Burtis Endicott
Burtis Endicott
Birth 1896-09-01 Death 1974-04-08
Bob was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during the Cold War from 1962 to 1964. He then had a long career as a forensic chemist first associated with State law enforcemen...
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Bob was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during the Cold War from 1962 to 1964. He then had a long career as a forensic chemist first associated with State law enforcement agencies and then with the U.S. military as a civilian.
Bob comes from a rather remarkable military tradition. He is the son of Army Captain William C. Blackledge (see WWII section), brother of Colonel David W. Blackledge (see Vietnam War section), and the uncle of retired Army Major General David Noel Blackledge, (see War in Iraq section) and William Dean Blackledge, also a retired Colonel (see Iraq War section).
As a child Bob was a prisoner in the Japanese WWII internment camps at Santo Tomas University in Manila and, later, at Los Baños, Philippines. He was almost 5 years old when the war started and 8 when it ended. He was interned with his mother, Helen Louise Van Curen Blackledge, and older brother, Dave.
His father, Bill Blackledge, was a U.S. Army Officer who was in the Bataan Death March and did not survive captivity (see WWII section). Helen, Dave, and Bob were liberated in a daring airborne raid on the Los Baños camp by the 11th Airborne Division and Filipino guerrillas, on February 23, 1945.
Bob’s lineage from Governor John Endecott is as follows:
Gov. John Endecott (1588-1665)
Zerubbabel Endecott (1635-1684)
Joseph Endecott (1672-1747)
Thomas Endecott (1737-1831)
Thomas Endecott (1771-1836),
Malinda Grubbs (1804-1884)
America Amos (1829-1911)
Amos Blacklidge (1865-1913) (not a spelling error)
William C. Blackledge (1905-1945)
Robert D. Blackledge (1937- )
The account of the Blackledge family in the Los Baños prison camp can be found in his brother Dave’s story (see Vietnam War section), but what follows here are details that Bob has added to that.
Conditions in the internment camps
Bob went into the Santo Tomas prison camp just before his 5th birthday, was shifted to the Los Baños camp, and got out of that when he was 8.
These prison camps were particularly jarring because before the war the Blackledges had a “nice lifestyle” since things were cheap in the Philippines. “ We had servants and everything,” Bob said. “My parents had quite an active social life and we got to be part of that.”
Yet another problem: “I had absolutely no friends in the camps. That made it hard to develop interpersonal skills. I’ve always been a solitary person and I wondered if that’s why.” (Brother Dave is 7 years older and was always more outgoing anyway.)
In the prison camps, Bob did not have school, so when asked what he did all day, he said, “I just wandered around a lot. But I followed the rules and didn’t get into any trouble.” He personally never had interaction with the Japanese guards; only the camp leaders did.
How was the food? “Watery rice with worms in it. You just learned to not look at it.” But he added that in the early years, the internees were allowed to have gardens and many families had their own, so he and his mother and brother tended one. “There was fruit all over the ground outside the camp but the Japanese wouldn’t let us have that,” he added.
Another thing Bob remembers: “there were a lot of Brits in the camp who knew all these songs from WWI and the Japanese allowed us to attend sing-alongs inside the camp.” So to this day, Bob remembers the words to a lot of those songs, some of them pretty “bawdy”!
He also remembers that “Once American planes started flying overhead, at first we’d look up at them and cheer. But then the Japanese said ‘if you look up we’ll knock you down.’ ” So, after that, everyone was careful to look up only when they knew the guards weren’t watching.
Bob remembers the night before he was freed.
I looked out across the camp and there was a flight of 5 P-38 Lightnings. It was a good fighter but could also be a kind of dive-bomber. Outside the camp there was a hill looking down on the camp grounds where all of us had to line up for roll call.
Each plane dropped a single bomb on the hill. And the next morning we were rescued. If there had been any machine gun nests left up there on that hill, it would have been bad news for us. It always bothered me that the Army Air Corps didn’t receive any credit for knocking out those guns.
Birthday cake for Dave
Just after being freed from Los Baños, in early March, Bob and his family were in a U. S. camp in the Philippines. It was a few days before Dave’s birthday and in over three years he had never had a birthday cake. Bob relates what happened next:
My mother went to one of the mess tents and asked whether it would be possible to make a birthday cake for him. Here are these bakers who have to prepare meals for thousands of people. But she was outgoing and attractive and got the cake!
Stormy trip back
In 1945, Bob and family made their way back to Fort Wayne, Indiana, first by ship to the U.S. and then by train. But the ship voyage had one pretty bad moment:
We sailed on a Liberty Ship east across the Pacific. There was a gigantic typhoon that we could not avoid. We were one ship and there was a big convoy headed right toward us.
So our ship was ordered to make a 90º turn and get out of the way. But turning put us sideways in huge waves. There were 3 maybe more times where the boat rolled way over on its side and we were afraid it would sink. But it would slowly come back up again.
We were sleeping in bunks stacked 6 people high during this!
Back in Indiana
When the Blackledges got to Indiana, after a little time to recover from their ordeal, Helen enrolled Dave and Bob in school. When Helen, spoke to the superintendent of schools about it, she so impressed him that he offered her a job on the spot:
He always was an advocate for her; he encouraged her to go back and get her Masters degree. I would say the happiest time in her life was when she was doing that at Columbia University in New York. She and her friends went to every Broadway show.
Bob and Dave stayed with Helen’s grandmother while she was away at school.
Because of his age, Bob should have been in the 3rd grade, but he had never been to school before. Nevertheless, he was assigned to start in the second half of the 2nd grade year, so he wasn’t too far behind.
When asked about whether the other kids were interested in what he had been through during the war, he said: “Once they heard the story the first time, they weren’t interested any more. There was always something unusual about me; I was interested in world affairs but the other kids weren’t.”
But being a bit older than the other kids in his grades meant he had a physical advantage: “I was always very interested in football and basketball and I had an advantage over the other kids,” is the way he put it.
By the time he was 18, he was 6' 7" tall and such a basketball standout that he got recruited by colleges.
The Citadel
Bob ended up accepting a “full ride” scholarship to The Citadel in South Carolina from 1956-1960. When asked if he chose The Citadel because he was thinking seriously about going into the military as a career, he said, no, the reason for going there was “strictly financial.”
On top of a full scholarship, Bob got payments from the U.S. Government. When he got to The Citadel he learned that Congress had passed the War Claims Act of 1948, which paid out small lump-sum payments from a War Claims Fund from seized Japanese, German, and other Axis assets. This meant that the approximately 14,000 American civilians interned by the Japanese were eligible for money. (This compared to about 120,000 Japanese Americans who were interned in American camps.) Bob remembers that in order to be eligible he had to take a test, which he passed.
Avoids hazing at the Citadel
Because West Point is under U. S. Government jurisdiction, hazing is limited to just the initial few months. But The Citadel, being a private institution, was not subject to the same scrutiny and according to Bob, “hazing went on for a cadet’s whole first year.” (The 1983 movie “Lords of Discipline” is a fictionalized account of this.)
But Bob was able to avoid a lot of it because of playing basketball for the university. And then after basketball season was over, he became a member of the track team, doing the high jump.
In 1960 Bob graduated from the Citadel with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and immediately went to graduate school, the University of Georgia, where he got a Masters degree in Chemistry in 1962.
Army service
From 1962-1964, Bob was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps for 2 years, the entire time in Fort McClellan, Alabama, which is where the Army Chemical School was at the time (the camp closed in 1999).
Then when he got out of the Army; he was a chemistry and physics teacher at Prestonburg Community College in Kentucky (renamed in 2003 as Big Sandy Community and Technical College) from September 1964-end of May, 1971.
Starts 33-year career as a forensic chemist
In 1971 Bob started his career as a forensic chemist. In recent years forensic scientists and chemists have been the subject of about 20 popular TV shows, such as “Bones,” and “CSI.” In general, they take trace elements found at crime scenes and analyze them in labs using techniques such as microscopy, gas chromatography and many others to catch bad guys.
In 1971 Bob got a job with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Tallahassee Crime Lab. He was there a little over a year before switching to a new lab, the Fort Pierce Regional Crime lab, and he stayed there until 1977.
Starting in 1977, and then for 30 years, Bob served as a civilian Senior Chemist, first at the U. S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory in Frankfurt, Germany and then at the U. S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service Regional Forensic Laboratory in San Diego, California.
Since leaving the U. S. Government, he’s been an independent forensic chemist consultant living in El Cajon, California.
His interests are wide-ranging but his special passion is trace evidence, the discipline of forensic science that deals with the minute transfers of materials that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. Trace evidence may provide a link between the victim and a suspect, a victim and a scene, or the suspect and a scene.
Bob has won several awards for his public speaking and is a tour speaker for the American Chemical Society.
He is the author or co-author of fifty-five journal articles and book chapters published in various FBI, law enforcement, and forensic science journals on such subjects as:
Condom lubricant traces where a sexual assailant wore a condom.
Characterization of Surface-Modified Fibers.
Bad Science: The instrumental data in the Floyd Landis case. (This was a Tour de France doping scandal case.)
Classifying single fibers based on fluorinated surface treatments
Spectrographic imaging based approach or condom identification in condom contaminated fingermarks.
Analyzing Forensic Evidence Based on Density with Magnetic Levitation.
In 2007 Bob was the editor of the book Forensic Analysis on the Cutting Edge: New Methods for Trace Evidence Analysis, published by Wiley Interscience, a branch of the 200 year old John Wiley & Sons, Inc. publishing house. (Today he’s working on a sequel of the book called More Methods for Trace Evidence Analysis.)
The book is an in-depth exploration of the methodologies, tools, and techniques for analyzing trace evidence, all the small pieces of material that are collected from crime scenes and accidents, which assist in the investigation of these incidents. Such evidence often provides proof of an association between a suspect and a victim or crime scene.
The book is a valuable hands-on reference for scientists in forensic laboratories worldwide. It’s also an informative, fascinating resource for mystery writers, attorneys, criminal investigators, and others who want to go beyond the basics of trace evidence analysis. It covers such things as:
A wide range of technical methodologies such as mass spectrometry; Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy; Raman microspectroscopy; and statistical validation.
The analysis of ink, condom trace evidence, glitter, fibers, glass cuts, pressure sensitive tapes, automotive airbag contact, and more.
Chemical detection strategies for latent invisible trace evidence, including bloodstains, fingerprints, and pepper spray.
The application of cathodoluminescense to forensic examinations.
Most interesting case
Bob says “the most interesting case is not always the one that gets all the press.” He describes one he personally found important:
Once DNA became commonly used, we saw more and more cases where the assailant wore a latex condom, serial rapists especially. Since we couldn’t get DNA from the scene, I developed a method for analyzing the lubricant of these condoms because different ones use different lubricant. That helps to rule a suspect in or out.
He says this led to a lot of work from the LA police Department
Because I was kind of the world expert on condom analysis, and I had a crime lab director who was kind of an easygoing guy and liked to accept cases that weren’t really in his jurisdiction, but they were great for me. But some of the cases didn’t get the attention they deserved because they were being handled by the wrong jurisdiction.
TV shows
How accurate are all these TV shows about forensic scientists?
According to Bob, “They try for accuracy, but if accuracy gets in the way of a good story…. Also, you’d never have someone as versatile as say Abby in NCIS. There would be separate specialists for each different area she works in.”
Bob explains that these TV shows have vastly increased the popularity of forensic science as a profession and there is a lot more competition for jobs in it now:
University officials have discovered that if they insert the word “forensic” into a course description, they can get a lot of students to sign up for it. So I start each course off by saying, “if you’re in this course to help you be a detective, it will help you. But if you think it will get you a job in a crime lab, it won’t. To do that you need a PhD in chemistry. Those labs will say, “We can teach you forensic science but we can’t teach you chemistry.”
Bob is married to Sally Blackledge and they have three children, Jim, a PhD chemist specializing in mass spectrometry; and daughters Andrea and Stephanie.
Sources:
1. Personal interview January 27, 2021
2. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Blackledge
Bob comes from a rather remarkable military tradition. He is the son of Army Captain William C. Blackledge (see WWII section), brother of Colonel David W. Blackledge (see Vietnam War section), and the uncle of retired Army Major General David Noel Blackledge, (see War in Iraq section) and William Dean Blackledge, also a retired Colonel (see Iraq War section).
As a child Bob was a prisoner in the Japanese WWII internment camps at Santo Tomas University in Manila and, later, at Los Baños, Philippines. He was almost 5 years old when the war started and 8 when it ended. He was interned with his mother, Helen Louise Van Curen Blackledge, and older brother, Dave.
His father, Bill Blackledge, was a U.S. Army Officer who was in the Bataan Death March and did not survive captivity (see WWII section). Helen, Dave, and Bob were liberated in a daring airborne raid on the Los Baños camp by the 11th Airborne Division and Filipino guerrillas, on February 23, 1945.
Bob’s lineage from Governor John Endecott is as follows:
Gov. John Endecott (1588-1665)
Zerubbabel Endecott (1635-1684)
Joseph Endecott (1672-1747)
Thomas Endecott (1737-1831)
Thomas Endecott (1771-1836),
Malinda Grubbs (1804-1884)
America Amos (1829-1911)
Amos Blacklidge (1865-1913) (not a spelling error)
William C. Blackledge (1905-1945)
Robert D. Blackledge (1937- )
The account of the Blackledge family in the Los Baños prison camp can be found in his brother Dave’s story (see Vietnam War section), but what follows here are details that Bob has added to that.
Conditions in the internment camps
Bob went into the Santo Tomas prison camp just before his 5th birthday, was shifted to the Los Baños camp, and got out of that when he was 8.
These prison camps were particularly jarring because before the war the Blackledges had a “nice lifestyle” since things were cheap in the Philippines. “ We had servants and everything,” Bob said. “My parents had quite an active social life and we got to be part of that.”
Yet another problem: “I had absolutely no friends in the camps. That made it hard to develop interpersonal skills. I’ve always been a solitary person and I wondered if that’s why.” (Brother Dave is 7 years older and was always more outgoing anyway.)
In the prison camps, Bob did not have school, so when asked what he did all day, he said, “I just wandered around a lot. But I followed the rules and didn’t get into any trouble.” He personally never had interaction with the Japanese guards; only the camp leaders did.
How was the food? “Watery rice with worms in it. You just learned to not look at it.” But he added that in the early years, the internees were allowed to have gardens and many families had their own, so he and his mother and brother tended one. “There was fruit all over the ground outside the camp but the Japanese wouldn’t let us have that,” he added.
Another thing Bob remembers: “there were a lot of Brits in the camp who knew all these songs from WWI and the Japanese allowed us to attend sing-alongs inside the camp.” So to this day, Bob remembers the words to a lot of those songs, some of them pretty “bawdy”!
He also remembers that “Once American planes started flying overhead, at first we’d look up at them and cheer. But then the Japanese said ‘if you look up we’ll knock you down.’ ” So, after that, everyone was careful to look up only when they knew the guards weren’t watching.
Bob remembers the night before he was freed.
I looked out across the camp and there was a flight of 5 P-38 Lightnings. It was a good fighter but could also be a kind of dive-bomber. Outside the camp there was a hill looking down on the camp grounds where all of us had to line up for roll call.
Each plane dropped a single bomb on the hill. And the next morning we were rescued. If there had been any machine gun nests left up there on that hill, it would have been bad news for us. It always bothered me that the Army Air Corps didn’t receive any credit for knocking out those guns.
Birthday cake for Dave
Just after being freed from Los Baños, in early March, Bob and his family were in a U. S. camp in the Philippines. It was a few days before Dave’s birthday and in over three years he had never had a birthday cake. Bob relates what happened next:
My mother went to one of the mess tents and asked whether it would be possible to make a birthday cake for him. Here are these bakers who have to prepare meals for thousands of people. But she was outgoing and attractive and got the cake!
Stormy trip back
In 1945, Bob and family made their way back to Fort Wayne, Indiana, first by ship to the U.S. and then by train. But the ship voyage had one pretty bad moment:
We sailed on a Liberty Ship east across the Pacific. There was a gigantic typhoon that we could not avoid. We were one ship and there was a big convoy headed right toward us.
So our ship was ordered to make a 90º turn and get out of the way. But turning put us sideways in huge waves. There were 3 maybe more times where the boat rolled way over on its side and we were afraid it would sink. But it would slowly come back up again.
We were sleeping in bunks stacked 6 people high during this!
Back in Indiana
When the Blackledges got to Indiana, after a little time to recover from their ordeal, Helen enrolled Dave and Bob in school. When Helen, spoke to the superintendent of schools about it, she so impressed him that he offered her a job on the spot:
He always was an advocate for her; he encouraged her to go back and get her Masters degree. I would say the happiest time in her life was when she was doing that at Columbia University in New York. She and her friends went to every Broadway show.
Bob and Dave stayed with Helen’s grandmother while she was away at school.
Because of his age, Bob should have been in the 3rd grade, but he had never been to school before. Nevertheless, he was assigned to start in the second half of the 2nd grade year, so he wasn’t too far behind.
When asked about whether the other kids were interested in what he had been through during the war, he said: “Once they heard the story the first time, they weren’t interested any more. There was always something unusual about me; I was interested in world affairs but the other kids weren’t.”
But being a bit older than the other kids in his grades meant he had a physical advantage: “I was always very interested in football and basketball and I had an advantage over the other kids,” is the way he put it.
By the time he was 18, he was 6' 7" tall and such a basketball standout that he got recruited by colleges.
The Citadel
Bob ended up accepting a “full ride” scholarship to The Citadel in South Carolina from 1956-1960. When asked if he chose The Citadel because he was thinking seriously about going into the military as a career, he said, no, the reason for going there was “strictly financial.”
On top of a full scholarship, Bob got payments from the U.S. Government. When he got to The Citadel he learned that Congress had passed the War Claims Act of 1948, which paid out small lump-sum payments from a War Claims Fund from seized Japanese, German, and other Axis assets. This meant that the approximately 14,000 American civilians interned by the Japanese were eligible for money. (This compared to about 120,000 Japanese Americans who were interned in American camps.) Bob remembers that in order to be eligible he had to take a test, which he passed.
Avoids hazing at the Citadel
Because West Point is under U. S. Government jurisdiction, hazing is limited to just the initial few months. But The Citadel, being a private institution, was not subject to the same scrutiny and according to Bob, “hazing went on for a cadet’s whole first year.” (The 1983 movie “Lords of Discipline” is a fictionalized account of this.)
But Bob was able to avoid a lot of it because of playing basketball for the university. And then after basketball season was over, he became a member of the track team, doing the high jump.
In 1960 Bob graduated from the Citadel with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and immediately went to graduate school, the University of Georgia, where he got a Masters degree in Chemistry in 1962.
Army service
From 1962-1964, Bob was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps for 2 years, the entire time in Fort McClellan, Alabama, which is where the Army Chemical School was at the time (the camp closed in 1999).
Then when he got out of the Army; he was a chemistry and physics teacher at Prestonburg Community College in Kentucky (renamed in 2003 as Big Sandy Community and Technical College) from September 1964-end of May, 1971.
Starts 33-year career as a forensic chemist
In 1971 Bob started his career as a forensic chemist. In recent years forensic scientists and chemists have been the subject of about 20 popular TV shows, such as “Bones,” and “CSI.” In general, they take trace elements found at crime scenes and analyze them in labs using techniques such as microscopy, gas chromatography and many others to catch bad guys.
In 1971 Bob got a job with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Tallahassee Crime Lab. He was there a little over a year before switching to a new lab, the Fort Pierce Regional Crime lab, and he stayed there until 1977.
Starting in 1977, and then for 30 years, Bob served as a civilian Senior Chemist, first at the U. S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory in Frankfurt, Germany and then at the U. S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service Regional Forensic Laboratory in San Diego, California.
Since leaving the U. S. Government, he’s been an independent forensic chemist consultant living in El Cajon, California.
His interests are wide-ranging but his special passion is trace evidence, the discipline of forensic science that deals with the minute transfers of materials that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. Trace evidence may provide a link between the victim and a suspect, a victim and a scene, or the suspect and a scene.
Bob has won several awards for his public speaking and is a tour speaker for the American Chemical Society.
He is the author or co-author of fifty-five journal articles and book chapters published in various FBI, law enforcement, and forensic science journals on such subjects as:
Condom lubricant traces where a sexual assailant wore a condom.
Characterization of Surface-Modified Fibers.
Bad Science: The instrumental data in the Floyd Landis case. (This was a Tour de France doping scandal case.)
Classifying single fibers based on fluorinated surface treatments
Spectrographic imaging based approach or condom identification in condom contaminated fingermarks.
Analyzing Forensic Evidence Based on Density with Magnetic Levitation.
In 2007 Bob was the editor of the book Forensic Analysis on the Cutting Edge: New Methods for Trace Evidence Analysis, published by Wiley Interscience, a branch of the 200 year old John Wiley & Sons, Inc. publishing house. (Today he’s working on a sequel of the book called More Methods for Trace Evidence Analysis.)
The book is an in-depth exploration of the methodologies, tools, and techniques for analyzing trace evidence, all the small pieces of material that are collected from crime scenes and accidents, which assist in the investigation of these incidents. Such evidence often provides proof of an association between a suspect and a victim or crime scene.
The book is a valuable hands-on reference for scientists in forensic laboratories worldwide. It’s also an informative, fascinating resource for mystery writers, attorneys, criminal investigators, and others who want to go beyond the basics of trace evidence analysis. It covers such things as:
A wide range of technical methodologies such as mass spectrometry; Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy; Raman microspectroscopy; and statistical validation.
The analysis of ink, condom trace evidence, glitter, fibers, glass cuts, pressure sensitive tapes, automotive airbag contact, and more.
Chemical detection strategies for latent invisible trace evidence, including bloodstains, fingerprints, and pepper spray.
The application of cathodoluminescense to forensic examinations.
Most interesting case
Bob says “the most interesting case is not always the one that gets all the press.” He describes one he personally found important:
Once DNA became commonly used, we saw more and more cases where the assailant wore a latex condom, serial rapists especially. Since we couldn’t get DNA from the scene, I developed a method for analyzing the lubricant of these condoms because different ones use different lubricant. That helps to rule a suspect in or out.
He says this led to a lot of work from the LA police Department
Because I was kind of the world expert on condom analysis, and I had a crime lab director who was kind of an easygoing guy and liked to accept cases that weren’t really in his jurisdiction, but they were great for me. But some of the cases didn’t get the attention they deserved because they were being handled by the wrong jurisdiction.
TV shows
How accurate are all these TV shows about forensic scientists?
According to Bob, “They try for accuracy, but if accuracy gets in the way of a good story…. Also, you’d never have someone as versatile as say Abby in NCIS. There would be separate specialists for each different area she works in.”
Bob explains that these TV shows have vastly increased the popularity of forensic science as a profession and there is a lot more competition for jobs in it now:
University officials have discovered that if they insert the word “forensic” into a course description, they can get a lot of students to sign up for it. So I start each course off by saying, “if you’re in this course to help you be a detective, it will help you. But if you think it will get you a job in a crime lab, it won’t. To do that you need a PhD in chemistry. Those labs will say, “We can teach you forensic science but we can’t teach you chemistry.”
Bob is married to Sally Blackledge and they have three children, Jim, a PhD chemist specializing in mass spectrometry; and daughters Andrea and Stephanie.
Sources:
1. Personal interview January 27, 2021
2. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Blackledge