For Patricia Cornwell, philanthropy has its price

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has learned that even generosity can need an explanation.

Cornwell donated $1 million to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City this month.

But worried that some of her remarks about the gift might be read as demeaning police officers, Cornwell last week spent $250,000 to set the record straight. (Story continues below interactive map.)

In an full page ads in the Feb. 15 editions of The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, Cornwell wrote that she was “dismayed by recent news accounts” concerning her gift to establish a Crime Scene Academy at John Jay.

She went on to write, “what has been publicized certainly does not accurately reflect my deep respect and admiration for … hardworking law enforcement professionals.”

Her concern was caused by a quotation from her that appeared in an Associated Press story on her gift. The quotation could have been read to imply that Cornwell had seen police officers doing their jobs badly.

“I’ve seen cops walk through blood,” the AP reported her as saying. “I’ve seen them leave their fingerprints on a window. I’ve seen bloody clothing put in a plastic bag, instead of a paper bag, so it decomposes.”

Cornwell told the Post in an interview that her words were taken out of context.

She said she had been talking with the AP reporter about what she had seen citizens do at crime scenes and a “misunderstanding” had developed.

And she also stressed to the Post that she was donating to John Jay in the interest of giving police officers the necessary training they need to avoid mistakes at crime scenes.

Cornwell told the Times that she purchased the newspaper ads as “a quarter-of-a-million-dollar pre-emptive strike.”

“I went into emergency mode,” she said. “I said, ‘You know what, this is going to be a disaster. It is going to be everywhere. Who knows what else is out there because these articles are all over the world.’”

A former crime reporter and a worker in a medical examiner’s office, Cornwell, 51, gained fame through her series of novels featuring Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner.

The second-highest-selling female novelist after J.K. Rowling, Cornwell has written other crime novels that don’t feature Scarpetta.

Before she began the Scarpetta series, Cornwell was the author of A Time for Remembering, a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of the Rev. Billy Graham.

She also wrote Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed. The 2002 non-fiction work argues that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

Cornwell is reported to be the subject of the forthcoming Twisted Triangle, a non-fiction account of her alleged 1990s relationship with Marguerite Bennett, an FBI agent and instructor.

Bennett’s husband, FBI agent Eugene Bennett, was convicted in 1997 of attempting to murder his wife. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison. His lawyers had argued that his discovery of an affair between his wife and Cornwell lead him to lose his sanity.

In 2005, Cornwell married Dr. Staci Gruber of the Harvard Medical School, soon after same-sex marriages were permitted in Massachusetts.

Cornwell’s gift to John Jay echoes earlier gifts by her in support of forensic science to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine and to the National Forensic Academy at the University of Tennessee.

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