Famous Davidson Schills: Part 3, Patricia "Patsy" Cornwell

"I literally could kill someone and get away with it" - Patricia Cornwell (quoted in Vanity Fair, May 1997)

Former Davidson student, crime author and lesbian power-broker Patricia "Patsy" Cornwell stands out as a shining example of Wildcat shillry. After failing out of another North Carolina college, Cornwell used her connections with influential preacher Billy Graham to weasel her way into the hallowed halls of Chambers. Weaseling being the preferred method of Davidson admission, she took to the Wildcat way of life with a vengeance. Not long after graduating from Davidson in 1979, Patricia married this Charles Cornwell, and so obtained the last name that she still uses. An acknowledged lesbian today, Patricia now speaks of her ex-husband as a conquest, one more sign of Patricia's power at a young age. In interviews Patricia talks about her seduction of this long-time bachelor professor, as something in which the older man had no choice. Charles Cornwell abandoned his cozy career as a college English professor, and decided to become a Protestant clergyman. After getting a series of boob jobs, face-lifts and other body modifications, the now 24 year old Patsy left her 41 year old husband a broken man. Patricia Cornwell, trying then to be the good Southern wife, gave up her career to move to Richmond, Virginia, where Charles Cornwell began a long program of seminary studies. After penning an unflattering biography of Billy Graham's wife, she moved to fiction. But her new career would require an entirely different set of connections, connections with the government. When Cornwell was beginning her series of crime novels at the beginning of the 1990s, she had also befriended an FBI agent in Richmond, Ed Sulzbach, who provided the introductions that led to Cornwell's long and deep involvement with that agency, and in particular at the FBI's famous Quantico training facility in northern Virginia. An even more powerful contact cultivated by Cornwell was Tony Daniels, for a time the Assistant Director. Another major scandal with an FBI agent, involved Cornwell's relationship with famous FBI behavioral scientist Bob Ressler. Ressler is the veteran profiler of numerous famous murderers, including killers Charles Manson, the Son of Sam and John Wayne Gacy, and Robert Kennedy's killer Sirhan.

Patricia Cornwell's first well-known lesbian affair was with FBI agent
Marguerite or "Margo" Bennett, who was teaching communications at
Quantico. Margo Bennett was married to Eugene Bennett, another FBI
agent, and had two children. Patricia Cornwell has admitted in
interviews that she has given money and gifts and done favors for these
two FBI agents - which is important as a part of Cornwell's broader
history of bribing government officials, and as a part of Cornwell's
influence at the FBI regarding the cover-up of her own crimes.Eugene
Bennett remains in prison to this day, after a kidnapping and gunfight
as part of his attempt to murder Margo. In 2001, shortly before 9/11 Cornwell donated more than one million dollars to one of Barbara Bush's pet projects. A regular guest at the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine (where she has no doubt engaged numerous FBI agents in Sapphic love) Cornwell is a serious mover within the Republican Party, and an unswerving advocate of CSI style "law and order." Unscrupulous, sexually predatory, and possessing a massive communications Empire and tens of thousands of loyal readers, Patricia Corwnwell is practically the poster child for Carolina shilldom. The only question is, does it slither?