Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell (born June 9, 1956) is the author of a series of crime novels featuring the fictional heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. She has worked at a crime lab as a technical writer and as a computer analyst (and not in any medical or forensics capacity, as some assume from her ambiguously-worded statements), and procedural details are part of the allure of her novels.

She was born Patricia Daniels in Miami, Florida. Her ex-husband is Charles Cornwell. She is a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Controversies

Jack the Ripper

Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She published Jack the Ripper: Case Closed in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world, where Sickert's work is admired, and also among Ripperologists, whom she criticizes as sick and disgusting for their interest in the killings.

For more on this theory, see the entry on Walter Sickert.

Litigation Surrounding The Last Precinct

In 2000, Cornwell successfully obtained a preliminary injunction against a Dr. Leslie Sachs, who had been disseminating outlandish claims on the Internet that Cornwell's then-forthcoming novel, The Last Precinct, was a plagiarism of his own book, The Virginia Ghost Murders. Reports by neutral observers indicate that the resemblance between the two works, if any, is extremely weak and certainly coincidental.

Sachs failed to comply with the injunction, fled the country, and continued his Internet-based campaign of harassment against Cornwell.

Works

• Scarpetta's Winter Table
• Cruel and Unusual
• The Body Farm
• Food to Die For

• Postmortem
• A Time for Remembering
• The Last Precinct
• Point of Origin
• Unnatural Exposure
• Cause of Death
• From Potter's Field
• All That Remains
• Body of Evidence
• Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper • Case Closed
• Blow Fly
• Trace

External links

• Casebook: Jack the Ripper dismisses most of Patricia Cornwell's claims.
• www.patriciacornwell.com
• [1] A link to CORPSE: a nonfiction account of the REAL Body Farm made famous by Cornwell's novel of the same name.