'Nancy was very driven, motivated, goal-oriented'
Raised in New Orleans, Nancy Campbell was a lover of roller coasters and a daredevil who delighted in swimming in snake-infested lakes in Louisiana. She was once bitten by a water moccasin.
Her mother, Eleanor Campbell, remembers her daughter as a "precious treasure" whose spirit matched her physical beauty.
Nancy's younger sister viewed her during their childhood as a role model to be tormented. But they grew into young women and became very close.
"I grew up in the shadow of my sister and wanted to be just like her," said Amy Leek, now of Arvada. "She was my best friend."
After moving to Colorado when she was about 20, Nancy worked to put herself through school and earn a journalism degree at Metro State College.
The family said she focused on every endeavor with tenacity. Campbell recalled how her daughter, at age 19, protected drive-up customers at a New Orleans bank by calmly continuing to serve them as two masked gunmen ordered those inside the bank to hit the floor during a robbery.
"Nancy was very driven and motivated, very goal-oriented," said college friend Jeanie Straub. "(She) just exuded that kind of self-confidence."
Kurt Sonnenfeld, a Colorado native, was raised in Aurora in a ranch house with his parents, brother and sister.
He earned a degree in English literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
"Kurt has a tremendous exuberance for life," said his friend, Mark Seewald, who described Sonnenfeld as well-read and adventurous. "He's been to a lot of interesting places. He likes to be in the middle of things."
The couple met at the Rock Island club in LoDo.
"It was head over heels for both of them," said one friend. "They were always together. She did very little without him. They seemed like the perfect couple."
They lived in a small LoDo loft until 1996, when they bought their home in Congress Park, a turn-of-the-century Victorian. The front bears a brass plate that reads, "On this site in 1897 nothing happened."
Nancy Sonnenfeld, whose devotion to animals led her to become a vegetarian, volunteered for the Max Fund, helping to place orphaned cats and dogs. Her husband joined in her volunteer work.
The couple shared their home with their cat, Jiffy, and a dog she called Shelby Doo, after her favorite cartoon character, Scooby Doo.
"Her pets were her children," Leek said.
The Sonnenfelds lived on the cutting edge of style and culture, friends said.
"They were very much quintessential Denver yuppies at a time when the economy was starting to boom," said Jeff Stratton, now of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who met Nancy at Metro State and knew the couple from the early to mid-1990s. "It seemed like Kurt and Nancy were really positioned for that.
"Nancy was one of the beautiful people. She really was into her look, her image and physique, the cachet of being attractive. She and Kurt lived that kind of lifestyle. They both were very fashion-oriented, very weight-conscious."
They shared a love of the arts, attending performances of nearly every production that came through town, Leek said. Their living room contained volumes of Shakespeare's plays.
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