Criminal - What Nobody Tells You About the Morgue (with Patricia Cornwell)

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Phoebe interviews crime novelist Patricia Cornwell about how working in an autopsy suite inspired her to create her most famous character: forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta. Plus, Phoebe and Patricia talk about visiting “body farms,” listening to police scanners, and why Patricia says she would have “run from the room screaming” had she known what her future would look like. You can also watch this interview at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Megan Rapino here. This week on a Touchmore, The Beautiful Game, I am sitting down with fashion designer DJ and the Washington Spirit's first ever creative director, Domo Wells, in her L.A. studio. We talk about Domo's unusual path towards sports fandom and how her work as a DJ makes her a better designer. And what designing for women's athletes and their fans

should actually look like. Check out the latest episode of A Touchmore wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. Hi, it's Phoebe. As you probably know, here on Criminal, we normally put out our episodes on Fridays. But starting today, we have something new to share with you. Recently, I've been interviewing writers, reporters, and journalists about stories I'm curious about. We're going to be sharing these more casual conversations here in the podcast's feed on Tuesdays.

You can also watch these new episodes on the Criminal YouTube channel. We've got the link right in the show notes. Today I'm talking with crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. She's written many books, including 29 novels about a fictional forensic pathologist named Kay Scarpetta, who, as it turns out, is based on someone she knows well. Patricia Cornwell recently published a memoir called True Crime, and I started out by asking her about the cover. It's a picture of her wearing a lab coat and gloves,

and standing next to what appears to be a dead body on a gurney. Can you tell me about this picture on the cover of your book? This is not exactly what I would expect. This picture was in 1997, Annie Leibovitz did, she was doing a photo shoot of me for Vanity Fair. And so we were trying to get just the right picture. So first we started in the Richmond. Medical Examiner's Office. And that picture, you may have seen it before.

I'm at an autopsy table and I have a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. And that was sort of the picture she was looking for. But the one you're talking about was taken in the cooler of the Richmond Medical Examiner's Office. And yes, indeed, that is a dead body. And that was Annie Leibovitz took that photo. And the funny thing is the picture that's on the cover, when she was trying to take pictures of me, Dr. Fierro, Marcela Fierro,

who was the deputy chief at that time, and my mentor, she was across the room with her little cannon sure shot camera. And every time Annie Leibovitz, the great Annie Leavich is trying to take one of her pictures, Marcella's going, snap, and the little flash cube is going off. And Annie finally lowers her massive camera, and she looks across the room and says, can you please just not do that while I'm doing this? You worked there in the 80s. What first got you into the morgue?

Well, that was not anything that I ever planned on. And I'm glad you asked because a lot of people, they've assumed that that is what I was working there. And while I was working there, I got ideas for writing books. It was the total opposite. I started out a journalist after college. And within six or eight months of being at the Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, well, you know, North Carolina. And Charlotte, North Carolina, they assigned me the police beat. And that is what began my, quote, life of crime was running around, you know, the late hours of the night reporting on all the crimes in the Charlotte area and ending up on homicide scenes and talking to rape victims and shooting victims and stabbing victims and all this sort of thing.

And so, but the one thing that I never knew when I was doing the police reporting is when I would go to a crime scene and the body was whisked away. I didn't know where are they taking it and what are they doing with it. There wasn't really, this was 1980 and 1981. There wasn't much known about this sort of thing publicly except for the show Quincy, whenever that was long ago and far away. When I finally wrote the Ruth Graham biography, I left journalism, I wrote a biography of my dear friend Ruth Graham, and then I thought, what am I going to do?

I'm going to try writing books about crime. maybe that's something I can do, but I'd never been to a medical examiner's office or a morgue. So somebody got me an interview at the Richmond Medical Examiner's office, and I met Dr. Fierro for the first time in 1984. And she gave me a tour of the morgue, and I began doing research there. I was already trying to write a murder mystery,

and I would go talk to her. I would use their library. And after about the better part of a year of that, I wanted to see autopsies, and that was not going to happen unless I had some sort of validity for being in the autopsy suite. And I said, well, what would it take to give me that validity? And she said, well, if you could become a volunteer police officer, that might do it. So I did.

Well, tell me about that, about seeing your first autopsy. I mean, I've always, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but there are so many people who go through their whole lives, never seeing a dead body. You know, maybe you're with a loved one at the end of their life, but even then, you know, what happens to you when you are surrounded by so many bodies? It's not the same as seeing it on the news or on TV or in photographs. When you're actually in the presence of a room full of dead bodies, there's a weird energy. I used to feel, you know, the morgue is all, I call it the morgue.

that's like calling Hollywood, you know, Hollywood, when it's just a word that means a lot of things. The autopsy suite, the medical examiner's facility, but when you're in that autopsy suite with all those bodies, I used to get so tired. I would get just so exhausted. It's almost as if you felt like the dead were trying to suck the life out of you because they're there. And then here's this, these living people are coming in and tending to them. And most of these people, a lot of them have been traumatized. They've been in car wrecks or they've been murdered or they've died all by themselves because they didn't have a doctor. Most people that end up there is not a good thing. It means something's happened that causes it to be a medical examiner's case.

So I would find, I was stunned by how tired I would get. When I would leave at the end of the day, I felt like someone had literally sucked the life out of me. And a part of it, I'm sure, is my emotional shields. of using a tremendous amount of energy not to let these things get to me while I'm standing there because you're no good for anyone if you let that get to you while you're there. You cannot, you don't cry in front of this.

You don't get hysterical, you don't flee the room. I mean, these are patients who need to be taken care of. Someone needs to care about these people and the people they've left behind and figure out what exactly happened to put you here because it's not just about justice because sometimes there's not a villain, but it's also about life insurance policies and people trying to move on with their lives and they're needing the medical examiner to help

them do that because of the legal complications and all that go with it. But it's, it is very, pictures are hard to look at, but being there in person is a different experience altogether. Are there any, I mean, this was a long time ago, I know, but are there any cases that stick out to from your time there. Oh, I have many cases that stand out to me from from being there. And also, you know, I didn't, when I stopped working there, I didn't quit going to medical examiner's office. I mean, I kept doing research there really throughout my whole career at various, not just the, not just in Virginia, but other medical examiner's offices and other areas where I would

go do research and spend several days watching cases with them and going to scenes, all to keep myself, you know, I don't, it's keeping myself sort of trained, sort of like an athlete where you need to keep doing stuff or you'll lose, you'll lose it. So it, if you told me when I was a kid that this would be how I spent my time, I would have not only told you you were crazy, but I would have probably run from the room screaming because that was not how I envisioned my life. But it is, but it's so important if you're going to write about it, let people feel it for what is. You know, and your eyes play tricks on you. You're down there sometimes and you think somebody just moved on the table, but they didn't. Or it's, it's a strange, strange energy in there. I mean,

you know, we don't know. There are theories about how long consciousness kind of almost circles the body. And so, particularly if somebody hadn't been dead long, if they hadn't weren't even put in the cooler. They came straight from the crime scene and were put right into the autopsy room. And you're looking at this person who is still not even that cold yet. And you look at their photograph and you think they look just like themselves, except that the energy that's in them is gone. It's like a light bulb that's burned out. It still remains the same shape it was. But whatever was in it is gone. Where did it go? I was interviewing, um, Sebastian Younger, who wrote this book in my time of dying. And I was fascinated. He's such a great author.

He's such a great author. And I tell him I'm a fan. I will tell him. My mother had just died. And I just read his book. And I was with my mother when she died. And so I was very interested in this idea of what happens exactly after death, because I was alone with her for a number of minutes. And I read his book, and he talks a lot about how for so long we've been concerned that when the heart stops, life is over. But actually, as you were talking, the activity in your brain goes on for much longer. And so this idea that we're just counting death when you have cardiac arrest, when we know scientifically that the brain continues to fire for sometimes hours after cardiac arrest is a real. I mean, this is the stuff that we're just starting to get to the scientific breaking point of what actually does death mean.

Well, you know, people think they would assume that I am a very fatalistic, morbid kind of person who is convinced that death is waiting around the corner every other second. And by the way, I do know that danger might be around the corner every other second, but I don't have the attitude about death that people would expect that I do. I actually have a very hopeful attitude that I would not have had had I not been around it so much. And I've been around it so much that I don't believe it, not the way other people believe. I believe it is the end of your biological existence right here and now, but I do not. It is believe. It's the end of you. And even if I weren't a religious person, a spiritual person, I would still believe that after what I've seen. When you were back there with all these surrounded by dead bodies and the morgue, you decided that you should maybe write about a medical examiner. Tell me about the decision to create a character around. ground a medical examiner. It was all because I couldn't get published. Postmortem was my fourth attempt.

And if that hadn't been accepted, I would have quit. It's hard to say because I sometimes don't know when to give up. But that would have been four attempts, a crime novels that nobody wanted. But an editor who had rejected three of my books suggested, I make Scarpetta the main character because she was a minor character in my earlier ones. And the person told me that is your best character. That's who I want to hear about.

And by the way, these fanciful stories you're writing about buried treasure and cheated wills and, you know, and archaeology digs where something bad happens. Is that what you see at the medical examiner's office? I said, never. Never. Death there is ugly. She said, but I want to see what you see. So that's how postmortem started. We'll be right back.

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mintmobile.com slash Phoebe. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash Phoebe. That's it. There's no catch. $45 up front payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on a limited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. Seamint Mobile for details. What made me so jealous about the way you've lived your life, you know, besides the helicopters, I keep saying I have to get my pilots license and I haven't done it yet, but I was, I'm on my way. I'm 42. By the time I'm 43, the lessons will have started. That's about the age I was when I got, I didn't get my pilot's license until I was like 43.

I think I was 43 when I got it. Okay, well, it's not too late. No, it's not. Honey, you're just getting started. As my mother used to say, you're a spring chicken. Well, I just, but here's the wonderful thing that I think that you've been able to do. And it's, I hope what I like so much about what I get to do is, you know, this morning I was talking to people who disentangle whales from fishing equipment. And, you know, yesterday I was talking about a wholly different. I was talking about cyber crimes.

And the wonderful thing is that. But it's always different and you get to have these new experiences. But what you've done is you have jumped in the deep end. If you're going to write a book, it seems to me, you need to know what you're writing about. You know, for example, the scuba diving. You wanted to, you've decided one day I want to, I want to, how about underwater crime? That's exactly how that happened. Why not?

But I better go scuba diving. And you did it. Yeah, now I want to set something on us, on the. moon, but I think that I'm not sure rockets are going to be in my future. But I mean, if I could, but I'm just going to tell you. And you, I bet you would too, if someone said, if you can take a rocket to the moon and write a story about it, would you do it? In one second. There you go. Me too. Just go out and experience whatever anybody lets you. And as you as writer, use your research interest as an excuse to do something that you wouldn't

do otherwise. I would never have gone scuba dive and had I not wanted to do it for research. It wouldn't occur to me. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of training. And it's scary. I find it scary trying to breathe underwater. Even now, after all the times I've done it. And I haven't been in a number of years now.

Who knows if I will again. But when I first jump in the water and I'm floating and waiting to go down the line, down to, do you scuba dive? Yeah. Yeah, I just at 110 feet through a cave. And I thought, Phoebe, the goal here is not to panic. And you're talking about me. I'm not going in no cave.

But don't you agree that if you didn't do it, you would never write it the way you could write it because you managed it? Well, that was so interesting. When you went to the body farm, we also did a story about a body farm in Texas, not the original intensity. But there's enough question. Yes, you said something about when you first got there and it was the same experience that I had, I thought there was going to be big protocols with suits that I was going to have to wear. And I walked in there and they gave me a little pair of boots to wear on top of my shoes. And they said, this is for the decomp fluid and nothing else.

And here we go. And they just gave you a little pair of gloves. Yeah, well, exactly. And what they don't give you is a surgical mask. And if, and clue for the future. If they suggest that you put VIX up your nose, oh, no, no, no, do not ever do that. The real pros, no, you don't ever put Vicks up your nose when you get into a stinky situation, whether it's a decomp in the morgue or at the body farm or at a crime scene,

because the science of odor is molecular. And so what you're smelling is particulate that's causing the stink. It may be invisible and microscopic, but that the putrefaction, element of this is something, those molecules then get stuck in the ointment you've just put up your nose. So now what you've done is you put a flycatcher right in your face instead of across the room. So don't use VIX or anything up your nose. No petroleum jelly, nothing up your nose. The other thing is, as awful is it, and the smells are my, the thing that I have the hardest time with, I really do. I cannot stand it. And the body farms are terrible because decom is awful. But

But if you don't experience something, if you have a reason to want to experience something, then you should do it. As long as it's appropriate, I mean, don't break the law or kill somebody or do something awful. But there's no substitute for showing up. And don't forget, that's what autopsy means. Autopsy is the Greek word to look for yourself, to see for yourself. And I encourage anybody that's doing anything that requires research, if you can do something that helps you understand it better. by participating, whether it's flying a plane or scuba diving or walking through a certain area or explore. I mean, as kids, we explored. And then we get to be adults and we're not supposed to do that

anymore. Yes, we are. You haven't been to the moon. So you haven't set a crime on the moon yet. Is there any other experience you want to have? I'm jealous of Agatha Christie because there was so many cool things she got to do that. You can't, I mean, And I don't know that you can do now, like going on archaeology digs, you know, going to archaeology things like in Egypt like she did. And these wonderful pictures of her on a balcony overlooking the pyramids. And I would love to see things like that. But, you know, I don't know what may be ahead, but I do know that the world is not that open like it once was. You've got to be careful where you go.

I would love to be on a safari in Africa, not the bad kind, but to see these majestic animals in person in a safe way because I love elephants, tigers, bears. I love them all. We talked about this, but you started out, your journalism career started out, you were doing crime reporting. I still, to this day, sometimes, I don't know what this says about me, but I'll turn the police scanner on. Because they have these apps now on your phone. You don't have to just have one in your car. And I listen to the police scanner from Chicago, where I'm from. And I don't know why. It gives me comfort in this odd way. But I also just think it's such a weird, interesting look into humanity, into just the stuff that you hear. What was it like when you turn that scanner on for the first time when you were doing the crime beat to just hear all the things that go on. that we don't hear about every day. It completely shattered my view of reality when I began to see the kind of crimes that were going on that you don't know about if you're just your average person,

but if you're listening to the scanner and I had one on my desk in the newsroom and I had one in the staff car I drove. So everywhere I was, when I was on duty on my beat, that, you know, I was listening to a scanner. And that absolutely shattered my worldview. I mean, I would drive home from work, and now I'm scared, and I didn't used to be. You know, a shadow could fall across my windshield, and I'd jump in the car because something's, I'm startled easily.

Had I not been a police reporter, I really don't think I would be sitting here today. I don't know. I mean, it never occurred to me to write about crime. I never read a murder mystery in my life. I never had. I never did until I started trying to write them. I still don't read much in the way of that. I never have, and it's not a disparagement of the genre.

It's more a statement of how police. poorly read I am. But yes, you can't see what, you cannot look death in the face and violence in the face and walk away unchanged unless there's something not quite right with you, in my opinion. It's, it, it, you can't be a naive person and think that bad things don't really happen if you're nice. It's not true. But, but, but you can't, you also can't forget there's a lot of good people in the world. And I know plenty of them too. If you, had to think about, and I get not reading a lot of crime. People say that to me too. Phoebe, aren't you, you're surrounded by crime all of him, and I think, well, it's like if you,

if you sold shoes every day, you wouldn't come home and read about shoes, you wouldn't want to. I feel, you know, I mean, I'm so interested in a million other things besides crime, but if you had to recommend a crime novelist, you know, that you admire, would it, would it be Agatha Christie, Who would it be? Oh, well, listen, there's nobody like Agatha Christie. And, you know, and it's funny, one of the things, the stories I tell in my books in my memoir, I mean, is that it was probably about 1984, and I was trying my hand at writing my first murder mystery, and I did not know what I was doing. I couldn't. I had no earthly idea, and it's a terrible feeling when you sit down and it doesn't talk to you.

It's like you're playing a dead keyboard. And I just thought, I don't know where to go with all this. I'm not good at this. I'm never going to be good in this. I'd already started doing, I think, some of the research at the Emmys office, but I still couldn't figure out how to tell the story. I mean, how do you write about autopsies, but tell a whodont it at the same time? There was no formula for what I was trying to do.

I didn't realize I was kind of creating a new one. And so, but, so I had this dream one night where Agatha, I was waiting in a line, and Agatha Christie was doing a book sign, and it was so really, It was like I was watching it. I was awake and asleep at the same time. My eyes were shut, but I couldn't move. And there's this movie playing in my head like this. And I'm in that line, and I get up to the table, and it's Agatha Christie, and looks just like her with the big hat.

And she had all black. And she's just signing books and not looking at anybody. So when I get to her, I just said, thank you. It's an honor to meet you. And she's signing, and she says something. She says, you will take my place. And I said, excuse me? And she looked up at me briefly and she said, you will take my place.

And she pushed the book back to me. And that was it. The dream was over. And I woke up and I thought, what the hell was that? And I looked her up in our World Book Encyclopedia. And she looked just like the picture in there that I'm not sure I'd ever seen before. But the point was, of course, I've never taken her place and could never take her place. Nobody will take her place.

But it's almost like something from beyond through that entity. that was in my head. You know, we talk about where do people go when they die? I don't know. But it was like something said, don't give up. Don't give up. You're going to do better than you think. Just hang in there.

Well, you figured it out. Well, I don't know that I figured it out, but I always would recommend Agatha Christi to people because she's not just a mystery writer. She's very scientific. She's exact. And she is a Rubik's Cube. You know, she's a walking Rubik's Cube. I mean, seriously, how she comes up with her.

puzzles. I don't know. What a mind that woman had. I love Thomas Harris. If anybody's not read Silence of the Lambs, to me, that's probably one of the very best crime novels ever written. Truman Capote in Cold Blood is worth reading. But I don't read a lot of crime. See, it's like you said about the person who sells shoes, maybe. I tend to, I love nonfiction. I love to read good biographies. Let's see, what else do I like to read? I like to read poetry, believe it or not. I have a copy of T.S.L.

It's the wasteland on my shelf over here. Now and then I'll pull it out because it's the most beautiful writing I've ever read in my life. It's my favorite, favorite poem. And how on earth somebody wrote something like that. Because, you know, in my heart of hearts, as much as I love my research and being able to explore things that most people don't know about and finding a way to incorporate them into a story. At the end of the day, what I always dreamed of when I was young in writing was I wanted to be a good writer. And so to read people like Hemingway or T.S. Eliot and to look at what they do

and to study the way they put a sentence together, it's like watching Roger Federer play tennis. It's like watching the Cirque do Soleil or Olympic gymnasts do things that I go, how on earth did you just do that? Patricia, thank you very much for talking. Well, it's been my pleasure. Patricia Cornwell's new memoir is called True Crime. And since we talked, I've officially signed up for my first flying lesson. If you'd like to watch the video of this interview and our other upcoming video interviews, follow us at YouTube.com slash criminal podcast. Or just click the link in our show notes.

I'm Phoebe Judge. Thanks for listening.