Elegant, witty and wildly successful with a net worth estimated at almost £20million, blockbuster author Patricia Cornwell seems in little need of salvation.
But as she fully admits, her most famous character – forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta, who first appeared in her 1990 novel, Postmortem – might never have come about if it hadn’t been for her bleak beginnings.
Patricia was five when her lawyer father walked out one Christmas Day. Her mother suffered from deep depression and mania, meaning her daughter was placed periodically into care, with a foster mother who cruelly taunted her.
There are childhood stories of attempted kidnap, sexual assault by a paedophile and having to scavenge raw hot dogs and hamburgers from the freezer when her mum was bedridden and unable to cook.
‘In Scarpetta I created a character who would have rescued me as a child, who would have saved me,’ she says. ‘And in a way she did.’
After all, Patricia, now 69, has sold more than 120 million books worldwide and the Scarpetta series runs to 29 novels. And as of this year, her most famous character has finally made it to the screen.
An instant hit when it launched on Amazon Prime Video earlier this year, Scarpetta was brought to fruition by executive producer Jamie Lee Curtis and stars Nicole Kidman in the titular role – cool, meticulous and relentless in seeking justice for the victims she sees on her slab every day.
‘You know, I’m not like Scarpetta,’ Patricia admits. ‘Nicole Kidman is like Scarpetta in that she listens more than she speaks and when she speaks, she has something to say…
‘I’m not like that!’ she laughs. ‘I’m out loud and wide open. But where Scarpetta and I are the same is that we both believe the root of all evil is the abuse of power.’
Something she has fallen victim to again and again.
Patricia Cornwell has sold more than 120 million books worldwide, many featuring her most famous character, forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta
Nicole Kidman stars in the Amazon Prime hit adaptation of the Scarpetta novels
Speaking from her home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Patricia is wearing an orange hoodie and grey sweatpants. A trim, fit blonde, she cuts a strikingly youthful figure as she prepares to turn 70 next month.
When we previously spoke a couple of years ago, she was open about ‘hating’ the vagaries of ageing (Patricia, you quickly realise, is open about pretty much everything) although, having been a proponent of plastic surgery and Botox in the past, she had sworn off it in recent years: ‘A lot of these things over time are not necessarily helpful.’
Today, she is upbeat if slightly weary – the result, no doubt, of having just written her memoir, True Crime, a riveting, emotionally draining gallop through her complex life.
As someone who likes to ‘not dwell on the past’, she only decided to tell her story when she was given a TV script to read which was ‘supposedly based on my life’ and realised that the only person equipped to tell her story properly was her.
Indeed, the facts of her life are so much stranger than the fiction she creates that Patricia’s constant exclamation throughout our interview is: ‘What a great story!’ Such as when her absentee father tried to kidnap Patricia, then aged seven, and her brothers, Jim and John, before thinking better of it and leaving them with a friend.
Patricia’s parents argued frequently and, after having an affair, her father walked out, leaving the children under the increasingly erratic supervision of their mother.
A lonely child who created imaginary characters to talk to, Patricia often roamed the streets near the family’s home in Miami. When a local patrolman stopped in his white cruiser every day to chat to her, Patricia, desperately missing her father, innocently ‘enjoyed the attention’.
His attentions soured, however, when one day he ‘started kissing me on the mouth, digging a hand in a pocket of my red shorts’ until her brother Jim rode up on his bike and scared him off.
Patricia was just five when she had to testify in front of a grand jury about what happened.
‘I seem to remember there were women sitting around a table – I don’t remember any men – and they passed my red shorts around so that everybody could look at them,’ she says. ‘I remember feeling humiliated and embarrassed because I had got involved in something that was bad and dirty and had got people really upset.’
Feeling Miami was unsafe, her mother, a devout Christian, moved the family to North Carolina – home to the renowned evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth. After Patricia’s mother attempted to hand over her children to the Grahams to be raised, she was placed in hospital for mental illness and nine-year-old Patricia was subsequently deposited with former missionaries, who again treated her cruelly.
Patricia decided to write a memoir only after she was given a TV script to read ‘supposedly based on my life’ and realised she was the only person equipped to tell her story properly
Patricia in a police uniform in 1983… she is known for the meticulous research she puts into her books
Patricia’s family moved to North Carolina when she was five, and the family became friends with evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth
Matters didn’t improve as Patricia headed into adulthood, her home life shattered and her ambitions of becoming a professional tennis player thwarted.
‘I didn’t think I was good at anything,’ she says. ‘I was depressed and felt like I had no control over anything in my life, so I decided I would control one thing – my weight.’
At one point down to 6st 5lbs – ‘which is 30lbs [more than 2st] less than I weigh now and I’m not a big person’ – she was eventually admitted to the same hospital that had treated her mother.
‘For several weeks I would fantasise about how I was going to kill myself,’ says Patricia, in an almost matter-of-fact fashion. ‘I told myself: “You’ve struck out way too many times. Life holds no promise for you. You’re never going to amount to anything.”’
But at her lowest point, Ruth Graham gave Patricia a journal and encouraged her to write, setting her on a path that was to change her life.
Having been accepted at the prestigious Davidson College in North Carolina, Patricia embarked on a romance with Charlie Cornwell, her elusive English professor some 17 years her senior.
‘I didn’t emotionally trust people very easily. My tendency was to pick somebody that I really couldn’t catch because that was safe, and picking Charlie was me returning to my indifferent father,’ she says.
‘I was never going to catch my father [in 1996 on his deathbed, his final words to her brother Jim were: ‘I love you’; to Patricia they were: ‘How’s work?’], and I was never going to catch Charlie, even though I married him.’
She joined a local newspaper after graduating and became a prolific crime reporter until a harrowing incident which occurred when she interviewed a city official. After dining together, he spiked her drink and Patricia later woke up, head pounding, too terrified to report her rape.
She quit the newspaper shortly afterwards and, in what was to prove an opportune turn in her life, took a job as a technical writer for the chief medical examiner in Richmond, Virginia – a brilliant, chain-smoking woman by the name of Dr Marcella Fierro.
Patricia in a medical examiner’s office, researching her work… it was one such official who inspired Dr Kay Scarpetta
With her wife Staci Gruber and Jamie Lee Curtis at a talk in 2015
Patricia with Demi Moore, who wanted to turn her first novel into a movie back in the 1990s
By now, she had penned three unpublished detective novels and, growing disheartened, she nonetheless heeded the advice of a helpful editor who told her to focus her storytelling on one of the minor characters in her books – the female medical examiner based on Dr Fierro.
As the editor explained: ‘I want to see what you see in the morgue.’ It turned out that millions of other readers did too, and the forensic thriller was born.
Her debut, Postmortem, won numerous awards and soon Hollywood started calling. Jodie Foster, fresh from the success of The Silence of the Lambs, was an early contender to play Scarpetta but, after she passed on the role, Demi Moore made her pitch, accompanying Patricia to autopsies and the FBI firing range – even suggesting her then-husband Bruce Willis for the part of Pete Marino, Scarpetta’s sidekick.
But the fame that Patricia had suddenly acquired proved unsettling. While drinking heavily and taking Prozac, she crashed her car driving in LA and had to be airlifted to hospital.
She suffered concussion, a sprained neck and lacerations to her face and recalls an out-of-body experience: ‘I was above the upside-down car, looking down at myself as the rescue people were talking to me.’
Just as the deal with Columbia Pictures was about to be inked, Patricia, terrified of ‘giving my power away’, scuppered it and checked herself into a treatment centre.
When Demi tried to call her, a panicked Patricia had her office tell her that she was ‘on a safari for book research’. Later, ‘I realised: oh my God – you were not fair to Demi,’ she says, blanching at the memory, ‘and then I had a bad reputation in Hollywood for the next decade.’
By this time, Patricia and Charlie had divorced and, after dipping her toe back into the dating pool, she was ‘surprised’ to find herself attracted to a woman – ‘a friend who’ll remain nameless’.
Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis in a scene from Scarpetta… Lee Curtis is the show’s executive producer
Patricia at a firing range… she says her work has shown her more than she wants to know about the darker side of human nature. She has had extensive firearms training and used to have a cache of guns in her vault
‘Growing up the way I did,’ she says of her religious upbringing, ‘I had no idea that could ever be on the cards for me, as it was not something the people in my hometown would have been happy about.’
But then in 1997 she was outed in horrible fashion when her brief affair with a female FBI agent made the headlines. The woman’s husband, also with the FBI, had got wind of the affair and, after strapping on a fake bomb, abducted his wife’s priest in his church, using him to lure her inside. The husband was eventually sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Her lover’s husband had also gone looking for Patricia but, luckily, she no longer lived at the address he went to.
‘I was told that he intended to stage an elaborate murder-suicide,’ she writes in her book – a staging which involved sex toys and pipe bombs.
While Patricia chats easily about every facet of her life, this is the first time during our conversation that she grows somewhat subdued. ‘I was afraid to face people,’ she admits. ‘Because not only was it the “gay card”, but it was also an affair. The person was married. None of it was good and it was not the way I was brought up, to say the least. That was poor judgment.’
Did she start to feel like one of the characters in her own novels?
‘Absolutely,’ she nods. ‘I was beginning to wonder: who’s writing what? Is life writing me, or am I writing the story?’
In a life filled with fortuitous escapes and curious encounters, there was no encounter more curious than the one she had with Mohamed Al-Fayed in 2001.
After giving a talk at the premier London store owned by the tycoon, Harrods, she was invited to his private apartment on the top floor. Al-Fayed wanted the acclaimed crime writer to investigate the ‘murders’ of his son Dodi and Princess Diana.
The couple had died four years previously when their car had crashed in Paris and Al-Fayed, still grief-stricken, wanted Patricia to write a book about what had really happened.
‘And I had to tell him I didn’t write books for hire,’ she explains now.
Instead, she proposed an in-depth TV documentary. But after examining the evidence and interviewing several people, including Diana’s butler Paul Burrell and the mortuary assistant present during Diana’s autopsy, she came to, what was for Al-Fayed, an unsatisfactory conclusion. ‘The big thing that argues against them being murdered in a car is that if you were wanting to do that by having a crash, it wouldn’t have worked as well if they’d had their seatbelts on, and they didn’t,’ says Patricia.
‘This FBI friend of mine used to say: “Don’t look for unicorns till you run out of ponies.” So often, the real answer is a mundane one.’
Patricia Cornwell’s memoir looks back at her traumatic upbringing and later success
These days, Patricia’s life is perhaps slightly calmer. Since 2004, she has been married to her wife, Staci Gruber, 58 and a Harvard neuroscientist. Like her creation Scarpetta, Patricia never had children.
‘[Staci and I] do things for other people that aren’t our actual kids, like put them through college, but yeah,’ she admits, ‘sometimes I do regret it. I never got pregnant, so there was never any decision that had to be made and eventually it was discovered that I probably couldn’t have kids anyway, as when my mother was pregnant with me, she was on diethylstilbestrol [a drug to prevent miscarriage] which is now known to cause significant birth defects.’
But, she adds: ‘I was terrified by the thought of raising children because I really didn’t know how. I don’t feel that I had anybody much that raised me and I thought: I don’t want to do to someone else some of the things that had been done to me. I didn’t want to be someone’s tragic story.’
Her work too has shown her more than she wants to know about the darker side of human nature. She is acutely aware of the dangers lurking around every corner (she has had extensive firearms training and used to have a cache of guns in her vault) and is known for the meticulous research she puts into her books; she has seen on the autopsy table the brutality that humans can inflict on one another.
‘Maybe that’s why I like to write from Scarpetta’s point of view,’ she says, ‘because I’m very pro-victim. I know how it feels to have something bad done to you. I have a very good sense of the way victims feel.’
Scarpetta too feels deeply for the victims placed on the slab in front of her and by allowing them to tell her how they died, she gives voice to the voiceless dead.
Little wonder that Patricia, voiceless as a child when all manner of horrors befell her, would have loved Scarpetta to have been her saviour.
‘When I was asked at the Scarpetta premiere what it felt like to meet all the actors playing my characters, I said, “All these years I’ve lived with them in my head and now I can look at them.”
‘Now,’ says Patricia with a smile, ‘I don’t feel as lonely any more.’
True Crime by Patricia Cornwell (Sceptre, £25) is out now. © Patricia Cornwall 2026. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 21/5/2026; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
