Officers heard him saying something to the effect of “I can't believe she shot herself.” They smashed a window near the front door and climbed through to the inside, finding a tastefully decorated living room and a grand piano. The man smelled of alcohol and had blood on his hands.

He pointed upstairs and started to lead the way, saying he needed to be with his wife, but the cops restrained him. A struggle ensued downstairs. At the top of the steps, officers followed the smell of gunpowder and entered the master-bedroom suite. There, in a sitting area beneath two skylights, they saw her.

She was a slender woman in her 30s with long brown hair. She was dressed in a camisole and red underwear, and she was sitting on a dark blue chaise longue, her head resting against the wall. A .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun lay on a comforter on the floor in front of her. She was bleeding heavily from the head.

Few people saw the trouble coming till near the end. Kurt and Nancy Sonnenfeld had the outward appearance of a thriving young Denver couple. They dressed stylishly and were known to frequent the gym and attend fund-raisers. When they threw upscale parties at their house in the Congress Park neighborhood, he drew laughs with hammy antics and she graciously played hostess.

Nancy was a successful advertising manager who drove a BMW. She was petite, with lustrous brown hair and brown eyes, and took care with her appearance, highlighting the curves of her figure. She could count on male attention. Friends say she was a little dramatic, or “manic,” at times and often strong-willed. She was the type to step in and talk right back when a stranger reprimanded a friend's small child. A softer side came through when she volunteered at the animal shelter or gave counsel to friends, looking them intently in the eye.

Kurt, for his part, was well muscled and earned the nickname “Chisel Face” among women who knew him. He graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he studied English and philosophy, and colleagues regarded him as well-read and eloquent, with a wry wit. He worked as a videographer and helped train government officials to communicate with the public in disaster situations, traveling often for assignments. He was popular at work, and a longtime friend of Nancy's, Laura Colombo, told me her own impressions of Kurt were “probably the same as everybody's—everybody loved Kurt.”

Nancy had been raised in Louisiana by deeply committed Baptists, and she'd already been married once before (at 19) by the time she met Kurt at a Denver nightclub that drew a goth crowd. They married after three years of dating, but even after settling into a shared life together, they retained a certain edge. Kurt had tattoos on the back of his neck and his upper arms, and both liked to go clubbing. Nancy would sometimes go out with friends, without Kurt, and come home very late. Still, as they reached their mid-30s, they seemed to most people like a typical yuppie couple in love, settling down on their tree-lined block and renovating their Victorian house. They had been married more than eight years when they headed out on December 31, 2001, to a party to ring in the New Year.

When the police found Nancy on the chaise longue in the Sonnenfelds' bedroom, it was apparent that she was still alive, but she was unconscious and in dire condition. The bullet had traveled through her head, and a portion of the slug was protruding from the exit wound.

Paramedics carried her out the living room window and into the frigid Colorado winter night, in view of neighbors gathered on the snowy street outside. The ambulance transported her to Denver Health Medical Center, where doctors worked to save her. She was declared dead at 7:30 that morning. She was 36 years old.

By the time Nancy died, police had already taken Kurt into custody and awakened a judge to issue a search warrant for the house. At the station downtown, Detective Ken Gurule of the Denver Police Department interviewed Sonnenfeld on videotape. He volunteered to take a polygraph test and insisted he did not shoot Nancy. He repeatedly suggested that police carry out a paraffin test on his hand and on Nancy's, referring to a somewhat outmoded technique of detecting gunshot residue. That would clear everything up, he said.

When questioned, Sonnenfeld waffled in his responses, claiming that there were gaps in his memory and that he was confused. Sonnenfeld said he had been in the other room when he heard the gunshot. Nancy had used a gun he'd bought for protection that was stored in a holster hanging from the side of their bed. He and Nancy had returned from the party downtown shortly before she shot herself, Sonnenfeld said. He couldn't recall whether he and Nancy had argued before the shooting, remarking that he would black out a lot when drinking. But later he said Nancy was “very combative” in general and “must have hit him,” noting his sore nose and blackened eye. (A booking photo of Sonnenfeld—see the top of the page—shows moderate swelling and discoloration around the eye.) At another point in the interview, Sonnenfeld accounted for his injuries by saying he had bashed his head against a window in the jail cell because no one would tell him of Nancy's condition.

According to the interview report, when asked why his wife would kill herself, Sonnenfeld said that Nancy had grown angry with him for using heroin on a recent vacation to Thailand. (Sonnenfeld added that he'd struggled with substance-abuse problems in the past.) They wound up parting ways mid-trip, and shortly thereafter she filed for a separation. Sonnenfeld was supposed to move out by Christmas, he said, but they'd patched things up for the time being. When he drank at the New Year's party, after having been “good” for a month, Nancy probably “saw no hope,” Sonnenfeld said.