She was abandoned by her parents on Billy Graham’s doorstep and battled with anorexia,
Patricia Cornwell is a ghoulish woman and, no mistake, she enjoys spending her time in morgues and at the scenes of murders, suicides and violent accidents. ‘It’s the coolest thing to see an autopsy,’ we are assured in True Crime, her autobiography.
A top tip is to swipe Vicks VapoRub up the nose, to counteract the stench.
Troubled upbringing: Growing up Patricia and her two siblings were abandoned by both of their parents but she overcame her early struggles to become a bestselling novelist
On thousands of occasions, Cornwell has watched the pathologist at the slab, using a rib-cutter to chop through the bone. The inner-organs are then lifted out and sliced with a long knife, the medical team checking for tumours, scarring and genetic anomalies.
The scalp is pulled back and a circular saw buzzes around the skull. The whole business takes about an hour. Sections of organs are saved in glass jars filled with a formaldehyde solution while everything else is popped in a plastic bag and sewn back into the chest cavity.
Cornwell is absorbed by blood stains, fingerprints, toxicology and firearms. Without a hint of nausea, she has prowled around the ‘Body Farm’ at the University of Tennessee, where decomposing cadavers are left out in the open, apparently making it easier ‘to learn more about determining time of death’. CCTV cameras monitor the rats and buzzards ‘helping themselves’.
All this morbidness is in the name of research – and Cornwell’s novels about Kay Scarpetta, the ‘tough, chain-smoking woman forensic pathologist’, currently played by Nicole Kidman in the Amazon Prime adaptations, have been huge bestsellers. Indeed, brags Cornwell, ‘I was the highest paid female author in the world’, next to J. K. Rowling.
This wasn’t always the case. For some years, says Cornwell, ‘I had very little income, only what I got for book sales when giving talks, and the occasional royalty cheque that wasn’t much.’
People weren’t quite ready for her graphic, detailed and dispassionate descriptions of death and horror. They expected intellectual games as provided by Agatha Christie.
Nevertheless, Cornwell says she had a dream where Christie appeared and announced, ‘You will take my place!’ And she has duly done so, winning many prizes and awards.
If, in Christie, murder is genteel – no pain, no suffering, no buckets of blood – suddenly, in the 1990s, readers saw that Cornwell, as the complete opposite to this tradition, might work after all.
The amounts she received for the rights to her books rose steadily from $40,000 to $120,000 to $700,000 to $4.5 million. Thousands of American fans queued up at Barnes & Noble bookshops for signed copies.
The author found herself associating with Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson and Mike Myers aboard the Columbia Studios Gulfstream jet.
First-hand experience: Cornwell deeply researches her novels and has witness several post-mortems
New heights: Cornwell is a licensed helicopter pilot
She hasn’t enjoyed fame, however: ‘I began disguising myself with baseball caps and sunglasses.’ In an attempt to preserve privacy, even anonymity, there’s a team of assistants to make reservations.
C ornwell travels by helicopter, piloted by herself. If she’s by chance walking along the pavement and hears footsteps, ‘I’ll stop what I’m doing and turn around aggressively’.
If this sounds paranoid, perhaps she is. Cornwell admits she’s ‘perpetually jumpy’, fearing scaffolding will collapse on top of her, or that ‘the person loitering suspiciously might be a serial killer’.
She’s had a distressing time with men, having been repeatedly groped – patrol officers, city officials, doctors and social workers.
Television interviewer Larry King comes in for criticism for his ‘lewd intimations’. King was ‘a little man in suspenders [braces], with stiffly sprayed hair, his aggression fuelled by insecurity, anger and misogyny’.
Cornwell had trouble with former US president Bill Clinton, who trailed his fingers along her palm, ‘not letting go’. Another former president, George Bush Sr, once grabbed Cornwell ‘in an inappropriate way’ while demonstrating tandem skydiving.
It is no surprise to learn Cornwell’s childhood was filled with insecurities. She was born in 1956 in Miami. Her mother, Marilyn, suffered from psychotic and depressive episodes, when she’d burn everyone’s clothes.
Fearing floods, fires and other cataclysms, she made her three children go through endless drills – ‘her drills leaving me unsettled’, remembers Cornwell.
Sam, Cornwell’s father, a successful lawyer, didn’t help matters by telling his wife she was ‘stupid and worthless’. Cornwell earnestly believes that her father was her mother’s ‘nemesis. I think he broke her, and she broke him back’.
Emotionally cold and silent, Sam walked out on Christmas Day 1961. ‘Daddy, don’t go!’ cried the five-year-old Patricia, clinging to his leg. ‘My father’s demeanour was unnerving. He’d look right through me as if I were made of air.’
Sam had nervous breakdowns, too, and was hospitalised. Later, after the divorce, he married a flight attendant called Rita and kept his ex-family short of money. He refused to pay for Cornwell’s education and nor would he meet the $500 dental bill when his daughter had her wisdom teeth extracted.
In despair, Marilyn put the children in the car, drove to North Carolina and dumped them on evangelist Billy Graham’s doorstep.
Marilyn was promptly sectioned and Billy’s wife arranged for foster parents to be found – cruel sorts, former missionaries from the Belgian Congo. The woman, Leonore, ‘ruled her household with the severity of a prison wardress . . . She went out of her way to crush my spirit,’ remembers Cornwell.
The food was ghastly, hair washing was forbidden, along with taboos on drinking and smoking, and ‘disco dancing was considered a sin’.
Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta in the Amazon Prime series
The upshot was that Cornwell was packed off to an asylum with a severe eating disorder, anorexia. ‘When I looked in the mirror, I looked huge and felt disgusted.’ Yet the future writer was being formed.
Though ‘I felt far lonelier when with other people and always would,’ nonetheless, ‘I learned to create worlds of my own, and my inventions kept me company.’
At college, where she was sponsored by the Grahams, Cornwell had a crush on her professor, and married him in 1980 – Charlie was a father-surrogate 17 years her senior. ‘Tensions began building between us’ almost immediately because, working as a local journalist, Cornwell volunteered to accompany the police on their night shifts, where she could talk to detectives.
Cornwell divorced Charlie after eight years and got involved with women instead.
Though assigned stories on fashion shows, babies born in taxis or the weather, what Cornwell enjoyed, her métier, was covering true crime.
Eventually she was made an official neighbourhood assistance officer, which gave her clearance to attend post-mortems. She left journalism to work at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Out of this came the genesis of her first book, about voodoo and poisons.
‘The dead won’t hurt you. It’s everybody else,’ Cornwell wrote. But in True Crime we are told of the author’s belief in ghosts and supernatural agencies.
Cornwell is convinced that, having ‘unmasked’ artist Walter Sickert (1860-1942) as Jack the Ripper, he is responsible for making her computer and the lights flicker on and off. ‘Fogs, fires and hurricane-strength winds’ have also been unleashed upon Cornwell by the aggrieved Victorian painter.
This sounds plain silly, and subverts Kay Scarpetta, who is as coldly scientific as Sherlock Holmes. It is more reminiscent of something Cornwell’s mother would come out with. Marilyn, incidentally, lived to be 96. There’s considerable strength of will in seeming weakness.
True Crime is a gripping, moving, account of over- coming much to attain success and riches.