‘CSI Guy’ credits benefactors like Purdue Club for student success

Thursday, November 8, 2018
Following a Wednesday evening talk by Purdue “CSI Guy” David Tate (right), no Purdue Club of Putnam County members are more engaged than Dick and Jill (not pictured) Rice, both of whom are retired from the Indiana State Police. Tate was in Greencastle to give a presentation on crime scene investigation as well as promoting giving to the university with which he has been associated since the 1960s.
Banner Graphic/JARED JERNAGAN

The Purdue Club of Putnam County didn’t turn a 1960s small-town kid into the “CSI Guy,” but it might as well have.

Never mind that David Tate, retired director of medical laboratory and forensic sciences at Purdue, is from the wrong county and that he began his matriculation at the West Lafayette campus more than 30 years before the local club was founded.

To Tate, it was the generosity of the university and alumni like those in the Purdue Club that gave him his start at Purdue.

“What you do got me where I am today,” Tate told club during a Wednesday-evening talk. “That little bit you give got me to Purdue.”

A $200 scholarship — which went a lot further in the 1960s — got Tate from tiny Williamsport High School in Warren County to the much larger university in nearby Tippecanoe County.

From there, Tate didn’t exactly leave Purdue until he retired from his faculty position in 2013.

While his success story isn’t directly due to the Purdue Club of Putnam County, he knows that donations by club members, no matter how big or small, make a difference in the lives of students.

Of course, Tate had a partisan crowd of alumni and supporters for the dinner at Autumn Glen. They didn’t so much need to be sold on the merits of the university, perhaps just cheered on a little bit.

“You love Purdue. You have this fascination with a really quality education,” Tate said. “We can go anywhere in the world and if we have a Purdue T-shirt on, we all hear the same thing, ‘Oh, Purdue.’”

Tate has been associated with the university for more than 50 years, receiving BS and MS degrees in industrial management and counseling before joining the Purdue faculty.

It’s likely Tate would have been quite happy remaining an instructor and academic adviser for the remainder of his career, but then a show called “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” got popular and suddenly students were inquiring about forensic science.

That’s when Tate, ever the proponent for his students, worked with entomology professor Ralph Williams and designed the course Introduction to Forensic Science, which eventually grew into a forensic science minor.

So in his last decade or so at Purdue, Tate’s career took on a new angle, one for which he is known beyond West Lafayette — as the “CSI Guy.”

That’s how he was billed for the Greencastle event, giving an extremely pared-down version of a six-hour presentation he gives to emergency and investigative professionals on the subject of serial killers.

It was only after some bone-chilling descriptions and images of serial killers such as Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway and Dennis Rader, the self-styled BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill) Killer that Tate shared his much more heart-warming and personal story of success.

“These men are exceedingly good at finding your weakness,” Tate said. “These men are exceedingly good at tracking you down.”

He shared the rather detached way many of them viewed the crimes they committed with quotes such as “I killed so many, I have a hard time keeping them straight,” and “There were too many bodies to burn,” and “For the fun it gave me.”

However, it is through his knowledge of handling awful circumstances that Tate has become well-known and sought-after, even in retirement.

Nationally known for conducting seminars related to incident management and crime scene investigation, Tate has served as chairman of the Indiana Emergency Management and Homeland Security Higher Education Advisory Board and was the inaugural chairman of the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.

“You’re near the end of your career and the all of a sudden you’re the ‘CSI Guy,’” Tate said with a smile.

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