INTERVIEW: On ‘Deadly Women,’ Candice DeLong is on the case

Photo: Candice DeLong is a former FBI profiler and host of Deadly Women on Investigation Discovery. Photo courtesy of ID / Provided with permission.

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Candice DeLong knows a thing or two about homicide. The former FBI agent and profiler has been a TV host of true-crime series for more than a decade, and her dedicated fan base continues to grow in 2019.

DeLong’s long-running series Deadly Women airs new episodes Thursdays on Investigation Discovery. On the show, she investigates female killers, all the while trying to answer tough questions about motivation and impact.

This season, DeLong and her team have examined cases with episode titles like “Fatal Fixation,” “Kill the Competition” and “Without Mercy.”

“We started filming in 2004, and it was for the Discovery network,” DeLong said in a recent phone interview. “We did three episodes. I made no money. They picked up my tab at the Holiday Inn Express in Chicago, and I thought it was great. The director/showrunner at the time with my production company wanted to do more, and nobody was buying. And then Investigation Discovery was created, and they moved over two crime shows that were on Discovery, mine and On the Case With Paula Zahn. And then they needed to do a lot of creation of new shows, and here we are 13 years later. And I’m thrilled and surprised. I’m surprised we haven’t run out of stories. In the beginning, I thought how many of these bad girls can be out there.”

When DeLong first confronts a case, she asks to see all the facts about the murder. She wants to better understand possible motivations and why someone would take the life of another person.

“Well, frankly, it’s just simply rage, and the person snaps,” she said about the most common occurrence she sees. “The number of people that are killed each year stranger to stranger just by road rage is phenomenally high. These are people that don’t even know each other, but they’re carrying around all this anger and bitterness. And they get pushed over the edge if somebody cuts them off in traffic.”

Other motivations that DeLong has seen are jealousy over love and sex, profit and revenge.

“Revenge is the kind of murder that ends up being premeditated,” she said. “Frequently jealousy ends up being a murder that either is premeditated or rage. They walk in. They find their spouse in bed with their friend, their sister, and they just explode, although the more common response to that by the way is to run away, not to explode. But nevertheless we do see that, and then murders committed for money are almost always premeditated. And both men and women commit murders for those reasons, so in that regard they are the same.”

When selecting cases for Deadly Women, DeLong and her team focus on the situations that present a challenge for the investigator. She is fascinated by smart killers who think they can get away with the crime, but they must have a fatal flaw in some way.

“It is not easy to get away with murder unless you commit it in front of witnesses or you tell someone,” she said. “I mean, if you’re a true crime fan, then you know how people get caught. Sometimes people get caught 20 years after the fact. [Consider] Ted Kaczynski, with whom I’m very familiar. I worked the case. I worked six weeks undercover before his arrest. I spent the afternoon with him in a mountain cabin while the FBI was searching his cabin. I was with him in another cabin. That’s the kind of person I like to go up against, but here’s the thing, Ted Kaczynski would still be living in his mountain cabin probably if he hadn’t done one of the cardinal sins of getting away with murder. And that is he had to brag about it.”

The so-called manifesto from the Unabomber contained thousands upon thousands of words — also known as thousands upon thousands of clues.

“We’ve got to get this out to the public,” DeLong said of the manifesto. “Someone might read it and go, oh my God, that’s an unusual expression, and the only person I ever heard say that was my brother. And that’s exactly what happened, so he didn’t come out and say, ‘I’m Ted Kaczynski, and I did this crime.’ But he had to brag about it, and after 16 years of getting away with murder and bombings, it resulted in his being caught I think within six months.”

She added: “I like the challenges. I like to interview. I did have a show on ID for five years that I created out of Deadly Women, and it was called Facing Evil With Candice DeLong. And I would actually go into prisons and sit down. The first three years were women that had been featured on Deadly Women. The next two years the show was so popular we had people contacting us wanting me to interview them, so I was interviewing some males as well. I really like that part of an investigation, especially if the offender is forthcoming.”

The TV personality has a long history of interviewing difficult subjects.

Before DeLong was an FBI agent, she was a psychiatric nurse at a large metropolitan private hospital associated with Northwestern University. That’s actually the position she was in when agents recruited her for the Bureau.

“I was head nurse when the FBI recruited me,” she said. “Well, what psych nurses do all day is talk and listen. Listening is paramount if you’re going to solve a crime. If you’re going to figure out someone it’s much more important to listen than it is to talk, and psychiatric nurses deal with a wide variety of people under very, very bad circumstances. … We were not a jail hospital, but periodically if the patient/accused came from a family with a tremendous amount of money or a famous last name, they might be able to convince the judge to put them in the hospital for 30 days of observation and treatment before they would go to the jail hospital. And so a lot of the other nurses were not interested in working with those kinds of patients. They were frightened of them. I was drawn to them because I wanted to know what made them tick, so that’s a bit of an explanation as to what makes me interested in murder and what makes me interested in certain types of murder. I found it challenging. I found that everybody has a story to tell. They really do, and there frequently are mitigating circumstances to the most heinous murders I’ve ever seen. The person should not be in prison; they should be in therapy.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Deadly Women, hosted by Candice DeLong, airs Thursday nights on Investigation Discovery. Click here for more information.