Karen Pipkin Guerrero
Appearances
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
I just want to believe my father was accurate because this was just such a big story for him and he believed it till the day he died. So, you know, I'm a little disappointed that that Steve didn't really find anything conclusive.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Yeah, I kind of thought that bumper would have some answers in it, and it sounds like maybe not if it's not another car. So I'm a little disappointed in that.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Thank you, Steve, for reexamining everything. Hopefully we can get something more concrete in the future.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
I've heard a lot about you through the years. I'm glad you worked with him.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
At the end of this road trip, there was a crucial piece of evidence we wanted to see. Evidence that had been passed down in a family from one generation to the next. Our journey to uncover that piece of evidence had finally brought us here.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The third thing that caught Pipkin's eye was damage to the left rear of Karen's car. Two dents, one on the bumper and one just below on the fender.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Fagan believed the dents could have been caused after the crash when the car was dragged out of the ditch by a tow truck driver. The bumper could have hit one of the concrete retaining walls.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And he thought other evidence suggested the presence of another car, too. When he examined the tire tracks Karen's car left in the muddy grass, he thought they suggested Karen had lost control of the car before it ever left the road. The car was rotating instead of tracking in a straight line.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And Pipkin wrote in his report that suggested, quote, either an impact by an unknown vehicle or a combination of an impact by an unknown vehicle and then driver overreaction and subsequent loss of control.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Now, Oklahoma law enforcement and Kerr-McGee were the ones being looked at under a microscope. A higher-up in the Highway Patrol was assigned to reinvestigate the crash, a guy named Lieutenant Larry Owen. He doubled down on the conclusion that this was a one-car accident. And in January 1975, about two months after Karen's death, he also added a new detail.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Karen had been under the influence of drugs that night. Here's Owen in an interview with ABC.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And these co-workers both allegedly told Fagan they'd offered to drive her home that night.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
In a 1980 interview for a documentary about the nuclear industry, Jean Young described her recollection of Karen as they were leaving the union meeting.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
A toxicologist we spoke with said we can't draw any conclusions about what the levels found in her body might have meant. There are too many unknowns, like whether Karen had developed a tolerance for the medication. Reporters also question other elements of the Highway Patrol's investigation. Here's NPR's Barbara Newman talking to Lieutenant Larry Owen about why he hadn't inspected Karen's car.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
We reached out to the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol about their investigation, but they didn't have any comment. But I was able to get Larry Owen on the phone. He's retired now, but stands by his conclusion that Karen Silkwood fell asleep at the wheel. He said that nothing had changed in 50 years. Last month, he spoke about his investigation with KOCO, a local television station in Oklahoma.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He said that Karen's car covered almost a football field before she crashed.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The FBI did its own investigation into Karen's death, and in the spring of 1975, they told the New York Times that Karen's death, quote, didn't appear to be a murder. No foul play, they said. Case closed.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
It wasn't only Silkwood's reputation that got attacked. Pipkin's credentials were questioned, too. And once Pipkin's name came out in the papers as being part of this investigation, his daughter, Karen Pipkin Guerrero, says he started getting menacing phone calls.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
I first talked to Karen Pipkin Guerrero on the phone about a year ago when I heard that she might have this piece of evidence. It took some convincing, but she agreed to let us come see it. Go ahead. You go first.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He just got threats that were, like, scary. Like, you know, death threats type things. Who they came from, I don't know. I have no idea. but my dad wasn't afraid.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He was 100% positive that Karen Silkwood did not die from falling asleep at the wheel. And he believed that till the day he died.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Other people thought there was more to the story too, and new investigators started digging.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
There's another person in this story we want you to meet, someone else who held on to things he'd collected in the Silkwood case until the day he died.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Joe Royer was a private investigator based here in Oklahoma City. Joe and I actually used to work together at a radio station here in town. He did sales and our nickname for him was Snake Oil Salesman. That's because he was always so well groomed. Joe had this full head of thick dark hair that he liked to slick back. He just looked like a million bucks every time he walked into a room.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
I never knew that Joe had been a PI back in the day. I actually used to be a PI myself. I dug around on Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu. So you'd think us both being PIs is something we would have talked about. But Joe kept that part of his past completely private, at least from me. And that included his work on the Karen Silkwood case. I only found out about that years later, after he died.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He was even tight-lipped with his wife, Jenny, and they were married for 45 years.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
I feel like it should have gloves on to touch it. What we were looking for was perched on top of a refrigerator underneath some fishing rods next to a jug of windshield wiper fluid. Can I take it down?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Where did this idea come from? A journalist who reportedly had a special relationship with the FBI told a congressional attorney that she had transcripts of what appeared to be phone taps and bugs of Karen's telephone calls, though she never produced those documents. And we know from interviewing Karen's co-worker and friend, Don Gummo, that Karen had been afraid someone had been following her.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Remember, a few weeks before she died, she went to see Don late at night, and she told him she was rattled because a car had been tailing her.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Those were the tapes we found in a storage warehouse in Oklahoma City just over a year ago. Joe's wife, Jenny, gave us access.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Holy mackerel. Here's a bunch. This is priceless. As we listened to the tapes, we discovered that Joe's investigation was rather narrow.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
When Joe started asking if the OKCPD had been surveilling Karen before her death, the department said, absolutely not.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Joe talked to I.G. Purser. He'd been the chief of police for Oklahoma City back in 1974, the year Karen died.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
But Joe wasn't the only one wondering if the OKCPD was crossing a line.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
We listened to Joe as he tried to get information out of Oklahoma City police officers.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
If I can bother you for five minutes... Joe had found a source who, in 1970, had worked as a secretary for the Oklahoma City Police Department's Intelligence Unit. She'd left by the time Karen died and were not naming her because she told Joe she did not want her name attached to his investigation. She'd agreed to talk to Joe. But she was reluctant.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Joe's source has just told him that in the early 1970s, when she worked for the police department's intelligence unit, that police officers had recorded telephone conversations between two people where one person was not a cop.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
As he was sniffing around the police in the spring of 1978, he started to suspect that someone was sniffing around him and his family too. His wife Jenny was out shopping for clothes for her kids and noticed she was being followed by a couple of men with suits, hats and ties. She told Joe about it.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
And there was another time when she and Joe heard some loud noises outside their home late one night as they were getting ready to go to bed.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
We don't know if Joe Royer ever reported these threats, but he was evidently rattled enough that a couple of months later, Joe packed up his family and moved them to Florida. He was adamant that no one should know their whereabouts. For over a year, they kept it a secret.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
As far as we can tell, Joe never found the hard evidence he was looking for, that the Oklahoma City Police had Karen Silkwood under surveillance.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
For Joe, there was no smoking gun, and none of what he gathered ever ended up in court. The judge limited the case to Karen's contamination.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
All righty, this is Tuesday morning, the 15th of November, and replacing a call to Larry Dellinger. Important call.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
His name was A.O. Pipkin. He ran an accident reconstruction business out of Dallas, Texas. Pipkin was a big guy who wore bright orange jumpsuits no matter the occasion, even when he was eating in a five-star restaurant. A reporter once described him as looking a little like an orange balloon.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Hello? Mr. Dellinger? Yes. Yes, sir. I don't believe we've ever met. My name is Bob Sands. Well, have you got just a minute to chat? Yeah, I suppose so. Okay. In the early 1990s, this guy named Larry Dellinger worked as a trooper for the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol. I explained that we had a friend in common. And this friend... Gave me a tape recording years ago and swore me to secrecy.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Yeah, I kind of figured you'd figure this out pretty quick. Back in 1992, Larry stumbled into some information about Karen Silkwood's death that troubled him. So he started taping himself, making a record of what he was doing, just in case.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Larry gave the tape to a friend for safekeeping. A year later, it was passed to me with instructions that I wasn't supposed to do anything with it until certain people named in the tape were dead. Those people are gone now. Because of the seriousness of what's being alleged on this tape, we're not going to share their names here.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
One day in September of 92, Larry was down at the county courthouse here in Oklahoma City when a man struck up a conversation with him in the elevator. Now Larry, he didn't know this guy from a hole in the wall, but they got to chit-chatting, made a friendly connection. Then a week or two later, Larry ran into this same guy again.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
This time he asked what Larry thought about one of the higher-ups in Oklahoma law enforcement, someone they both knew.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
As part of his job, Larry kept something called a daybook. It's where he took field notes on things like arrests and accidents. To this day, Larry has held on to all of his daybooks, along with copies of his accident reports. When we interviewed him in 2024, we asked him to read from the daybook he was keeping in the fall of 1992. I see on...
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Larry took these allegations seriously. If they were true, then this was a crime, a big one, possibly a murder case.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So Larry started to sniff around the Oklahoma City Police Department. He was circling some of the same territory that private investigator Joe Royer had been circling around in the late 1970s.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Larry was looking into whether Karen may have been murdered.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So what did he think was going to happen to this when he asked me to bring it home with me? That's my thing is, did he think something was going to come up and it might be important?
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So Larry arranged to meet with his source to get more information, and the source said he knew someone who had even more details about what had happened to Karen. So Larry kept recording.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
In the days and weeks that followed, Larry took this information up the chain to his supervisor and then to a district attorney.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Larry's investigation went cold. He didn't hear anything back from the FBI until the following year, 1993. That's when he made his last recording. The FBI agent said he'd turned over the information Larry had shared to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, or OSBI. In April 1993, Larry met in person with an OSBI agent.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Never, never. The only time he ever asked me to hold on to anything was that Silkwood bumper when he was close to passing. And he said, you've got to promise me you will take it. And I don't break promises to anyone, but much less my dad, no. And of all the cases that he did, this was the most important one to him. There was a reason it was important to him.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
I tracked down that other source Larry met with, the one he had dinner with back in 1992. The one who gave him more details about what might have happened to Karen and who alleged that OKCPD was involved. Well, that person didn't want to do a recorded interview with me, but he did talk to me. He said the people who'd originally told him this story didn't have solid evidence.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
It was nothing more than whiskey talk, not admissible in court. He didn't put a lot of stock in it. And that's what this source told the OSPI agent, who did show up to interview him, by the way. But once this source said whiskey talk, the OSPI agent reportedly closed his notebook. Once again, case closed.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
The FBI said it didn't wish to comment on the questions we sent them, but a spokesperson for the Oklahoma City Police Department did get back to us. He said that the OKCPD didn't investigate Karen's death, and so, quote, it would be inappropriate for us to comment on a case we had nothing to do with.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
In response to a question about whether police officers were allowed to take security jobs when they were off duty, he said there was no way to know what the policies were on outside employment back then or who was working extra jobs at that time.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
That makes sense to us. But again, it's just a theory. A theory informed by countless hours reading, researching, and thinking about what happened to Karen Silkwood on November 13, 1974. But still, just a theory.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
What was it that just... Well, something bothered him about it.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
I guess we can add our own names to that list now, too. Our investigation is wrapping up, but we have one thing left to do, and it's a big thing.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
So, we gathered Karen's children and sisters and A.O. Pipkin's daughter to hear the accident investigator's presentation. And what he told us? It wasn't what we were expecting. That's next time.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
We're hoping that a fresh look at all of the evidence, the photographs, diagrams, the original accident reports, and now the bumper, might turn up new information. Maybe even get us one step closer to understanding how Karen actually died that night.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
He was so into this case and getting it reconstructed. So maybe this will help prove my dad was right. With the new technology, technology is so advanced today than it was in the 70s. You know, and I want to know that. I want to know that.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Fagan was a baby-faced newbie. He'd been a trooper for just five months and Karen's death was reportedly one of the first fatal car crashes he'd ever investigated.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Fagan got down into the ditch. He and a couple of other people tipped the car back on its wheels and pried the driver's side door open so they could pull Karen's body out. Here's how Fagan described the scene to ABC News in 1975.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Then he drove home. By the time Steve Wodka, Karen's friend and union contact, arrived at the crash site around 11 p.m., everyone was gone. The car had been towed, and all that was left was Karen's Kermagee paycheck in the mud. Eventually, Steve went back to his hotel.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Steve wasn't there, but here's what he's pieced together about that late-night inspection.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
As Steve sees it, if someone from Kerr-McGee had discovered documents that were damaging to the company, then this would have given them the opportunity to disappear those documents. Poof. Gone.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
That same morning, Steve Watko went to see Fagan. Steve says he initially had no reason to doubt Fagan or his investigation, but that feeling didn't last very long.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Steve was suspicious. How could Fagan have reached this conclusion so quickly, less than 24 hours after she died? Why wasn't this being investigated more thoroughly? Steve tried explaining to Fagan that there was more to the story. Karen was on her way to a really important meeting. This idea that she'd fallen asleep, it didn't make any sense to Steve.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Another thing that didn't quite make sense? The red spiral notebook that both Fagan and Karen's co-worker Gene Young said they'd seen the night Karen died. The only papers in the box of things from Karen's car were notes from a union bargaining session. And there was something about the look of those papers that didn't add up.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Steve smelled a rat, and so he told his bosses that the union needed to hire its own investigator to look into the crash. That's where A.O. Pipkin enters the story. He'd analyzed thousands of crashes, including the one that killed Hollywood starlet and model Jane Mansfield. That was in 1967.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
When he put all the puzzle pieces together, there were a few things that really stood out to him.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
Second, Pipkin examined the tire tracks in the muddy grass and noted the direction the car appeared to follow once it left the road. He thought if Karen had been asleep, her car would have drifted down a grassy slope, away from the road, and eventually stopped. She never would have smashed into a concrete wall.
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'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators
But the path the car actually took, staying relatively parallel to the highway, suggested to Pipkin that Karen was likely trying to steer the car back onto the road. Here's Steve Watka again.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
I just want to believe my father was accurate because this was just such a big story for him and he believed it till the day he died. So, you know, I'm a little disappointed that that Steve didn't really find anything conclusive.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Yeah, I kind of thought that bumper would have some answers in it, and it sounds like maybe not if it's not another car. So I'm a little disappointed in that.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
Thank you, Steve, for reexamining everything. Hopefully we can get something more concrete in the future.
Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
I've heard a lot about you through the years. I'm glad you worked with him.