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By Julie A. Jervis, MD, RN

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Renaissance Woman
By Kelly M. Pyrek

A few things you should know about former FBI special agent Candice DeLong: She collared Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. She's a former psych nurse. She doesn't watch "CSI" ("It's ridiculous!"), although she's hooked on true crime novels. She owns a cat that runs her life. And she is passionate about making the world a safer place for women and children.

When she was a young woman pondering her life's path and potential, Candice DeLong knew she wanted to be a nurse. While caring for her mother, who struggled with a debilitating depression for much of her life, DeLong realized she was capable of helping others also suffering from mental illness. After serving as a psychiatric nurse in one of the Midwest's largest hospitals for 10 years, what DeLong didn't count on was trading in her plastic hospital ID for a gold-plated badge, a gun and a 20-year career as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the two years since retiring from the FBI, DeLong added a third title to her list of occupations: celebrity.

In Hyperion published her autobiography titled "Special Agent: My Life on the Front Line as a Woman in the FBI," and the exuberant DeLong has enjoyed great success on the lecture circuit.

"People say I have reinvented myself for the third time now," says DeLong, 52. "I joke that I was a nurse, then an FBI agent, and next week I'm going to be an astronaut," she says with a laugh.

Although she is sometimes misidentified as the first woman in the FBI, DeLong is the first woman in the FBI to publish a book. And aside from the occasional comparisons to Clarice Starling (the female FBI character in the Thomas Harris novel "Silence of the Lambs") DeLong says she can appreciate the interest the general public has in what makes an FBI agent tick. However, she is most gratified by the attention being paid to her advocacy for the safety of women and children. While she was still an agent, DeLong was asked to serve as a safety spokesperson for the FBI, lecturing on the subject at college campuses. In , she was asked to appear on the education video "Missing: What to do If Your Child Disappears," created by the (Polly) Klaas Foundation.

Her advocacy has caught the attention of Hollywood. Acknowledging her extensive background as a profiler at the now-famous Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico and as a former member of the Child Abduction Task Force, earlier this year Lifetime television for women approached DeLong about hosting and narrating a program based on a chapter of her book advising how women and children can protect themselves against predators.

"A television executive was reading my book and after finishing the last chapter, closed the book and said, 'There's a TV show here.' She called my agent and pitched the idea, which I liked. The program re-enacts real-life profiles of courage in the face of the threat of interpersonal violence. Each show has a theme, and the pilot episode focused on what to do if you were forced into the trunk of a car. Each week the show will explore strategies for staying safe under the threat of harm." If the show is picked up, production would start this year and the first episodes could air in .

While awaiting word from TinselTown, DeLong already has a presence on the small screen. Tapped for her FBI expertise, DeLong has served as an expert commentator on cable news network MSNBC during the summer-long spate of child abductions and homicides. Hesitant to call these events an epidemic, DeLong says statistics should be kept in perspective.

"There are about 100 child abductions each year," she says. "Sometimes it's 125 or 85. In roughly half of these stranger abductions the child is either never seen again or is found dead. Even though the population has been growing, child abduction statistics have pretty much stayed the same. What we have now that we didn't have five years ago is several 24/7 cable news networks competing for viewership. They have to keep getting new stories on the air, and when they do, they bleed them. Besides, kidnapping is a big story. The abduction of the little girl from Orange County would have been a regional story five years ago. Now, people on the East Coast know about what happened in California and they can see her picture an hour after she's snatched. Don't get me wrong ... the marriage of media and law enforcement is good. It has resulted in the identification and capture of many criminals because people are saturated with information. But no, there's not an epidemic. Men who commit these kinds of sexual violent crimes have been thinking about it since they were in their early adolescence, when their sexual awakening happens. The pedophile is thinking about the 5-year-old who lives next door but he doesn't act on the urge for many years. He may molest children in his late teens or early 20s but it takes a while to work up to sexual homicide. There's a fantasy he's been working on for years. He masturbates to this fantasy and every time he has an orgasm after masturbating to the idea of stabbing a woman or a little girl, the orgasm re-enforces the fantasy. Soon, the fantasy no longer does it for him and he needs a real person. That's when he lashes out. He may see an abduction on the news and say, 'Hmm, I've been thinking about that; this guy got away with it, maybe I can, too.'"

Hunting these sexual predators by day was rewarding and challenging work for DeLong, but by night, she worried about cases hitting too close to home. One of her most meaningful cases was an 11-year-old Nevada boy who was abducted while in the care of his mother's boyfriend. DeLong was working on the San Francisco Child Abduction Task Force at the time and jumped at the chance to thwart the kidnapping and apprehend the boyfriend when he and the child were about to pass through town. One of the most satisfying moments of her career was returning the boy to his mother's arms, but DeLong couldn't help but think about her own child. Being a divorced mother with a young son when she entered the bureau, DeLong continually suppressed her fears for the safety of her own child by teaching him what to do in the face of danger.

"It's a given that you take the job home," DeLong admits. "When Seth was young I was worried about him all the time. He would say the reason he is so cautious is because I trained him well. You can't work a case of a missing kid and not be thinking about your own child and wondering if he is safe."

DeLong says during the height of the Elizabeth Smart investigation in Utah, when she was doing news commentary for the early morning show, she couldn't help but be haunted by the abduction. "I would get up early, go to the studio and talk about a little girl who I believe was raped and murdered within the first two hours of her disappearance, then come home and try to go back to sleep but can't. I'm lying there thinking about Elizabeth. 'Where is she? How do we find her?' It still bothers me. I started sleeping well after I left the bureau but now doing news commentary on violent crime again, I have trouble sleeping. But I think, 'I can always take a nap. What is my small sleep disturbance compared to a little girl gone missing?'"

Her toughest moments as an agent have centered on the abuse of children, and although her work as a psych nurse prepared her for the fringe edges of the human condition, nothing quite prepared her for the torture and death of a child.

"The toughest thing emotionally in my 20 years as an agent, was the case where we had to tell a surviving little girl that we found her friend's body after she had been murdered. She made fools of all of us. All this planning of what to say, including telling her that her friend went to heaven and she'll smile and say 'Oh goody.' But this little child said to us, 'God took her away from the bad guys ... why didn't he take the bad guy?' That was my toughest moment and I was really holding back the tears. We all were. It's hard to keep your faith when you see a little girl on an autopsy table. When a 7-year-old challenges the very existence of why God is here, or why didn't he take the bad guy, it leaves you speechless and scratching your head for the rest of your life."

DeLong's compassion, coupled with nerves of steel, are two strengths she has tapped throughout her career, especially in her early years as a psych nurse. She believes she developed these characteristics as a teenager.

"My mother suffered from a crippling depression that started affecting her when I was 12," she recalls. "She would become bedridden for weeks. I lost my adolescence because when Mom was sick I was the one who did all the household chores. When Mom was well I'd go back to being a teenager again. When I was 15, I knew I wanted to be a nurse. When I started nursing I was unaware of psych nursing until the first month of school when they told us we'd have a rotation in psychiatry. I became aware people were hospitalized for what my mother was suffering from. I always had a soft spot in my heart for people with mental illness."

DeLong's early exposure to her mother's illness prepared her for the rigors of her psych work. "Anyone who knows what psych nurses do for a living knows they sit and they listen and they talk and they intervene, and periodically deal with violence. You get very involved in your patients' lives. As a pysch nurse, both inpatient and outpatient, you see the aftermath of sexual abuse. If it's ongoing sexual abuse then you have someone who is clinically depressed, possibly suicidal. Periodically, there were offenders on the psych unit and most of the nurses refused to work with these sex offenders or killers; however, I was drawn to these criminals. Nurses are supposed to be therapeutic but I found myself asking questions more like what a criminalist would ask: 'How did you get out of the house undetected?' Why did you place the body in that position?' I was asking these questions and learning because these people frightened me. I was afraid but if I was ever attacked, I wanted to have the inside scoop on how to deal with somebody that was out to hurt you."

DeLong says she was drawn to the very things that repulsed other nurses. "I think most nursing schools' psych rotations are just enough to convince most nurses they never want anything to do with psychiatry. They send them to state hospitals where there's no hope for any of the patients because they terrify everybody, and the nurses don't receive good training. The only place psych nurses should have their training is at a major metropolitan hospital that has a psych unit and that way you're not surrounded by only killers and creeps. I was the only one in a class of 30 nurses who went into psychiatry; everyone else was terrified of it."

DeLong says psych nurses should constantly have their antenna up. "Nurses, being trusting, therapeutic creatures, should realize there's always something their psych patient isn't telling them. There's a huge, deep dark secret they're keeping. Whatever your patient is confiding in you, there's a whole lot more they're holding back. Assume the worst."

Surprisingly, DeLong says she had to unlearn a lot of what she learned as a psych nurse when she entered the FBI. "I had to learn a different way of looking at things. Psych nurses never see what their patients do criminally. To see a crime scene and realize your patient did that is to be blown away. No psych nurse would work with a patient if she saw what he did to a victim. What FBI profilers Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas taught me years later was I was no longer looking for therapeutic clues in the crime scene, I was looking for personality clues and how someone thinks. For example, if someone has a disorganized mind, like a schizophrenic, when they commit a crime, it's going to be a disorganized crime. As opposed to Ted Bundy, who has an organized mind and is going to plan out his crimes. I had to get out of nurse mode and become Sherlock Holmes."

The mental transition from psych nurse to FBI agent was one of many challenges DeLong experienced in her quest to prove her mettle. In her book, DeLong chronicles her struggle for acceptance in a male-dominated bastion of power and authority that had a clear pecking order. Her wry sense of humor frequently disarmed her chauvinistic colleagues, and her solid investigative work earned her the respect of her supervisors. As a picture of grace under fire, DeLong destroyed the stereotypes of the "weaker sex."

"My biggest battles were always in the office, not in the field," DeLong recalls. "Sometimes it was fighting against bureaucracy, sometimes management, sometimes other agents. The more successful a female was, at least in the old days, the more problems she's going to have. There's an expression in the bureau, 'No good deed goes unpunished.' It is so true. By requirement, FBI agents are very bright. By nature they are competitive. And when you put bright, competitive people together and everybody's trying to be a star, it's the kind of environment that can foster resentment. I never had the problems in nursing that I did when I was an agent. When you're a nurse working in a hospital, you're part of a team working toward a common goal. The goal is to get through the day without being hurt or not having patients hurt, and you did some good. In the FBI, you're usually on your own in some way and you want to be a star. It didn't get me down because I was raised with three brothers, a father and a grandfather. I was used to scrapping it up, taking my knocks and staying in the fight. It was worth it to have such an exciting, fulfilling career."

Dossier

Hometown: San Francisco
Sanctuary away from work: "Reading a good book in a hot tub."
Hobbies: Scuba diving and skiing
Family life: "My son is gone now but I spend a good amount of time with friends and family, and my cats."
Most influential person in your life: "My dad."
Favorite book: "My own. Just kidding. For fiction, 'White Oleander' was the most haunting book I ever read. 'Sex Crimes' by Alice Vachss was a very good non-fiction book, and 'The Bourne Identity' was my favorite fiction thriller. I love espionage and murder mysteries. For crime fiction, 'The Bone Collector' wins the prize."
Pet peeve: "People who talk in movie theaters!"
The one thing in life you can't do without: "My cell phone."
What you want to be remembered for: "Helping people understand mental illness."

DeLong has a simple piece of advice for forensic nurses who face sexism or any other kind of professional barrier: "Hang in there and don't let anyone tell you your specialty isn't needed. There was nothing I could have done to prepare to be an effective agent than having been a psychiatric nurse. Interviewing rape victims or offenders, which I did in both camps, was fabulous training. We need these forensic specialties. It takes a certain kind of person to be a psych nurse. It takes a certain kind of person to be on a SART, interview a victim effectively and not traumatize her further."

DeLong is reminded of her earliest days at Northwestern in Chicago. "I was 23 and asked the supervisor of psychiatric services, 'Do we have a rape crisis team or a special protocol for handling rape victims?' She looked at me and said, 'No, rapes are dirty cases and we send those down to the University of Chicago.' I looked at her and my jaw dropped. I said, 'Like it's the victim's fault?' I said I can't believe that. A few years later we did have a rape crisis program, so things have changed a lot, fortunately."

In her book DeLong shares the ups and downs of prominent cases such as the Tylenol murders ("Over the Counter") and the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski ("The Beast'), cases that tested DeLong's stamina, challenged her perseverance and sharpened her reasoning and deductive skills.

"I learned something with every case, and I enjoyed the little ones as much as I enjoyed the big ones. I think my sense of humor got more refined with every case. This is the kind of job, like nursing, that if you don't laugh you will surely cry. With every case you feel more confident in your ability to handle something more difficult."

But every once in a while, there was the criminal mastermind who caught everyone off guard.

"Ted Kaczynski," DeLong is quick to answer. "The guy has a genius IQ, so no wonder it took 17 years to find him. He went to extraordinary lengths to not be associated with the bombs he sent. We weren't even looking in Montana and if his brother hadn't turned him in, we'd still be searching for him. Somebody like Kaczynski will present a problem for law enforcement, but the average criminal is not that smart. Crimes of passion are the ones that can be tricky to solve, but the offender cannot possibly think of everything. Henry Lee had a case where a doctor killed his wife. It happened in the morning, and being smart, he wanted to slow down or confuse the possible time of death so he turned the air conditioning down to 55 degrees. Then he plays golf for the day, comes home and pretends he just found her body. It was an attempt to trick people into thinking she was killed much later than she was. It didn't work. There's always going to be a Hannibal Lecter out there who's really skilled, but they're rare." (And just to clarify the issue, DeLong says there is no real Hannibal Lecter. He is a composition of several different serial killers upon which author Thomas Harris based the character.)

Despite a stellar career DeLong says she was ready to leave the FBI when she did. "By the time I was at the end of my career I was at the end of my rope. People have said, 'What an incredible career, why did you leave, you could have stayed seven more years.' I said, 'Yeah, but I couldn't have taken seven more minutes.' I haven't been this happy in years. I have a stress-free life which I did not have as an agent. Every FBI agent has at least three bosses but now my only boss is my cat. It's wonderful not having to answer to anybody but myself. And now, with all of the Hollywood stuff, people are actually paying me for my opinion," she says with a chuckle. "Lifetime has bought the movie rights to the book; it would have to be a drama/comedy. I had someone say to me, 'If Candice DeLong isn't what Lifetime's all about, I don't know what Lifetime is all about.' I took it as a huge compliment, and I related it to being a single mom in a man's profession; I'm at a great place in my life and I'm happy where I'm at."

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