Bob Sands
Appearances
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Back in the early 1970s, Kerr-McGee was a Goliath in Oklahoma and in America's oil and gas industry. But if Kermagee was Goliath, Karen never set out to be David, though she certainly became one.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
We met Linda and Karen's other sister, Rosemary Silkwood Smith, at Rosemary's home, 30 minutes east of Houston. We wanted to get a better picture of who Karen was as a young woman before she turned into the fearless whistleblower we know.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
There were boxes of toys and old family photo albums and a somewhat creepy ventriloquist dummy. Let me get this out of the way. I can't see what it says. And then... Mike, you found it. What? Silkwood storage.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Karen took care of people. She would help friends with their schoolwork and volunteered as a candy striper at the hospital. But Karen also liked living on the edge a little bit. She was gutsy.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Well, Mary isn't quite right. With her being 19 and Bill only 18, no one would legally marry them without their parents' permission.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Karen's son, Michael, says his mom was stubborn, for better or worse. She'd get into heated debates with her father-in-law. Michael says other people would have been intimidated to challenge this big, accomplished, headstrong Navy vet. Not Karen.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
In the early days, life with Bill was exciting. Bill Meadows talked about those early days in an A&E documentary from 2001 called Karen Silkwood, A Life on the Line.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Fingers down. Holy cow, I got goosebumps. On the outside, in black sharpie, was the name. Silkwood. Yeah, it's all here.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Bill Meadows told us that in his marriage to Karen, when things were good, they were very good. And when they were bad, they were very bad.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
To her sisters, Karen seemed resigned to stay in the marriage, but then she found out about something else.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
A mother giving up custody of her kids was really unusual in the early 1970s, and it's something that after Karen's death would be used against her to try and paint her as a bad mother and a bad person. Rosemary and Linda say Karen absolutely loved her children.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
A hole he's trying to fill by learning all he can about the woman who never got to raise him, about her life and her death.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
The death of Karen Silkwood. Karen died in a single car crash off a dark, empty Oklahoma highway exactly 50 years ago this November. She was on her way to meet a New York Times journalist, reportedly to hand over documents she'd secretly been collecting at her job at a nuclear facility. But she never made it to that meeting.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
So very 70s of him. These days, Steve's got a head of white hair and a full gray beard. He recently retired from his career as an attorney advocating for people with work-related cancer. He's now spending his retirement in a small New Jersey beach town, trying to figure out what happened to Karen Silkwood 50 years ago.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Filing freedom of information requests with federal agencies, pouring over decades-old legal documents, and files with ink that's faded but still legible. So there's 599 file items here. That's just FBI. Steve also has the only recordings we've been able to find of Karen's voice.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
At the time of this call, Karen was still learning about the effects of repeated exposure to radioactive materials.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
She was concerned that she and her co-workers didn't get enough information or training at the plant, especially about how plutonium could accumulate in the body over time. You'll hear a lot more from these tapes in the next episode.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Though brief, those seven weeks would wind up changing the course of both of their lives. It all started with Karen's concerns about the plant. She claimed things there were sloppy and unsafe at Kerr-McGee's nuclear facility in Crescent, Oklahoma. Plutonium, the stuff she and other assembly line workers were handling, has a half-life of up to 20,000 years.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Getting contaminated with that stuff can have major health consequences.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
On the way, Karen fell asleep at the wheel, possibly under the influence of drugs, drove off the highway, crashed into a ditch, and died.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
But a claim like that, they'd need evidence, company documents.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
No one should know. So Karen went back to Oklahoma and started quietly looking for evidence. She told Steve over the phone that things were coming together and she'd be able to prove it. So he began looking for an investigative reporter. That's where legendary New York Times reporter David Burnham came in.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
When the union tried to get Burnham interested in the story, at first, he didn't bite.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Karen was going to blow the whistle on this energy giant. Her life was going to change, and everything around her was going to change. But none of that happened.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
From around 5.30 to 7 o'clock p.m., Karen was at a union meeting at the Hub Cafe, a greasy spoon in Crescent, not far from the plant. She drank an iced tea, and aside from making a brief presentation to her fellow plant workers, she didn't say much. That night, a friend and fellow Kermagee plant worker, Jean Young, spotted Karen at the meeting, leafing through a stack of documents.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
I'm Bobby Sands. And I'm Mike Boettcher. We're two old gray guys who've been in this journalism game a very, very long time. Mike and I met as young reporters at competing Oklahoma news outlets. We were both on the scene of a hostage situation back in 1973. Bullets were whizzing past our heads. I dove off the end of a flatbed trailer, and what does this crazy character do?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Then Karen left and got into her 1973 white Honda Civic to drive the 30 miles to meet Steve and Burnham, who were waiting for her at the hotel with her boyfriend, Drew Stevens.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Karen was seven miles from Crescent when her Honda Civic went from the right lane of the highway across to the left and off the road onto the grass along the road's shoulder.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Law enforcement estimated that the moment of impact happened around 7.30 that night. The collision crumpled the front end of Karen's small two-door Honda, making the windshield fly out and leaving the vehicle sitting on its left side in the red mud of the ditch.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
When Karen didn't show up for the meeting in Oklahoma City, Steve Wodka, David Burnham, the New York Times reporter, Andrew Stevens, Karen's boyfriend, started to get nervous.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
And finally, Steve reached one of Karen's fellow union leaders.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
The union guy, the reporter, the boyfriend, they all had this one impulse to go to Karen.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
But by that point, Karen and the wrecked Honda, the entire accident scene had been cleaned up
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Decades later, Steve still wonders, what if he and Burnham had gone to Karen that night instead of having her come to them?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
He stood there, holding a microphone in the air, trying to catch the sound of the bullets flying by. I said to myself, that's a guy I got to get hooked up with, and we've been buddies ever since.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
By the time Steve, Drew, and Burnham arrived at the scene of Karen's crash, just about every trace of her had vanished. Everything except that paycheck in the mud. Karen, gone.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
What exactly was Karen uncovering about Kermagee? What secrets could those documents have held? That's next time.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
That summer, reporting came through that KTOK newsroom about a 28-year-old union organizer making noise about safety conditions at a local nuclear facility.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Karen was a rank-and-file worker, one of only a few women who worked in that plant. And yet, here she was, standing up to her employer, Kerr McGee, an atomic energy giant.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
And so when news of Karen's death broke in November of 74, when that bell dinged on the wire, I paid really close attention.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Over the years, we kept a close eye on the Silkwood case, and for a time, so did the rest of the country.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Well, there were also investigations by several news outlets, and Karen's story got lots more attention in 1983 with the release of the Hollywood movie Silkwood. Based on her life, Meryl Streep, starred as Karen, actually got Streep an Oscar nomination.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Mike and I held on to Silkwood over the years as we covered countless other stories.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
There was war reporting overseas, and the Oklahoma City bombing, which shook our home state and the country. We covered that for NBC.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
And then a couple of years ago, we decided to try and pick back up with Silkwood, do the job we would have loved to have taken on as cub reporters 50 years ago.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
To us, there seemed to be more to Karen's story, and we weren't the only ones who suspected it. It's a widely held belief Karen Silkwood died for what she knew. So what had Karen uncovered? Who had she upset? Why did her car hit that concrete wall? Was there a second vehicle involved?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
There are fewer and fewer people alive to share what they know from the night Karen died. Many of the people who worked with Karen in the plant are dead.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Hello? Yes, ma'am. My name is Bob Sands. I'm a producer. I produce documentaries. Have you got just a moment to chat with me?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
In the mid-90s, about 20 years after Karen's death, I was handed a secret tape with the instruction I could not reveal its contents until certain people named in the tapes died. Well, that time has come. We'll hear what an investigator was trying to shed light on decades ago and what he came up against.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Last year, my buddy Mike and I found ourselves inside a giant warehouse with hundreds of big wooden storage containers stacked floor to ceiling.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
And people with clues that could possibly help solve the puzzle of her death. People who've been holding on to the old investigative tapes we dug out of storage and even physical evidence from the night she died. In one case, an accident investigator saved a crucial piece of Karen's wrecked car, even making sure to pass it on to his daughter on his deathbed.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
With the idea that someday, someone could figure out what really happened to Karen. That someday, someone would come looking for it. Well, here we come.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Michael doesn't remember much about his mom. He has a few fragmented memories. That breakfast, a trip to the zoo, maybe a trip to the state fair, though he's not sure about that last one. Looking at Karen's old apartment makes him feel like some of those memories he's been grasping for could be unlocked if he could only see through the apartment's brick walls and 50 years into the past.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Well, we were definitely searching for lost treasure, hoping one of these storage containers would hold the key to a 50-year-old mystery. Okay, it's coming out.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 1: The Tapes
Michael is a former Marine, and four years ago, he started his own investigation into how his mom died, how her car smashed into that concrete culvert wall, and he shares a suspicion other people have.
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Trailer: 'Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery'
I got the tape on one condition. No one else could hear it until the people named in it were dead. That time has come.
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Trailer: 'Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery'
Oh my gosh. The accident investigator believed he had a smoking gun. He told his daughter on his deathbed to hang on to it. We have the bumper. Something's not right with this story. I think it needs to be looked into further.
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Trailer: 'Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery'
She'd agreed to deliver sensitive documents to a New York Times reporter.
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Trailer: 'Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery'
And I'm Bob Sands. I've been covering the Silkwood story since I read the wire copy on the air in Oklahoma City the night that Karen died in that car crash.
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Trailer: 'Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery'
And in 1994, 20 years after Karen Silkwood's death, a friend gave me a secret tape for safekeeping. An Oklahoma highway patrolman had launched his own risky investigation behind the thin blue line.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Now, there were other dings on Karen's car. She'd been in a minor accident a couple of weeks earlier that damaged her right rear taillight. But what interested Pipkin was on the left. The dent on the bumper was about two inches long and less than an inch wide.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Ted Sebring, the tow truck driver, said he was confident he didn't dent the car. And when Pipkin had outside experts look at the dent under a microscope, They didn't find any traces of concrete. Neither did the FBI, though the agency still thought it was possible the dent could have been caused after the crash. But there was something else wedged into one of the dents. Metal particles.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And Pipkin thought those particles could possibly have come from another vehicle.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So Pipkin's puzzle was complete. And the picture he saw looked different from the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol's explanation of the crash. Here's what he told ABC about his findings.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Pipkin's evidence suggested that a second car could have hit Karen from behind. On November 18th, five days after Karen's death, Pipkin called Steve and his bosses to report his findings. He told them the same thing he later told National Public Radio.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The LCAW immediately sent a telegram to the U.S. Attorney General and to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, demanding an investigation.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Here we met another Karen in this story. Karen Pipkin Guerrero greeted us at the front door.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The medication? It was those Quaaludes Karen had been prescribed to help her sleep. The state medical examiner said that she was probably under the influence of them when she crashed. Fagan would later say in a deposition that two of Karen's coworkers had told him she'd been, quote, exhausted, unable to sleep, very fatigued.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
But Fagan's account didn't square with another important eyewitness. As you heard earlier in the series, Karen's co-worker and friend Gene Young had also been at the union meeting that night. As far as we know, she was the last person to see Karen alive.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Media reports after Karen's death also challenged the idea that her medication would have put her to sleep.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
She has long flowing dark hair and was wearing brown knee-high leather boots. She's retired and lives in this split-level home with her husband and two rescue dogs. It's a beautiful spot surrounded by mountains with lush greenery all around.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
In congressional testimony, the FBI's lead agent on the case said his agency was satisfied with the thoroughness of its investigation. But a congressional attorney criticized the FBI's handling of their investigation, saying it was, quote, in essence, a character assassination of Silkwood, unquote.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And that the agency was blatantly taking the word of Kerr-McGee and government officials instead of doing their own independent work.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Pipkin was convinced that Karen Silkwood hadn't been asleep at the wheel, but not much happened with his findings. And his daughter said he never forgot this case. And remember, this was a guy who'd investigated thousands of car wrecks. There was something about this investigation that got under his skin.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Karen led us through a door and into her garage. Oh my, that's it right there? Yeah.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Here's some of what we've been able to put together about Joe's investigation into the Silkwood case. In the fall of 1977, we know that Joe was hired by lawyers who were working on the Silkwood civil trial that you heard about in the last episode. As far as we can tell, he had a specific task to investigate whether Karen had been surveilled before she died.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So Joe wanted to get to the bottom of who might have been listening in on Karen. If Joe could find evidence that Kerr-McGee had been involved in the alleged surveilling of Karen before she died, then the Silkwood lawyers would try to use it in court. If someone had been following Karen, could they have been involved in her death?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So, just like Karen had done at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant, Joe started snooping around, looking for proof. And he secretly recorded his conversations on these little cassette tapes.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Right here, Bobby. What'd you find? Silkwood investigation tapes.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Okay. And just like that, we were holding the bumper from Karen Silkwood's 1973 Honda, the car she was driving the night she died on that Oklahoma highway 50 years ago. I had this vision that it was going to be in some hermetically sealed glass case. You know, here was this key artifact of the Silkwood story.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
We don't know why, but most of Joe's investigation focused on one subject. A group of people who were more often doing the investigating rather than being investigated. The Oklahoma City Police Department. Joe spent most of his time looking at whether the OKCPD had been involved in surveilling Karen. We know that the head of security at the Kermagee plant where Karen worked had ties to the police.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
In the 1960s, Jim Reading worked as a detective for the Oklahoma City Police Department and led the department's intelligence unit. When Kerr-McGee did its own investigation into Karen's death, reading led the charge.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Illegal because in the 1970s, some states had laws on the books that allowed local and state law enforcement to do wiretaps. But Oklahoma wasn't one of them. In Oklahoma, that kind of surveillance was forbidden. The only people who could do it legally were federal agents who had a court order.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Around the same time of his investigation, the local paper reported that the OKCPD had, quote, sophisticated electronic hardware and that they were capable of doing illegal electronic surveillance. But a PD spokesman denied using illegal wiretaps. They said most of their equipment was boxed up in storage.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Well, don't worry about that. Joe's source said that when she was with the police department, her bosses asked her to type up records of recorded phone calls. Joe was trying to get to the bottom of whether those calls were illegal wiretaps.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And there it was, more than 500 miles from the crash site, gathering dust in a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Wow. My God.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Because Joe thought he'd finally gotten someone to talk about how the OKCPD not only had the tools to do wiretaps, but also that they might have used those tools. There could have been other explanations for these calls. Maybe they were conversations involving police informants. But Joe clearly thought he'd caught them doing something they weren't supposed to do.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The puzzle pieces were coming together, but Joe never finished his investigation.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The reason Karen Pipkin Guerrero has this bumper is because her dad was an accident investigator. And Karen Silkwood's union, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, hired him to look into what caused the fatal crash.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Oklahoma City Police replied with a no comment when ABC News reached out about allegations of surveillance of Karen Silkwood.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
But what Joe was sniffing around, more than a decade later, someone else would pick up the scent.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Breathe in. This is safe. We take you back to a core trauma.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Now, Larry was honest. He said he didn't really like this person. Then out of nowhere, the guy says this higher-up was involved in the death of Karen Silkwood, and that some other Oklahoma City police officers were involved too. Larry, he was stunned.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
But this was just unbelievable, almost. So unbelievable that Larry decided to start making secret tape recordings so he could document what he was hearing.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And this bumper? He thought it was important enough that he held on to it for the rest of his life. And just before he died in 2011, he asked his daughter Karen to hang on to it too.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
In reference to the Silkwood murder. Larry didn't mince words. That's how he made sense of what he was hearing. Again, to recap, this source Larry had become acquainted with told him that back in 1974, some Oklahoma City police officers allegedly had side jobs working security for Kerr-McGee.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Like a lot of other people who've investigated Karen's death, Larry started seeing smoke. But where was the fire exactly?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Larry and Joe, they were investigating different things. Joe was trying to find evidence of any police surveillance.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
But Larry had a big leg up on Joe because he worked inside law enforcement.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
A couple of months ago, Bobby and I set out on an epic road trip from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Eight hours through a lot of flat, dry land. For most of the way, there wasn't much to see except giant windmill farms, a few antelope and some rest stops. OK, well, we got about three hours more to Albuquerque. What do you think we're going to find there?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Common knowledge? Well, if that was the case, Larry had never heard about it before.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Larry's source warned him about the danger of looking into the Silkwood case, so he took some precautions.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Despite the possible danger he was being warned about, Larry pressed ahead.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He went to that dinner meeting and got more details, including the names of some of the officers who were allegedly involved.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So Larry was eventually connected with an FBI agent, and they talked on the phone. Afterward, Larry recorded his thoughts.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
I mean, was there any other case where he asked you to guard these papers or keep that item?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
But still, Larry was skeptical, even suspicious that the higher-up in law enforcement, one of the targets of the investigation, might know someone in the FBI and have figured out what Larry was up to.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The OSBI agent was so interested, he called one of the sources who'd originally told Larry about these allegations, and he set up a meeting so he could interview that person. The agent said he'd keep Larry informed. So Larry waited. and waited. And nothing ever happened.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
When we reached out to the OSBI to ask about their meeting with Larry and what they did with the information he gave them, we didn't get an answer.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
It's been more than 30 years since Larry Dellinger struck out, trying to find if there was any truth to the chatter that off-duty Oklahoma City police officers were allegedly involved in the death of Karen Silkwood. It still bothers him.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
We put this theory to Steve Watka, Karen's union confidant. Remember, Steve has spent his retirement doing his own investigation into Karen's death. And this idea that Kerr-McGee was somehow responsible for her death? Steve has long been skeptical. It just doesn't make sense to him.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He said that if Kerr-McGee had figured out what Karen was up to, carrying those company documents out of the plant, they could have just fired her. After all, she'd stolen company property.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Steve is part of a small army of people who've tried to investigate this case. Law enforcement, the accident investigator A.O. Pipkin, the private investigator Joe Royer. the state trooper Larry Dellinger, Karen's son Michael Meadows. They've each carved off their own piece of this mystery and given us something to build on.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
As we mentioned at the start of this episode, we've asked an accident investigator to review the case file we've gathered on Karen's accident, the new photos we took of the bumper in New Mexico, law enforcement reports, and A.O. Pipkin's original investigation materials, his photos, diagrams, and measurements of the crash site.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
After weeks of waiting and wondering, praying, hoping that he'd be able to make the deadline for our final episode, we finally got the call that he was ready to talk.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Karen's wondering, and we're wondering, if there's something more that Pipkin's investigation files could tell us. So we've made a plan to have the bumper re-examined by an accident reconstruction expert. And then we'll share whatever new information we find with the Silkwood family.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery, is a production of ABC Audio in collaboration with Standing Bear Entertainment. I'm Mike Boettcher. My co-host Bob Sands and I served as consulting producers on this podcast along with Brent Donis. Thanks to the ABC News investigative unit and investigative producer Jenny Wagnon-Kortz.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin, reporter-producer Sasha Peznik, and associate producer Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced by senior producer Nancy Rosenbaum and Vika Aronson. Tracy Samuelson is our story editor, associate producer and fact-checker Audrey Mostek. We had production help from Meg Fierro, story consultant Chris Donovan,
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Supervising Producer, Sasha Aslanian. Original music by Soundboard. Mixing by Rick Kwan. Ariel Chester is our social media producer. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Katie Dendoss, Cindy Galley, and the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism. Josh Kohan is ABC Audio's Director of Podcast Programming. Laura Mayer is our Executive Producer.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery. Episode 4, The Investigators. I'm Mike Boettcher. And I'm Bob Sands. So let's start at the beginning. The night Karen died, Oklahoma State Highway Patrol Trooper Rick Fagan got a call from his dispatcher about a car wreck on a two-lane state highway, possibly a fatal one.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Fagan drove directly to the crash site and by the time he arrived around 8 15 there were several bystanders. Two men and a 14 year old boy had been driving by when they noticed a car tilted on its side in the muddy ditch. They stopped, tried to shine headlights at the scene and called out. No one answered. They approached the car and could see a hand visible out the driver door.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
All three reported papers were strewn around the accident scene. All three said they watched as the patrolman gathered them up and placed them back in the car.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
All in all, he stayed at the crash site for about an hour.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And then, sometime after midnight, Trooper Fagan got a phone call from the local police department over in Crescent saying the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to inspect Karen's car for radioactivity.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The third was a Kerr-McGee representative. Fagan said the men spent about 20 minutes going through Karen's car, including her papers. They waved around a Geiger counter to check if anything was hot or contaminated. Steve thinks this would have given the Kerr-McGee employee the chance to look at every single piece of paper.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The next morning, Fagan returned to the crash site and checked the road for skid marks. He found no marks, and it suggested to him she had fallen asleep.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Steve became even more suspicious when he retrieved the box of Karen's things that had been recovered from her car. Remember, he'd been waiting for Karen to show up that night to meet the New York Times reporter. She was supposed to deliver the evidence she'd been collecting. Evidence that would support her allegations that Kerr-McGee was falsifying quality control reports.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Steve was eager to see if the papers he was looking for were among the belongings recovered from her car.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The way Trooper Fagan described the documents was strange, too. Remember, three witnesses described seeing documents scattered around the crash site and how a patrolman gathered them up and put them in the car. Trooper Fagan later told an FBI agent that the night of the crash, he saw a thin red spiral notebook in the back of Karen's crushed car, along with two stacks of paper in the back seat.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And that description of two stacks of paper sounded off to Steve Watka.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Yeah, I was tempted to say, meet you there. But eight hours in a car? That's nothing when you think about the thousands of hours we put into investigating Karen Silkwood's story.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The union wanted A.O. Pipkin to see if the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol's version of events held up. So when A.O. Pipkin arrived in Oklahoma on November 16, 1974, he started assembling his puzzle pieces one by one. He inspected every inch of Karen's car. He walked the accident scene and measured Karen's tire marks on the grass. He read Fagan's accident report. He took photographs.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He drew diagrams. and he hired outside experts to review his work.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
One, Karen's car had crossed the center line and veered off the left side of the road. Pipkin wrote in his report that typically, when a driver falls asleep at the wheel, they drift to the right, not to the left. That's because the road has a little peak or crown at the center. It slants so the rain will run off.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So that was his first takeaway, the way the car had gone from the right to the left-hand side of the road. That didn't mesh with the highway patrol's sleepy driver theory.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
And while he said he didn't do an exhaustive search, Steve could not find a car with a bumper that was low enough to do the job.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Steve goes back to this idea that law enforcement had that maybe the dent was caused by the tow truck driver who pulled it out of the culvert that night. Pipkin and the FBI tested it for cement residue and didn't find any. But Steve is skeptical.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Where Pipkin thought there was circumstantial evidence to suggest a second car, Steve doesn't see it. Again, he can't definitely rule it out. But as he spoke, I felt the phantom vehicle get even more shadowy.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
And then Karen Silkwood's sister, Rosemary, spoke up. But her question wasn't for Steve. It was for A.O. Pipkin's daughter.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
And it's the culmination of weeks worth of effort, that drive to Albuquerque to photograph the dent in the bumper, collecting every scrap of original evidence we could find from all the different accident reports from Troopers Fagan and Owen, A.O. Pipkin, and the FBI.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Steve acknowledged the heaviness in the room. For the last two hours, he was explaining Karen Silkwood's fatal car crash in technical terms, the way he might typically do in a courtroom. Now he was speaking to family members who knew the driver of this car, loved her, family members who for years had been grasping for some kind of resolution that kept evading them.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Steve has told us that's why he does this work. The science can help families know more about what happened and maybe give them some sense of peace. He wasn't able to answer all the questions we had going into this, but he did answer one big one, and Karen's sister Rosemary was grateful for that.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
We took all the photographs, diagrams, hand-drawn sketches, witness interviews, and report narratives and uploaded them to Steve's team in Dallas to see if new tools and technology could tell us something that wasn't possible to know in Karen's day.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
That with 50 years of technological advances since Karen died, Steve could now tell us, without a doubt, what happened in the moments leading up to the crash.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
We wanted that closure for them, for everyone.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
But Steve's presentation brought up some feelings for Christy. She wanted to remind us about some of the fundamental questions in this story that continue to matter, and how our attempts to try and get definitive answers about Karen's fatal car crash might actually not be the way forward as we think about where we want to go next in our own investigation.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
We ask her to record part of the message she sent us.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
She wanted safe working conditions, and she tried to do something about that.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Well, in the end, the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant did shut down. It wasn't long after Karen died, actually. The company couldn't reach a deal for a new contract to keep manufacturing its fuel rods. So on November 13, 1975, on the first anniversary of Karen's death, Kerr-McGee announced it was closing the plant. And by the end of that year, most of the workers were laid off.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Karen probably wouldn't have wanted her friends and co-workers to lose their jobs. But I've come to see the closure of the Kermagee plant as some kind of vindication for her. That in the end, maybe she got what she wanted, even if it wouldn't have been how she wanted it. She wanted a safe plant, and she wanted the rest of us to know about the hazards that alarmed her.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Well, consider that a mission accomplished.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
I think it's fair to say Karen's story, the publicity around her contamination, death, and the civil trial were all part of that. There was also the partial meltdown of a big nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island, in 1979. It was a huge story that really frightened a lot of people.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Altogether, the late 70s was a time when the risks and potential health issues of nuclear power started to feel real to the American public, visible, tangible in ways they hadn't before.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Karen's friends and family told us she wasn't necessarily anti-nuke, or at least she didn't start out that way. I think of her more as an underdog fighting for other underdogs. That's the way I'll always remember her.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Yeah, there's a bunch of us. There's a bunch of us. Steve Irwin peers into a Zoom screen. A couple rows of faces stare back at him. It's not his usual audience.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Steve Irwin feels the weight of this moment.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
We're both in our 70s, but we're going to keep chasing any leads that need to be chased. I guess we don't know any other way. So if you know something about Karen Silkwood, her work as a whistleblower at Kerr-McGee, her contamination, her death, whatever it might be, Get in touch with us. We've set up a phone line where you can leave a message. The number is 347-901-9102.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
That number again, 347-901-9102. That's all for now. Thanks for listening.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
We invited Karen to be on the Zoom, too, given how she had held on to the Silkwood bumper, waiting for the moment it might be needed. She and Steve hadn't met before. Hi, Karen.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Steve stands by a big screen where he can display his simulations or magnify the smallest scratch in photos.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Steve's team created an animation showing how the car could have smashed into the cement wall and came to rest on its side in the red mud.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
So we have a pretty good sense of the moment of impact. Now Steve and his team must work their way backwards to think what set of forces acted on the car to get it to this crumpled state. And here's where the evidence gets thinner.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Remember, the highway patrol thought that Karen had been unconscious, possibly under the influence of a sedative and asleep at the wheel. And that's the reason for the crash. Lieutenant Larry Owen said that there was no evidence of braking or trying to steer after the car left the road. What did Steve find?
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
He pulls up a photo Pipkin took a couple of days after Karen's crash of tire marks in the grass next to the highway. The highway patrol and Pipkin measured marks once Karen drove off the road that ran 255 feet. Imagine, 85 yards on a football field. But it's hard to see much detail in Pipkin's photos.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Trooper Rick Fagan, one of the first officers on the scene, reported that just before impact, the tire tracks appeared to turn right.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
So there was a final steer to the right, an action.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
It wasn't passive coasting. And here's where we want to remind you that Karen was a skilled driver. She'd gotten into car racing with her boyfriend, Drew, and she raced that little Honda, even won a trophy that we saw at her sister Rosemary's house.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
But today, he's presenting to members of the Silkwood family. They've gathered to hear what he has to say about the fatal crash that killed Karen Silkwood 50 years ago. Maybe Steve Irwin will finally have some of the answers they've been waiting for.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
The evidence Steve finds of braking and steering are important. Remember, the highway patrol thought that Karen was asleep at the wheel. Steve comes to a different conclusion.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Now, could Karen have fallen asleep and been woken up by going off the road? It's possible, Steve says.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
So, what made Karen drive off the road in the first place?
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
The murkiest part of this crash has always been what happened to Karen while she was on the road to make her lose control.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
In another, she goes off the road to the left and can't get back on the road.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
He pulls up A.O. Pipkin's original photograph, showing the damage to the rear of Karen's car. Two dents, one is on the fender, just behind the left rear tire. The other is on the bumper. But first, there's something else in the photo that catches Steve's eye.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Seven miles into her trip, exhausted, stressed out from her multiple contaminations and scrub downs, maybe clouded by her prescription sedative, Did she fall asleep at the wheel, as law enforcement has always said?
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Then Steve shows us a simulation of what it would have looked like if a second car comes up behind Karen, taps her from behind, and keeps going.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Then there needs to be some kind of force that's powerful enough to make Karen's car go over to the left-hand side of the road. That force could have been her steering. Maybe she's scared and reacting to what's happening. Or maybe she hit the brakes. But when it comes to a phantom vehicle, dinging Karen's bumper and fender and forcing her to go left... Here's the question Steve asks.