Stirring Up A Hornet s Nest

Maybe there was no such thing as gender, after all. Maybe biologically people were just vehicles, like cars. She d heard that overseas the steering wheels were on one side, while here they were on the other. Different genders? Maybe not. Maybe just different cars, the behaviour of all determined by the spirit in the driver s seat.
from Patricia Cornwell s Hornet s Nest

This is the third time that I have interviewed Patricia Cornwell in just under four years, and it s the first time that I ve seen her laugh, really laugh.
In the past, her tapeside manner could best be characterised as one of marble-faced earnestness. She has always been infallibly polite, conscientiously attentive to the questions asked and scrupulously methodical in the answers given. Occasionally, if you were lucky, a tepid smile might tug at the corners of her mouth.
But today, as she reclines on a couch in The Shelbourne Hotel s Princess Grace Suite, it s as if the cork has been unplugged from her bottled-up reserve of polar coolness. Every few minutes, our conversation is shattered by her hearty, throaty chuckle which, more often than not, swells and billows to a great big barnyard cackle.
The irony is that 41-year-old Patricia Cornwell has had precious little to laugh about of late. This bookstore megastar may have just signed a contract worth #16 million for the next three books in her phenomenal series of novels featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Chief Medical Officer of Virginia who moonlights as a senior FBI consultant, but she s been in no mood for a celebration.
The truth is that Patricia Cornwell s life has been rent asunder by blackmail, extortion, scandal and the kind of lurid violence that she tends to play down in the thrillers that have made her one of the most respected crime writers in contemporary fiction. My laughter is the defiant kind, she smiles ruefully. If I didn t laugh, I d cry.
Let s begin with the lurid violence. On Sunday, June 23rd last, sometime late in the afternoon, a former FBI agent called Eugene Bennett sauntered into the Prince of Peace United Methodist Church in the Washington suburb of Manassas.
Bennett is a tall, beefy, brawny 40-year-old man with a permanent scowl and a wide herbaceous moustache. Not that you could tell what his face looked like on this particular evening because he was wearing a ski-mask. He was also brandishing a bolt-action pistol.
The church s pastor, Reverend Edwin Clever, was tidying up after Sunday services when Bennett suddenly leapt out from behind a stairwell. With calm efficiency, he handcuffed Rev. Clever, shoved a bag over his head, chained him to a chair and attached what he said were plastic explosives to his waist.
He then forced Clever to telephone Bennett s estranged wife, Marguerite, and lure her to the church, which was her parochial house of worship. Clever complied, but managed to slip a coded message into his brief communication, warning Marguerite that he was under duress. Like her husband, Marguerite had been an FBI agent, but the couple had separated three years earlier. At this time, Marguerite was working as a security officer at a local community college.
Half an hour after the call from Clever, Marguerite arrived at the Prince of Peace church carrying a gun. There was a confrontation between husband and wife, and Marguerite fired a shot. Bennett fled the scene. Marguerite alerted the police and Clever was released unharmed. Bennett later surrendered to police after a four hour siege at his home.
The incident might have remained a domestic dispute, albeit one with a nasty overspill, had a local radio station not unearthed a copy of Eugene Bennett s divorce papers. These documents soon became the hottest American literary texts of the year.
In the course of his affidavit, Bennett alleged that his wife, Marguerite, had been stolen from him by the millionaire mystery writer, Patricia Daniels Cornwell with whom she had a love affair. Cornwell, it emerged, had first met Marguerite at the FBI academy at Quantico. Marguerite had been an instructor there; Cornwell was a repeated visitor as part of her famed research programme.
Mrs. Bennett met and became totally infatuated with Cornwell, Eugene asserted. Mrs. Bennett began spending a great deal of time with Cornwell in late 1991. In 1992, Mrs. Bennett would frequently meet with Cornwell for romantic candlelight dinners.
The divorce papers maintained that the relationship was initially secret, but that Eugene had become suspicious. He started to follow his wife. On several occasions, he observed Marguerite and Cornwell hugging and kissing in their vehicles. Bennett also claimed that his wife once suggested that he join in a sexual threesome. When he declined, she described him as square.
Eugene and Marguerite eventually split in 1993. Relations had soured so badly between the former couple that, in the same year, Marguerite reported Eugene to the FBI for faking his expenses receipts. He was convicted of stealing #11,000 from the bureau and sentenced to a year in prison.
Early last July, it was established that, for 18 months solid, Eugene Bennett had been sending anonymous letters to newspaper offices outlining his sensational claims about his wife s romance with Patricia Cornwell. Within days of the Manassas fracas, the story had seeped into every crevice of the U.S. national media. It had become a major news buffet and a feeding frenzy was well underway.
Cornwell herself, a notoriously private person, was horrified and stunned by the sudden glare of intrusive scrutiny. She didn t have very much time to dwell on her discomfort, however. For the moment at least, there were other, more immediate, matters on her mind.
On the morning of the day he abducted Rev. Clever, Eugene Bennett had travelled to Richmond, Virginia, Patricia Cornwell s hometown. With a scornful quiver in her voice, she tells me that she is under no illusion about why he did so.
He came to my city to find me and he knew where I lived, she declares. He was going to kill Margo in the evening but I was the entrie. That had been part of his great scenario, I m sure of it.
That s what s taken me the longest to recover from. This was a very clever and evil person who was very skilled because he comes from the right side and lives on the wrong. With his undercover FBI work, he was very expert with guns and explosives. It is incredibly disturbing knowing that that man, who is psychopathic, was virtually on my doorstep. He was simply using me as a way of doing more damage to his wife. He didn t care about me, he doesn t hardly know me. But that makes it all the worse.
Those days, in the aftermath of the abduction, were terrifying. They had to search my house with a bomb dog and go through my car looking for bombs because they found explosive devices at his place. I kept trying to stop my imagination from thinking about what might have happened. But, you see, I know too much. Being the kind of writer I am, I know what psychopaths are capable of, and that s not good stuff to know when you re a target yourself.
It was a nightmare that I did not think would ever happen. It was surreal and sickening.
Today, Eugene Bennett is in jail in North Virginia, serving concurrent sentences for abduction, burglary and illegal possession of weapons. He will remain locked up for what Patricia Cornwell hopes will be pretty much the rest of his life. Custody of the Bennett s two children, aged seven and nine, has been awarded to Marguerite. The couple s divorce proceedings have been postponed but Cornwell denies speculation that she will be forced to give evidence when that case is eventually heard.
Shouldn t be, she shrugs. But who knows? I would never have imagined that I d be involved in his insanity plea so I ll take it as it comes. People get a lot of mileage out of something like this. I guess, sometimes they like it to go on. The people who create it I mean.
The glimpse into Patricia Cornwell s lifestyle afforded by Bennett s crazed eruption has whetted the public appetite for more information. This is not a happy predicament for the author who values seclusion so much that her houses in Richmond, Los Angeles and New York are protected by high, guarded walls and state-of-the-art security appliances, and who has purchased five additional plots of land around her Virginia home to ensure that she has no near neighbours. Nevertheless, she has decided to face the fascination about her personal life head-on and with as much grace as she can muster. Hence the new, improved sense of humour.
Much is not given to you without having the opposite effect as well, she muses. When a lot of light comes into your life, there s a lot of darkness too, there s a lot of shadow. It s almost a law of physics. I have been given so much and I ve gotten so much attention that it really does go with he turf that this is going to happen. You cannot be celebrated and be totally left alone. It s just not going to happen that way. It s like being incredibly wealthy and thinking no-one s gonna want to break into your house.
Having been a journalist, I understand it. Nobody in journalism right now is interested in this any more than I would ve been if I were still a journalist. In a way, I m pretty much trying to be a good sport about it.
Patricia Cornwell confirms that she did indeed have a romantic involvement with Marguerite Bennett (or Margo as she calls her) but adds that their relationship is long over and was of relative little consequence at the time. It almost amuses me slightly that people are making such a big thing out of something that was a very brief shadow on the sun dial of my life in terms of knowing that person, she affirms. This was five years ago. This is not who I am. It may be something I did but it s not who I am. There s not one little facet and that s all there is of me. We ve all done things we regret.
I m not saying that something like that could never happen again with somebody. I m saying that who you re with is who you re with at that moment. I don t know who I m going to be with at a later moment. I can t answer that. It s theoretical. I m not in a relationship now, except with my dog (laughs) who s very territorial by the way. I don t deny anything or admit anything. It s just the way things are at this time.
During her journalistic incarnation, Patricia Cornwell wrote a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of the Christian evangelist Billy Graham. Patricia cites Ruth and Billy as just two of a number of conservative friends about whose reaction to the media revelations she fretted last Summer.
I don t think they registered what I would call shock, Patricia avers. But I think it was hard for them. I think they tried to be very, very supportive. Billy Graham called me twice, just to send his love and support and all that. I flew up to the Western North Carolina Mountains to talk to Ruth immediately when this stuff started hitting.
I wanted her to hear it from me. That was a very, very difficult thing for me to do. I thought it might bother her the most. She has been this mentor figure and I was afraid that she would think that somehow she had failed as a friend over the years, which is nonsense, but you never know what people think.
Her reaction was, The press say anything they want to say, you should just deny it . I said, Ruth, I can t deny it. What they re saying about this situation with Margo is true . Mostly, people just go quiet at that point and try to be nice and helpful about it. But they don t know what to say.
If you re looking for comfort, you re not going to get it from everybody because they don t know how. If you re looking for judgement, you can certainly find that, if you re silly enough to go ask the wrong person. I know where I would find that and I don t ask. I don t need anybody s judgement. I m hard enough on myself for almost everything I do.
You go through the phase of worrying about what people think. You worry about family. You worry about friends. But then you stop and you get a hold of yourself. You realise how much you worry about other people already. Why? Why do I spend so much time worrying about what people think? You have to know what you do and be okay with yourself. It s a matter of being honest with yourself. That s all you can do.
Back home in Richmond, Patricia Cornwell s home was besieged for months by reporters, photographers and camerafolk from all over the world. She contemplated making a midnight flit to somewhere far away like Switzerland or Ireland, but resisted the temptation.
In the end, I did the absolute opposite, she says with a proud grin. I felt like disappearing but I didn t. I would say to a couple of my friends, Let s go out to dinner . We would go to one of the most visible places in the city and just walk in like usual. I ignored people staring and just went about my business because I needed to do that for me. I was saying, I m alright with myself and I m not going to run from you folks, whether you like me or don t .
I have never dumped a fight, and I don t start now. I m going to live my life. We re talking about somebody who has attempted to murder people, that s the one they should be looking at, not me! He s the loony tune. Whenever I do that, I feel better. Hiding is a very dangerous thing to do.
Patricia Cornwell refuses to categorise herself as lesbian, bisexual or heterosexual. Her attitude to gender and sexuality is best encapsulated by a character in her latest novel, Hornet s Nest, deputy police chief Virginia West. West s contention (quoted on previous page) is that, biologically, people are just like cars. Some drive on one side of the road, some on the other. It s the spirit in the driver s seat that counts.
I think that gender is our biology and we re affected by it as much as we wish to be, Cornwell proclaims. There are clear ways that we can have dominance over other people because of our gender, whether it s the feminine things that we do for dominance or the male things. But who we are as spiritual beings does not, in my opinion, have anything to do with gender. Our deep inner core doesn t get up in the morning and live totally inside the animal.
I think the same thing about sexual orientation. And other choices that people make, whether it s in inter-racial relationships or whatever. If you live as a decent and loving person then these choices should be of no consequence. They re control issues in society and create tremendous difficulties.
If I never had a relationship with anybody again the rest of my life, I would, in the end, be glad that I had this happen to me. If, for no other reason, than it gives me greater understanding of what some people put up with. The suffering. I m very lucky because I m in a position where I wouldn t even be discriminated against as much as others. I m trying to be as open as I can here because if I m not open, I just add to the problem.
But what about those gay activists who argue those who are successful and famous and also gay have a duty to be upfront about their sexuality because they can serve as positive role models and help erode negative stereotypes?
No, retorts Cornwell tartly. I m not into that sort of thing. I think that people should just be themselves. Who they love is a part of them but it s not all of them. To announce that is like you walking into your office and saying, By the way, I m Catholic, I knew you would all want to know that, we re gonna form a support group at 5 o clock today . People would look at you like, What is wrong with this guy? .
Why announce that you re white or you re black or a woman or a man? We shouldn t have to do that. It should simply be part of our landscape. I don t think it would be such an issue if we didn t feel we would be punished for it. I would like to see less guilt and more acceptance. Then, this wouldn t be necessary.
So, how much do people have a right to know?
That s a very good question, Cornwell chortles. In some senses, they don t have a right to know most of it. Literally, they don t have a right. Why should they know what medications you re on or who you sleep with? But it doesn t matter because rights have nothing to do with it. You can t legislate discretion. By the same token that you don t have a right to know, I also don t have a right to tell you not to write it. It s not about rights, it s about decisions people make.
How do you deal with that? I ve had to think about this a lot and I guess you just have to not care. It s like finding you re being paraded down the street with no clothes. It s not your first choice but you don t have much say about it. I will try to deal with it with a sense of humour and not care. I m always trying to find the good in things.
The Eugene Bennett affair has transformed Patricia Cornwell s personal life into a pay-per-view commodity. Dozens of her friends and acquaintances have been approached by assorted American publications offering big bucks for scoops and even tittle-tattle about what goes on behind her closed, and bullet-proofed, doors. Several have yielded to the bait, and a bruised and battered Cornwell expects a second wave of revelations over the coming months. Once it starts, people start picking at everything. They want to find out everything. There s always people who ll talk.
I don t think any of the things that are gonna come out about me are anybody s entitlement to know, she protests. They re almost petty. Little things about me personally that would even have to do with my health and what medication I take, and people decide that they re gonna print it.
Margo was five years ago but some of the stuff that s gonna come out goes back to when I was three or four years old! If you have best friends, you confide. It may be something you said about your father once. It could be anything. Imagine it being written about yourself. I m sure you can imagine a lot of things coming out that would just make you sink to the floor if you read it in the paper.
The good part is that when all this stuff comes out, you are forced to scrutinise a lot of things about your self because you have to. It s caught up with you. We kinda like not to look at things after we ve done them. It s hard but worthwhile.
Not only do you face a lot of the sadness of certain times of your life but the thing that I ve had to come to terms with is seeing where I have used poor judgement, seeing where I have been self-destructive, seeing where I have made mistakes. And shaking hands with that and saying, Let s go our separate ways now, we should never have met.
In what way has Patricia Cornwell been self-destructive?
It could be anything, she replies. Reckless ways of running my company in the early days when I didn t know what I was doing. Reckless ways of dealing with money. Partying too much. Sometimes, it s something that wouldn t make sense to anybody else. Relationships, friendships and otherwise, dysfunctional ones. Getting into stuff that was self-destructive.
That s the biggest way that people become self-destructive. They enter relationships that no good can come from because of the choice you ve made. There s a lot of stuff like that that I have had to confront, and everybody s better off doing that and not beating yourself up for it. That s been the biggest revelation.
Naturally, she titters, I would have preferred that to have happened in a therapist s office and not in the newspapers but I ll learn any way I can. That is the blessing.
As the international appeal of the Kay Scarpetta novels has expanded and flourished, Patricia Cornwell has had to set up what amounts to her own corporation to oversee the divergent aspects of her career. She runs two offices, her own research department, a production company and a graphic art company. There are almost 20 (mostly female) staff members on her payroll, among them some of her closest friends.
As her empire has enlarged, her wealth ballooned and her obsession with privacy intensified, however, Patricia Cornwell has fallen prey to enemies from within. In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to blackmail her, the most insidious by former employees.
They make things up and I will not tolerate that, Cornwell insists. Anything that I consider a matter of integrity, I will fight. If it s a matter of embarrassment, it s not worth fighting but if it s a matter of integrity then I have to fight those things because that s who I am. All I have in my life, no matter what people might think, is who I believe I am when I get up in the morning.
I m not saying I ve handled things perfectly in dealing with all these matters but I m trying to deal with them in the best way again. And, I draw the line where somebody accuses me of something that I can t live with.
The most grievous attempt at extortion in Patricia Cornwell s eyes involved a charge of sexual harassment. This person that I had to fire accused me of sexual harassing her. I would never, ever do such a thing and I had not done such a thing. She was a woman and, I guess, she figured I d be afraid of the publicity that would occur if I fought her and that I d just pay her out of court. I fought her for a whole year. I got my way. Her whole case was thrown out but it cost me a lot of money.
There was not one scrap of evidence in her favour. Everything that she said could be shown to be false. The more important point, whether it s that charge or any, is you don t fight somebody and risk a trial unless you believe in your innocence, if you re me anyway. There s no profit in it. Why would I do that with the exposure on television, win or not?
And you don t know what a jury is gonna do. They could just decide that I m this rich lady and I can afford to pay that poor person some money. You can t even think about whether you re gonna win, it s an extortion situation so you have to fight it. You can t fold.
Aside from an opportunity to assert her own innocence, Cornwell regarded her trial as an important stand on behalf of what she says are the hundreds of wealthy employers against whom she says similar false accusations are made every year.
Sexual harassment charges against celebrities has kinda been the flavour of the month, Cornwell avows. In the States, it s become a real popular thing. These kinds of charges are rampant. A lot of people to whom it happens don t ever say anything. They just pay up because of the aggravation and the public relations damage that could result from it. I m not saying that sexual harassment never happens, believe you me, but it s being very much abused by bad people. It s nothing more than extortion.
The normal thing to have happened in a case like that is I would have found out how much money this person wanted through her attorney and would have written a cheque for, like, $100,000 there and then. She would sign a form guaranteeing that she would go away and keep her mouth shut and that d be the end of it. That s what most people do.
It could have been handled in maybe a week. But, since I can t do that and won t do that, I spent a year on that case. It cost me over $300,000, not to mention my time and the anguish and misery of having to deal with it.
The eighth novel about the woman Patricia Cornwell refers to as Doctor Scarpetta is entitled Unnatural Exposure and will be published here in October next. In the meantime, she s taken a break from the series to give us Hornet s Nest, a tale of cops n robbers n crime journalists set in Charlotte, Virginia, the town where Patricia Cornwell worked as a police reporter in the late 70s and early 80s.
Featuring a strong cast of engaging characters, Hornet s Nest will probably mark the genesis of another sequence of Cornwell books, one that will run in tandem with the Scarpettiad.
I just realised it was time to do something else, not to try and force the Scarpetta series, explains Cornwell. There comes a point where you re smart to rotate your crops and do something else and get new experiences. Hopefully, they ll make you better at what you have been doing.
I had gotten so far ahead with the Scarpetta books that I had to try something new anyway. I turned in Unnatural Exposure a year ago this past February. The publishers looked at each other in shock. If I kept going at that rate, there d be a new book every six months and that s too much. But because of everything else that was happening, work was my refuge, my release.
Plans for a Scarpetta movie are currently stalled in amber. This has been going on for four or five years, more or less, Cornwell sighs. All of us are re-grouping now to see what we might do next. I ve finally reached the conclusion after two very serious attempts at it, which include about 30 drafts of a screenplay and being executive producer and living out in LA that what I want now is I want Scarpetta. I want to find who s gonna play her.
Until she arrives on the scene, someone who s impassioned about this role and who can do a good job with it, I don t think there s much point in going forward. But she s gonna have to find me this time. I m open-minded. I just want to find somebody with whom I can have a meeting of the minds.
Few authors in modern popular fiction have been as determined to tantalise their readers with hints of real-life parallels as Patricia Cornwell has in her Scarpetta swab operas. She lards her books with references to her favourite restaurants, bars and shops, and with diatribes against pet hates such as smoking. She has openly stated that Kay Scarpetta is her alter ego, the woman whom, she concedes, in her heart of hearts I would like to be.
It s not surprising therefore than one of the most widespread theories among Scarpetta s legion of fans is the belief that the forensic pathologist is actually a lesbian, and that her ongoing sexual liaison, in the latter novels, with married FBI agent, Benton Wesley, is actually a fictional veneer for an account of Cornwell s own affair with Marguerite Bennett.
When I run this one by Patricia Cornwell, she treats me to the full symphonic boom of her most derisive snort.
If Kay Scarpetta is gay, she s never told me, she sniggers. And I ve never seen her do anything with anyone that would suggest she s gay. She seems to have a pretty good time with Benton Wesley. I had Benton Wesley long before I knew Margo. He was in Postmortem. I didn t even meet Margo until, gosh, I dunno when it was, but it was a good three or four years after I had written Postmortem. I started that in 1987 and I didn t meet her until at least 1991. It s not true.
I don t lie about gender with people in my books. I ll make you a promise, if Scarpetta ever wants to sleep with a woman, I ll just say it s a woman. You won t have to guess about it. But I can tell you I haven t heard any rumblings on the horizon yet. n
Hornet s Nest is published by Little, Brown at #16.99.