Patricia Cornwell’s real-life love triangle

The American crime writer Patricia Cornwell, best known for her Dr Kay Scarpetta novels, finds herself one of the protagonists in a real-life thriller due to be published in the US. Twisted Triangle tells the story of the lesbian affair that developed in the 1990s between an FBI agent, Margo Bennett, and Cornwell. It resulted in Bennett's husband Gene plotting to kill his wife in revenge, for which he is still serving a 23-year jail sentence.

Margo Bennett says that she met Cornwell at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, near Washington DC, when the thriller writer visited to research a new Scarpetta novel. "As they sat in chairs next to each other, Patsy [Cornwell] kept swiveling around and touching Margo's leg with the toe of her shoe," Twisted Triangle relates. "As they talked, Margo felt the blood coursing through her veins, very aware of the close proximity of her body to Patsy's."

At further meetings the temperature rose and the two women became lovers. In 1996, Margo's husband Gene, an undercover agent for the FBI, lured his wife to a church and tried to shoot her. After his arrest, he accused Patricia Cornwell of trying to steal his wife.

It was not the last time Cornwell went on a research trip and found the source of her intelligence irresistible. She admitted in an interview last year that she had been 'married' in a civil ceremony in February 2005 to Dr Staci Gruber, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Cornwell met Gruber when she visited Harvard to research neuroscience for a new novel.

Cornwell lives in Boston. Margo Bennett, who agreed to tell her story to the writers Caitlin Rother and John Hess for Twisted Triangle, lives on the other side of the continent in San Francisco, where she is now an officer in the University of California police department.