FBI agent who helped catch the Unabomber reveals biggest thing the Netflix movie left out

Candice DeLong, one of the FBI agents who worked on the Unabomber case, has reacted to the new Netflix movie and revealed an important piece of context about the real Ted Kaczynski.

Unabomber landed on Netflix last week, with the film focusing on both Kaczynski’s years at Harvard and Henry Murray’s experiments, as well as the FBI’s investigation. In the latter timeline, Shailene Woodley portrays Joanne Miller, who focuses on the language of Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto. 

With a runtime of under 100 minutes, there’s obviously a lot about Kaczynski’s life and crimes that are left out of the Netflix film. This is something Candice DeLong addressed in a recent video. 

And she knows the case better than most: DeLong spent around 20 years as an FBI special agent and was one of three who were hand-picked to work on the Montana manhunt for Kaczynski. Before joining the FBI, DeLong had worked as a psychiatric nurse, and she later became the Bureau’s head profiler in San Francisco. 

When she reacted to the Netflix film and its depiction of Kaczynski’s time at Harvard, there was one important piece of context she wanted to highlight: his problems definitely didn’t begin when he went to college at age 16. 

Candice DeLong believes Ted Kaczynski was ‘damaged’ before Harvard

Over on TikTok, DeLong responded to the clip showing the movie going back to 1958 and Kaczynski participating in Murray’s experiments. “Ted Kaczynski was special,” she explained. “He was damaged before he got to Harvard.”

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For context, Kaczynski was a mathematics prodigy who eventually abandoned his career to live a reclusive, off grid life. Between 1978 and 1995, he began a nationwide bombing campaign in the US, which killed three people and injured 23 others. 

Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber in the media, targeted people connected to universities, airlines and technology, believing advanced modern tech and the destruction of the natural environment to be a travesty. 

He outlined these thoughts in a 35,000-word manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future, published in 1995. Kaczynski was eventually arrested in 1996 after a nearly two-decade FBI manhunt. He died by suicide in federal prison in June 2023, at the age of 81.

It’s long been suggested that the psychological experiments he participated in at Harvard may have contributed to his mental deterioration, with some even speculating that the study was part of the CIA’s MKUltra program. 

But this has never been proven, and in a letter sent from prison, Kaczynski himself described the belief he was “subjected to psychological ‘torture’ as part of an ‘MK Ultra’ mind-control experiment conducted by the CIA” as “all bullsh*t.”

And DeLong believes the issues started much earlier. “We, the FBI – we found something in his very, very early childhood that happened to him that I believe very likely changed the course of his life,” she continued. “And what happened to him when he was a baby has happened to other people who became serial killers.”

DeLong is referring to an incident when Kaczynski was just nine months old, when he was hospitalised with a severe case of hives and separated from his mother. Wanda Kaczynski later said her previously happy baby appeared withdrawn and unresponsive when he returned home, and came to believe the experience had profoundly affected him.

On her Killer Psyche podcast episode ‘The Unabomber: Evil Genius’, the now-retired FBI agent explained, “We’re talking about three weeks in a strange, scary environment and pediatric wards in those days would be a huge room with maybe 20-30 cribs in it, and one or two nurses. 

“There was no touching, no smiling, no laughing, no rocking, no holding the baby to give him his bottle. So Ted went from all kinds of good stuff that babies need to suddenly having it cut off. And when he emerged three weeks later, according to his mother, he was not the same baby that went in that hospital.”

“Well, there were many, many really good studies on the effects of maternal deprivation, and it can have lasting behavioural and psychological and emotional damage on the child.”

“For me, it helped explain… maybe that contributed to this brilliant child and young man [turning] into basically a misfit, a social misfit, and then someone who was angry, it seemed, at the world,” she added. 

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Featured image credit: Public Domain/Netflix