Exclusive | How Scarpetta, Body Farm author Patricia Cornwell cultivated her life of crime with help from Billy Graham and his wife
Patricia Cornwell showed up to her first meeting at the Richmond, Virginia, medical examiner’s office in the summer of 1984 carrying what appeared to be a cane.The woman who would one day invent the forensic thriller was just 28 years old and still unpublished, living in a cramped seminary apartment with her then-husband while she tried to write mystery novels that no one wanted to buy.A friend had arranged an introduction to deputy chief medical examiner Marcella Fierro, and Cornwell was determined to make an impression.“The secretary saw me walking in and said, ‘What do you have a cane for?’” Cornwell told the Post in an exclusive interview.
“And I said, ‘Oh, this isn’t just any cane.’”In the ME’s conference room, she demonstrated — putting her lips to one end of the cane to blow a dart across the room, where it buried itself in an anatomical poster on the wall.Fierro tried it herself, then sat down and delivered the verdict.Everything Cornwell had engineered for her novel — the poison dart, the digitalis used as poison, the aluminum pipe concealing a bamboo skewer for finishing the job if the dart failed — was clever, but it wouldn’t fool a competent forensic pathologist.
The puncture wound to the heart would be obvious, and a toxicology screen would detect the digitalis.“She said, ‘You’d be caught,’” Cornwell remembered.“And then she said, ‘Let me tell you about foxglove and digitalis.’ So I met my evil twin.”It was, as Cornwell explains in her new memoir, “True Crime” (Grand Central Publishing), out Tuesday, the moment everything changed.She’d recently arrived in Richmond with an unfinished murder mystery about voodoo and poisons and a fictional female chief medical examiner named Kay Scarpetta.
The character, a brilliant, unflappable forensic pathologist, would eventually anchor 29 novels, nearly all of them bestsellers.But in 1984, Scarpetta existed only in rough drafts that weren’t working, and Corn...