Describing years of marital strife, Ms. Bennett gave details about how her husband attempted to kill her and held her minister, the Reverend Edwin Clever, hostage at The Prince of Peace church in Manassas, Virginia. Charges against him are attempted murder and kidnapping.

Eugene Bennett had used the minister to lure his wife to the church offices, but once there, the estranged wife sought cover behind a desk in the minister's office. "I knew if I came out of that room, I was dead," she explained to the jury, "There was no way I was going to live through it."

Unexpectedly, perhaps, Ms. Bennett, also a former FBI agent, and a private investigator, yanked a gun from her purse and began firing at her unhappy husband. He fled the church and later surrendered to police, pleading not guilty to nine felony charges. His behavior, he says, was the result of insanity.

Mr. Bennett's insanity was caused, say his lawyers, by years of undercover work and by worries that his wife, mother of his two daughters, might be a lesbian. His principal fear was that his daughters would be affected by this fact.

The friendship between author Cornwell and the former FBI agent's wife, Marguerite Bennett, was the cause of the 1992 disintegration of their marriage, according to Bennett himself, though Ms. Bennett insisted there was no prolonged lesbian affair, but only the two intimate encounters. In the four years that have since elapsed, she explained, she had not seen Patricia Cornwell again. Her husband, she insists, did not accuse her of homosexuality until divorce proceedings began in 1992.

Author Cornwell's agent, Esther Newberg, told reporters she hoped the trial testimony would help sell more of Cornwell's books. "I find the whole thing typical of what's going on in the American press today," she said.

A million dollar insurance policy with Bennett's daughters listed as beneficiaries also figured in the trial after he asked help in setting up a case against his wife from Mary Ann Khalifeh, of Annandale, Virginia. Ms. Khalifeh said she believed that Bennett was trying to make it appear that she herself was having an affair with his wife.