Patricia Cornwell Net Worth

What Is Patricia Cornwell's Net Worth?

Patricia Cornwell is an American contemporary crime writer who has a net worth of $25 million. Patricia Cornwell is widely known for writing a popular series of novels featuring the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies. After earning a B.A. in English at Davidson College in North Carolina, Cornwell started working as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer and was soon covering crime. Her biography of family friend Ruth Bell Graham, "A Time for Remembering: The Ruth Bell Graham Story" (later renamed "Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham"), was published in 1983. In 1984, Patricia took a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, where she worked for six years, starting out as a technical writer and then becoming a computer analyst. She also volunteered with the Richmond Police Department.

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. Besides the older woman/younger man premise, the books include discomforting themes of scatology and sepsis. Patricia is also known for her continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She wrote "Portrait of a Killer-Jack the Ripper: Case Closed," which was published in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world and among Ripperologists.

Early Life

Patricia Cornwell was born Patricia Carroll Daniels on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida. She is a descendant of the famed abolitionist/writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Patricia is the daughter of Sam and Marilyn Daniels, and she has two siblings, John and Jim. Sam was one of the country's leading appellate lawyers, and he was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. After Sam walked out on his family on Christmas in 1961, Marilyn moved to Montreat, North Carolina, with their children. Ruth Bell Graham, evangelist Billy Graham's wife, took them in and arranged for Lenore and Manfred Saunders to raise Patricia, Jim, and John. Marilyn suffered from severe depression at the time and was hospitalized. Ruth recognized Patricia's writing talent and encouraged her literary pursuits. Cornwell was a good student and a talented tennis player, and a cartoonist. She attended King College in Tennessee before she transferred to North Carolina's Davidson College on a tennis scholarship. She earned a B.A. in English in 1979.

Career

In 1979, Cornwell landed a job at the newspaper The Charlotte Observer. She started out editing television listings, then she worked on features before covering crime as a reporter. In 1980, Patricia won an Investigative Reporting Award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series on sex workers. She stayed at the newspaper until she moved to Richmond, Virginia, in 1981 with her first husband, who had enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary. That year Cornwell began writing the biography " A Time for Remembering: The Ruth Bell Graham Story." After it was published in 1983, the book won the Evangelic Christian Publishers Association's Gold Medallion Book Award. In 1984, Patricia started working on her first novel, which was about a detective named Joe Constable, and she met the inspiration for Dr. Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner Dr. Marcella Farinelli Fierro. In 1985, Cornwell was hired by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, where she worked for six years. She began as a technical writer, then she became a computer analyst. She also served as a volunteer for the Richmond Police Department. In 1990, Cornwell's first Kay Scarpetta novel, "Postmortem," was published, and it won several awards, including the American Edgar Award for Best First Novel. She has gone on to publish more than two dozen additional Kay Scarpetta novels, such as " The Body Farm" (1994), "The Last Precinct" (2000), and "Autopsy" (2021).

Patricia has also written the Andy Brazil/Judy Hammer series, which consists of the novels "Hornet's Nest" (1996), "Southern Cross" (1998), and "Isle of Dogs" (2001). Her Win Garano series is made up of the novels "At Risk" (2006) and "The Front" (2008), and the Captain Chase series is comprised of "Quantum" (2019) and "Spin" (2020). Cornwell published the children's book "Life's Little Fable" in 1999. Patricia has been researching Jack the Ripper for decades and has a theory that the killer was Victorian painter Walter Sickert. She has written two books about the subject: 2002's "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed" and 2017's "Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert."

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Personal Life

Cornwell has had her troubles with the law, starting with crashing her Mercedes-Benz while under the influence of alcohol in 1993. She was convicted of drunk driving and sentenced to 28 days in a treatment center. She was later accused of possible plagiarism when eyebrows were raised at similarities between Leslie Sachs' novel "The Virginia Ghost Murders" and Cornwell's "The Last Precinct"–a legal battle in which Patricia ultimately triumphed. Cornwell has suffered from anorexia nervosa and depression, which began in her late teens. She has also been open about her struggle with bipolar disorder.

Patricia married Charles L. Cornwell, one of her college professors, in 1980, shortly before she graduated. Charles later became a preacher. Patricia and Charles divorced in 1989, then she became romantically involved with FBI agent Margo Bennett, who made headlines when her estranged husband tried to abduct her. Cornwell married Staci Gruber, a Harvard University associate professor of psychiatry, in 2006. Patricia has made charitable donations to organizations such as the Virginia Institute for Forensic Science and Medicine, the Harvard Art Museum, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Veterans Village of San Diego. She donated a full-scale apartment to Baltimore's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner; crime scenes are staged in the apartment, known as Scarpetta House, and used to train investigators.

Awards

In 1985, Cornwell won an ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award for "A Time For Remembering" in the Biography/Autobiography category. In 1991, she earned an Edgar Award, an Anthony Award, a Macavity Award, and a John Creasey Memorial Award for "Postmortem," making her the only author to win all four of those awards in the same year. The following year, "Postmortem" earned her a Prix du Roman d'Adventures. In 1993, Patricia received a Gold Dagger for "Cruel and Unusual," and in 1995, she was honored with the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award. In 1999, Kay Scarpetta was named Best Detective at the Sherlock Awards, and in 2008, Cornwell became the first American to win a British Book Award for Crime Thriller of the Year (for "Book of the Dead"). In 2011, "Red Mist" earned the RBA Prize for Crime Writing, the most lucrative crime fiction prize in the world at €125,000.

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