She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set.
Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert.
A descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe,[1] Cornwell was born on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida, second of three children, to Marilyn (née Zenner) and Sam Daniels.
Her father 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 walked out on the family on Christmas Day 1961.
She continued at the newspaper until 1981, when she moved to Richmond, Virginia with her first husband, Charles Cornwell (married in 1980), who enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary.
Cornwell began work on her first novel in 1984, about a male detective named Joe Constable and met Dr. Marcella Farinelli Fierro, a medical examiner in Richmond, and subsequent inspiration for the character of Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
Cornwell wrote three novels that she says were rejected before the publication in 1990, of the first installment of her Scarpetta series, Postmortem, based on real-life stranglings in Richmond in the summer of 1987.
The novels are considered to have influenced the development of popular TV series on forensics, both fictional, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,[5] and documentaries, such as Cold Case Files.
Often, conflicts and secret manipulations by Scarpetta's colleagues and staff are involved in the story-line and make the murder cases more complex.
Although scenes from the novels take place in a variety of locations around the United States and (less commonly) internationally, they center around the city of Richmond, Virginia.
In addition to the Scarpetta novels, Cornwell has written three pseudo-police fictions, known as the Trooper Andy Brazil/Superintendent Judy Hammer series, which are set in North Carolina, Virginia, and off the mid-Atlantic coast.
Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed quest for evidence to support her theory that Victorian painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.
[14] She believed the well-known painter to be responsible for the string of murders and had purchased over 30 of his paintings and argued that they closely resembled the Ripper crime scenes.
[14] Ripper experts noted, however, that there were hundreds of letters from different authors falsely claiming to be the killer, and the watermark in question was on a brand of stationery that was widely available.
[15][16][17] For Naldi, the discovery of this painting, which depicts a man who appears to share Sickert's features, is "visual confirmation of Patricia Cornwell's theory".
[27] Cornwell later stated that turning 50 had made her see the importance of speaking out for equal rights and spoke of how Billie Jean King had helped her come to terms with talking about her sexuality publicly.
"[8] Cornwell has made several notable charitable donations, including funding the Virginia Institute for Forensic Science and Medicine,[34] funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee's National Forensics Academy and Davidson College's Creative Writing Program (the result of which is the Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholarship, awarded to one or two incoming freshmen), and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University.
She has also made million-dollar donations to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the Crime Scene Academy[36] and to the Harvard Art Museum.
[38] The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland trains investigators in the Scarpetta House, a full-scale apartment donated by Cornwell, in which crime scenes are staged.