ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, June 26, 1996 TAG: 9606260059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MANASSAS
SOURCE: Associated Press
Best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell had a lesbian love affair with an FBI agent while doing research for one of her novels, according to court documents filed in a bizarre divorce case.
The allegations came to light Tuesday, a day after former FBI agent Eugene Bennett was arrested in an elaborate abduction scheme involving his estranged wife, Marguerite, also an ex-FBI agent.
General District Judge Charles Sievers on Tuesday ordered Bennett to undergo a psychiatric evaluation after Bennett's attorney told Sievers that his client hears voices and believes he has a bad alternate personality.
Cornwell and Marguerite Bennett had secret candlelit dinners in 1991 and 1992, when Marguerite Bennett was a hostage negotiation instructor at the FBI's training academy in Quantico, divorce papers her husband filed in Prince William Circuit Court allege.
Washington radio station WTOP-AM obtained the papers before the Bennett divorce file was sealed Tuesday.
A telephone message left late Tuesday afternoon at Cornwell's office, Cornwell Enterprises in Richmond, was not returned. Her home number is not published.
Marguerite Bennett, a supervisor of campus police at the Northern Virginia Community College's Woodbridge Campus, declined to discuss her husband's accusations. ``Time will put everything in its proper perspective,'' she told The Washington Post.
Cornwell is the author of several best-selling crime novels about a sleuthing Virginia medical examiner named Kay Scarpetta. The fictional Scarpetta's niece, a member of the FBI hostage rescue team, is in love with another female agent.
``Mrs. Bennett met and became totally infatuated with Patricia Cornwell,'' said the statement filed by Eugene Bennett's lawyer, Douglas Bergere. ``These liaisons and this relationship was supposed to be a covert affair,'' but Bennett discovered it, the statement said.
Bergere did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
However, Jeffrey Gans, another attorney for Eugene Bennett, said in a petition that Bennett ``spoke of hearing voices and an alter ego named Ed that was bad.'' Gans said Bennett could not account for his whereabouts during the time of a confrontation in a church Sunday night that led to his arrest.
Eugene Bennett was charged with abduction, robbery and other crimes after he allegedly lured a minister into a darkened church Sunday night and took him captive, police and prosecutors said.
Police said Bennett placed a bag over the Rev. Edwin Clever's head and strapped what he told Clever were plastic explosives to Clever's body. Bennett then forced Clever to call Marguerite Bennett and summon her to the church, police said.
Marguerite Bennett suspected something was amiss and arrived armed. She shot at her husband but missed, and Eugene Bennett fled the church, police said. He was arrested several hours later after holding off police inside his suburban house.
According to Gans, Bennett said he agreed to surrender ``after he was able to lock Ed in the garage.''
Clever and Cornwell were scheduled to testify July 15 during a custody hearing in the Bennetts' long and bitter divorce case. But Bennett's arrest put that hearing on hold, Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert said Tuesday.
``There are certain allegations about lesbian conduct on the part of his wife. That's part of the divorce case,'' Ebert said. Bennett claimed in the court filings that his wife's alleged lesbianism contributed to their estrangement.
Marguerite Bennett obtained temporary emergency custody of the couple's two girls, ages 7 and 9, at a hearing Tuesday in Prince William Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court.
Eugene Bennett resigned from the FBI's Washington office in 1993, after pleading guilty to two felony charges involving fraudulent government vouchers, FBI spokeswoman Susan Lloyd said.
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