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Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell (born Patricia Carroll Daniels June 9, 1956) is a contemporary American crime writer. She is widely known for writing a popular series of novels featuring the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. In 2002, Cornwell claimed to have solved the mystery of the Jack the Ripper murders by accusing noted painter Walter Sickert, though her conclusions and methods have been widely criticized.
Early lifeA descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe,[1] Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida. Cornwell says that there are numerous links between herself and the main character in her novels, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist. They are both Miami-born, divorced, and had difficult relationships with their late fathers. Cornwell's father, Sam Daniels, was one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Cornwell later traced her own motivations in life to the emotional abuse she says she suffered from her father, who she says walked out on the family on Christmas Day 1961. In 1961, Cornwell's family moved to Montreat, North Carolina, where her mother was hospitalized for depression and the children were placed in the foster care system. By her late teens, Cornwell told The Times [2], she was anorexic and suffered from depression. Billy Graham's wife, Ruth Bell, encouraged Cornwell to write. Shortly after graduating from Davidson College with a B.A. in English, she married one of her English professors, Charles Cornwell, who was 17 years her senior. Professor Cornwell left his tenured professorship to become a preacher and Patricia began writing a biography of Ruth Bell Graham. In 1979, Cornwell started working as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer and soon began covering crime. Her biography of Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering (renamed Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham in subsequent editions), was published in 1983. In 1984, she took a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia. For six years she worked there, first as a technical writer and then as a computer analyst. She also volunteered to work with the Richmond Police Department. In 1989, Cornwell and her husband divorced. CareerIn the 1980s, Cornwell wrote three novels that she says were rejected before the publication, in 1991, of her first major success, Postmortem. After the success of Postmortem, Cornwell bought five houses and as many cars in one year. Then, after an evening out with actress Demi Moore, who was visiting to discuss playing Scarpetta in a film, Cornwell crashed her Mercedes, was convicted of drunk driving and sentenced to 28 days in a treatment center.[3] After studying the criminal brain for her 2005 book, Predator, Cornwell said she reversed her position in support of the death penalty and concluded that the mind is formed by nature and nurture acting upon each other, which does not mean that someone is chemically doomed to become a psychopathic murderer. In her interview with The Times, Cornwell used similar concepts to describe herself, saying that she was "wired differently", in a direct reference to her struggle with bipolar disorder:[2] "She was a personal friend of George Bush Senior (or 'Big George', as she calls him), spending a number of weeks at the family's summer retreat in Kennebunkport. 'I was supportive of young George Bush because I liked his family. I thought he was going to be another Big George. Boy, was I ever wrong. It's not a democracy so much as a theocracy, and those are not the principles this country was founded on.'" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/07/patricia-cornwell-interview) She has been friends with the family of the Reverend Billy Graham since childhood, often serving as the family's unofficial spokesperson on Don Imus' radio show. Cornwell was a particularly ardent supporter of Graham's elderly wife, Ruth Bell Graham, who wished for her and her husband to be buried together near their home in the mountains of North Carolina, rather than at a "Billy Graham Museum" in Charlotte that was being planned by Graham's eldest son, Franklin.[4] Personal lifeOn November 11, 2007, The Daily Telegraph published an interview focused largely on her history and identity as a lesbian, including her marriage to Dr. Staci Ann Gruber.[5] In an April 2008 interview on how Cornwell's life has influenced her writing, in The Times, Cornwell's marriage to Gruber in Massachusetts was also discussed.[6] A 2008 interview in The Advocate discusses how Billie Jean King helped Cornwell to come to terms with talking about her sexuality publicly. In the interview, she says turning 50 made her see the importance of speaking out for equal rights.[7] Murder plotIn June 1991, Marguerite 'Margo' Bennett and Cornwell became friends after the two met at the Quantico FBI academy, where Cornwell had been researching her Scarpetta books. Margo and her FBI undercover husband Eugene "Gene" Bennett had been in a relationship for ten years, married since 1984, and were parents of two daughters. The following year, Cornwell initiated an affair with the wife, Margo.[8] In 1996, following discovery of the affair, Eugene Bennett was arrested and later charged with the attempted murder of his wife, among a host of other charges related to the abduction of Margo's minister, Edwin Clever, and threats to blow up his church. Gene Bennett was convicted in Prince William County, Virginia in 1997, and was sentenced to 23 years in prison. Margo Bennett had already been forced to resign from the FBI in 1994 after helping prosecutors convict her husband in a federal fraud case. The novelist has denied any responsibility and regret for the 1996 incidents at the Prince of Peace United Methodist Church, implying the blame lay at the Bennetts' door. Although Margo said the affair was "very special and magical, unique," Cornwell told reporters, the affair "was very brief in every way you can imagine," a dismissal that Bennett says, "hurt my feelings."[8] Gene Bennett is scheduled to be released from a state prison in Virginia in 2016 at age 61. Political contributionsSince 1998, Cornwell has donated at least $130,000 to the Republican Party, and has made additional individual contributions to Republican U.S. Senate candidates including George Allen, John Warner, and Orrin Hatch.[9] She has occasionally supported specific Democratic candidates as well, including Hillary Clinton, Nicola Tsongas, Charles Robb, and Mark Warner.[9] Charitable donationsCornwell has made several notable charitable donations, including founding the Virginia Institute for Forensic Science and Medicine, funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee's National Forensics Academy, Davidson College's Creative Writing Program, and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University. As a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital?s National Council, she is an advocate for psychiatric research. She has also made million-dollar donations to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the Crime Scene Academy and to the Harvard Art Museum. WritingsScarpetta seriesThe Scarpetta novels include a great deal of detail on forensic science. The solution to the mystery usually is found in the forensic investigation of the murder victim's corpse, although Scarpetta does considerably more field investigation and confrontation with suspects than real-life medical examiners. The novels are considered to have influenced the development of popular TV series on forensics, both fictional, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and documentaries, such as Cold Case Files. Cornwell herself worked at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia as a technical writer and computer analyst, but not in any official medical or forensics capacity. Other significant themes in the Scarpetta novels include health, individual safety and security, food, family, and the emerging sexual self-discovery of Scarpetta's niece. Often, conflicts and secret manipulations by Scarpetta's colleagues and staff are involved in the storyline and make the murder cases more complex. Although scenes from the novels take place in a variety of locations around the U.S. and (less commonly) internationally, they center around the city of Richmond, Virginia. There are two remarkable style shifts in the Scarpetta novels. Starting from The Last Precinct, the style changes from past tense to present tense. Starting from Blow Fly, the style changes from first person to third person. Brazil/Hammer seriesBesides the Scarpetta novels, Cornwell wrote three additional pseudo-police fictions, the Brazil/Hammer series, set in North Carolina and off the mid-Atlantic coast. Besides the older woman/younger man premise, the books include discomforting themes of scatology, sepsis, and talking animals. Non-fictionCornwell wrote a number of works of non-fiction, including cookbooks featuring Northern Italian cuisine. The Scarpettas originally came from northern Italy. ControversiesJack the RipperCornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She wrote Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper?Case Closed, which was published in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world[10] and also among Ripperologists.[11][12] Cornwell has denied being obsessed with Jack the Ripper in full-page ads in two British newspapers[13] and has recently said the case was "far from closed."[14] Litigation surrounding The Last PrecinctLeslie Sachs, author of The Virginia Ghost Murders (1998), claimed there were similarities between his novel and Cornwell's The Last Precinct. In 2000, he sent letters to Cornwell's publisher, started a web page, and placed stickers on copies of his novel alleging that Cornwell was committing plagiarism. The United States District Court of Eastern Virginia granted Cornwell a preliminary injunction against Sachs, ruling his claims were baseless. The court shut down his web site for false advertising and ordered him to stop placing the stickers on his book The Virginia Ghost Murders and required booksellers to remove the stickers already on their copies.[15] Sachs fled to Belgium to escape the injunction.[16] In May 2007, testifying in a Viriginia court in her libel suit against Sachs, Cornwell stated that Sachs had accused her in online postings of being a "Jew hater" and "neo Nazi" who bribed judges, conspired to have him killed, and was under investigation by U.S. authorities. She hired bodyguards to protect her against anyone who might believe Sachs' accusations. She asked the court to enforce a broader injunction to stop his online accusations, charging he was engaging in libel and cyberstalking.[16][17] Sachs chose not to participate in the proceedings.[18] In June 2007 the federal judge, finding actual malice in forty-five false statements by Sachs, ordered the removal of Sachs' defamatory postings until the case was resolved. [19] In December 2007 the court awarded Cornwell $37,780 in damages to cover the costs of defending against Sachs's internet attacks. He also permanently enjoined Sachs from making the defamatory accusations against Cornwell. Sachs again chose not to participate in the proceedings.[18] BibliographyFiction series"Kay Scarpetta" series
Andy Brazil series
At Risk / Win Garano series
Other
Non-fiction
Omnibus
Awards
References
External links
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