This TV Host Used to Be a Fed
Candice DeLong was a huge draw at IDCon, but I was fortunate enough to snag a quick audience with the host of Deadly Women and Facing Evil with Candice DeLong.
Her true-crime prowess comes not only from her Investigation Discovery gigs but also past experience as a psychiatric nurse and an FBI profiler assigned to the Unabomber and Tylenol killer cases.
DeLong’s TV series include segments about a number of bad seeds Forensic Files devotees will remember, including Diana Haun and Della “Dante” Sutorius.
I’m working on finding links so you can watch those Deadly Women episodes online. In the meantime, here are DeLong’s answers to three of my nagging but a little out-of-left-field questions about crime and law enforcement:
1. What’s a scenario that could make an innocent person look guilty of murder? A man calls the police from his home. “Help, help, my wife is on the floor. She’s been stabbed.” And in his panic — and a lot of people would do this — he removes the knife. So when the police get there, he’s covered with blood because he’s been leaning over her. He pulled the knife out, so the knife has his fingerprints. His DNA’s on her, her DNA’s on him. Did he do it? A lot of people will think he did. There are situations where DNA is screaming at the police and the prosecutors, but it’s actually inconsequential.
2. How about an example of how murderers trip themselves up with the forensic evidence? In my experience, there are a lot of people who say, “I did CPR,” but there’s no evidence. If you do CPR — and I’m an RN, so I’ve done CPR many times — you’re going to leave a lot of indications that you applied tremendous pressure to that body. Or your saliva would be on their mouth, but it’s just not there. So people tend to get caught because something isn’t there. If someone says they tried to resuscitate a dying person and there’s no indication they did, I would be very suspicious that they had something to do with that person dying.
3. I’ve noticed in Forensic Files that hit men tend to get harsher sentences than the people who hired them to commit the murders (Denise Davidson, Bradley Schwartz). Do you see the same thing in your work? I think there are sentences that are painfully light. There was a show on MSNBC years ago on murder-for-hire cases and it’s astounding that some people get only one or two years in prison for almost killing [via a hit man] the mother of their children. “Can you kill my wife? I’ll give you $50” — that kind of thing. But in most of the cases I’ve seen, the person soliciting the murder gets the heavier hit, which is only right. ♠
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
The Deadly Women “Web of Death” (Season 6, Episode 5), which includes a segment about the Sutorius murder, is no longer available on YouTube, but you can watch on Amazon with a Discovery+ subscription.
Thanks for this, Rebecca.
“I’ve noticed in Forensic Files that hit men tend to get harsher sentences than the people who hired them to commit the murders (Denise Davidson, Bradley Schwartz). Do you see the same thing in your work?”
Seems to me it should be the same for both. One assigned the target; one fired the bullet.
Candice repeatedly blames mentally ill people for their own illness — everyone with bipolar is an axe murderer, or a general murderer. Has said we are blatantly insane.
We are 99 percent nonviolent, the only people we kill are ourselves. Candice constantly says every single mentally ill person is a homicidal maniac.