A Denver murder suspect living in Buenos Aires has given an account of how he got his dead wife’s blood on his face that conflicts with the version his former defense attorney and his own forensic expert have given.
In an interview with Evan Hughes, a GQ Magazine writer, murder suspect Kurt Sonnenfeld claimed he got blood on his face after he embraced his wife, Nancy Sonnenfeld, moments after she shot herself, and then covered his face with his own bloody hands in despair. The blood dried and flaked, Sonnenfeld further explained.
“That’s their ‘spray,’ ” Sonnenfeld told Hughes, criticizing statements by a half dozen Denver homicide detectives who claimed Sonnenfeld had “high-velocity” blood spray on his face in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2002, when his wife died of a gunshot wound to the head.
But Sonnenfeld’s former attorney, Carrie Thompson, and a nationally-renowned crime consultant working for his defense, have consistently stated that Sonnenfeld’s version of what happened is that Nancy coughed or sneezed blood in her husband’s face and that’s how he got tiny specs of her blood on his face.
Sonnenfeld’s story, which is recounted in a 9-page article called “The Last Fugitive of 9/11′ in GQ’s July edition that also features partially nude images of TV personality Kim Kardashian, was released on newsstands across the country on Tuesday.
Thompson could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
The GQ feature is the latest national news coverage of the murder case against Sonnenfeld, whose story was re-aired on CBS’ 48 Hours earlier this month. Denver authorities have been trying to extradite him from his new home in Buenos Aires back to the U.S. since 2003. Although the Argentine Supreme Court approved Sonnefeld’s extradition in December 2014, former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner granted him political asylum at the end of her administration in October.
Sonnenfeld, a former videographer and spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, claims that he was framed for his wife’s murder to silence him about information that shows U.S. operatives either allowed 9/11 to happen or were participants in the conspiracy.
In a phone interview with The Denver Post, Hughes said Sonnenfeld described the events of the night his wife died during a meeting last year at a Buenos Aires cafe. Sonnenfeld still maintained, as he had originally told police, that when his wife shot herself he was in another room. He was not near his wife when she pulled the trigger, he told Hughes.
That’s why the mystery of how blood ended up on his face is so relevant to the case. Police said the tiny dots of blood spray on his face indicated Sonnenfeld was no more than a few feet from his wife when the gun fired.
Sonnenfeld’s explanation of how tiny blood specs got on his face struck Hughes as being strange, mostly because it differs from the defense that helped win him freedom the first time he was charged with his wife’s murder.
Denver police arrested Sonnenfeld on Jan. 1, 2002, for allegedly murdering his wife. But he was released a week before his trial that spring after Thompson presented an analysis by a nationally-renown forensic scientist who claimed Nancy coughed or sneezed blood onto Sonnenfeld’s face.
Hughes said Sonnenfeld’s explanations of how he got blood on his face has shifted over time.
Former Denver homicide Lt. Jon Priest has said he personally saw what appeared to be a red mist from an aerosol spray can on Sonnenfeld’s face the morning his wife died.
That mist in no way resembles the type of “transfer” blood from Sonnenfeld’s hand to his face that he claimed, Priest told Hughes for the GQ article. Priest told Hughes it “is not the way it could have happened.”
Priest has previously told a Denver Post reporter that even the defense expert’s story is disputed by the fact that Nancy didn’t have blood in her lungs so she couldn’t have coughed blood in her husband’s face.
Hughes said he believes the only chance that Sonnenfeld will be extradited back to Denver to face trial is through diplomatic means rather than through Argentine courts.
Someone in the U.S. would have to apply enough pressure politically to persuade current Argentine President Mauricio Macri to override his predecessor’s offer of asylum to Sonnenfeld and approve his extradition to the U.S.
