Mike Boettcher

We pulled out box after box, each one sealed with layers of thick packing tape.

She took the job at the nuclear plant because she needed a job, and the company was one of the biggest employers in the area. But also, Karen loved science.

And that was a guy? Yeah.

Rosemary and Linda treated us to cookies and coffee, and we reminisced about their big sister. Karen was six years older than Rosemary and 13 years older than Linda. And boy, did Karen take to that role of big sister.

How old were you?

And later in life, Karen raced cars and was pretty good at it, too, in her white Honda Civic.

Karen got a scholarship for college but dropped out, against her parents' wishes, to marry Bill Meadows, an oil pipeline worker and motorcycle lover that she'd met a year earlier.

But the two teenagers were headstrong and determined. It became a common law marriage.

The very last box in the very back corner.

Christy was the couple's first child. Two years after Christy, they had Michael. Then a year later, another daughter, Dawn. By the time Karen was 24, she had three babies to take care of. Like lots of people in oil country, the couple moved around a lot in those first few years, but landed in Duncan, Oklahoma.

Karen's sisters also remember highs and lows.

We reached out to Bill Meadows through his daughter Dawn, who is his caretaker. He didn't dispute going to get Karen when she left, and he said he did bring his father with him the second time.

After that, Karen decided she had to leave, and she decided to leave the kids with Bill.

In August 1972, Karen moved out. She gave Bill an uncontested divorce. Her children were five, three, and almost two years old.

Michael says he doesn't hold his mother's leaving against her. He only saw her a few times in the 18 months after the divorce and before she died, but he feels like she fought for him and his sisters. For him, what's hard has been missing the chance to know his mom for himself, not someone else's version of her.

Holy mackerel. This is what we'd been looking for, hoping for. Cassette tapes recorded in the 1970s. Interviews a private investigator had made looking into a mysterious death.

So we're returning to the people who have the best chance of knowing. The ones still alive who still hold part of Karen Silkwood's story.

Just like Karen's son, Michael, Steve Watka has been gathering pieces of the Silkwood Puzzle, too.

Steve met Karen in the early 1970s. He was a young staffer working for the labor union that represented Karen and other workers at the plant, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, or the OCAW. Back then, his hair was black and wavy, and he had a thick, walrus-style mustache.

Steve held on to these recordings for 50 years. And at this point, he's replayed the calls so many times, he basically has it memorized.

Karen actually only knew Steve for seven weeks, the last seven weeks of her life. She was in Oklahoma, he was in D.C., working at the OCAW's office there. But they got to know each other pretty well.

Then Karen and a coworker raised some even bigger concerns about wrongdoing at the plant. That important quality control reports were being falsified. Concerns, that if true, meant the health and safety of a lot more people was at risk, well beyond people who worked at the plant.

Or at least that's the official story. We've never believed it. Not for one second. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood Mystery. Episode 1, The Tapes.

David Burnham passed away in October of 2024, just a few months after this interview. In the late 60s, early 70s, Burnham uncovered police corruption in the NYPD and then reported on Congress and federal agencies, like the one overseeing Karen's job as an atomic worker.

Karen was set to meet Steve and Burnham on November 13, 1974, at 8 o'clock in the evening at the Northwest Holiday Inn in Oklahoma City. The plan was she'd turn over the evidence to Burnham, documents she'd been secretly collecting, and he'd expose Kerr-McGee to the whole country. When Steve asked Karen if she was reluctant or hesitant in any way, she was clear. She said, I'll be ready.

Instead, here's what we know from that night.

This is from a 1980 interview for a documentary about Karen. Jean told the filmmakers that she talked with Karen right before she left the Hub Cafe.

Jean also gave a sworn affidavit about that night, about how Karen had a manila folder with her, about an inch thick, full of papers. She said some of them were typewritten pages, others were heavier, like photographs.

She headed south toward Oklahoma City on State Highway 74, It was a road Karen knew well. She traveled it nearly every day to get to and from work, a narrow two-lane roadway with steep shoulders and prairie on either side. On that night, Highway 74 was dark and empty.

Her car drove into a ditch and smashed head-on into the concrete retaining wall of a culvert, basically a big, wide drainage channel running under the road.

In pictures, the front end of the car looks like a crushed tin can.

The highway patrol was notified of the accident at about 8 p.m., and when the trooper arrived at around 8.15, he noted that Karen's legs were broken. She had dried blood on her face, and she appeared to be dead. At around 8.30, an ambulance arrived at the scene. They transferred Karen to Logan County Hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival around 9 p.m. She was 28 years old.

And waiting. And we got more and more worried about that. Karen should have showed up by 8 o'clock. By 9, Steve decided to check on her.

Then there was action.

He found Karen's paycheck, her Kermagee paycheck, in the mud.

The car, gone. And crucially, those documents, the ones she was supposed to deliver to Steve and Burnham, gone.

Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery, is a production of ABC Audio in collaboration with Standing Bear Entertainment. I'm Mike Boettcher. My co-hosts Bob Sands and I served as consulting producers on this podcast, along with Brent Donis. Thanks to the ABC News investigative unit and investigator producer Jenny Wagnon-Kortz, chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin,

Reporter-Producer, Sasha Pezenik. And Associate Producer, Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced by Vika Aronson. Nancy Rosenbaum was our Senior Producer. Tracy Samuelson was our Story Editor. Associate Producer and Fact Checker, Audrey Mostick. Story Consultant, Chris Donovan. Supervising Producer, Sasha Azlanian. Original music by Soundboard. Mixing by Rick Kwan.

By 1974, Bobby and I were working in the same newsroom, KTOK Commercial Radio in Oklahoma City. We wrote news copy on typewriters, and stories came in from across the country on the AP wire machine. When breaking news hit, the alarm on the teletype machine would go off.

Arielle Chester was our social media producer. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Katie Dindas, 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.

Karen Silkwood was a lab analyst at a nuclear fuel production plant. It made the plutonium fuel rods to power a new kind of nuclear reactor, part of a multi-million dollar experiment to supercharge nuclear energy. And when she began to notice unsafe working conditions, leaks, spills, co-workers getting contaminated with radioactive material over and over again, she spoke up.

Tried to change things, make them better.

Karen became nuclear energy's first whistleblower, though the term whistleblower was just starting to be used. This was at a time when the idea of someone inside of a big corporation exposing alleged misdeeds was shocking.

We would have loved to investigate Karen's death, but Bobby and I were too young and too green then to dive headfirst into such a complex story. There was mystery and controversy swirling all around it.

There was an investigation by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, an FBI investigation, a civil lawsuit, several appeals, a congressional hearing, and two appearances before the Supreme Court of the United States. Did I miss anything, Bobby?

In the real-life version of Silkwood, Karen became an icon for the labor movement. the women's movement, and the nascent anti-nukes movement, with vigils for Karen years after her death.

Investigations into grisly murders, storm chasing through Tornado Alley.

Oklahoma Citians consider themselves halfway from anywhere. This morning, they were right in the middle of hell.

Because it didn't feel like any of the many investigations in the 70s and 80s had gotten it right. None of them were able to, once and for all, disprove the Highway Patrol's official narrative of a single car crash.

We just can't seem to shake the idea that justice hasn't come for Karen yet. But maybe it will.

Plus, even 50 years later, some people are still reluctant to talk about what happened.

But we've got some new leads, like something Bobby's been holding onto for decades.

And we found people brave enough to talk. People who can shed light on who Karen was and what she was learning about the place where she worked.

It felt like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. You know, the one where the government stores the lost Ark in a massive warehouse filled with crates where it'll never be found.

So 9-0-8. And this is where your mother, Karen Silkwood, lived. Wow. You've been here before? Not since I was four years old. Michael Meadows was just five years old when his mother, Karen Silkwood, died. We met outside the apartment where Karen spent her final months.

It's a plain red brick one-story building broken up into a few apartments, each with a front door opening onto a small shared lawn. So what do you, do you remember anything about when you came here when you were a kid?

Instead of memories of his mom, Michael's got black and white photos, newspaper clippings, police reports. If he tries to picture his mom or imagine what she was like... The image in his head is actually Meryl Streep's portrayal of Karen in the 1983 movie Silkwood.

You know, in my mind, just thinking about you, you're a former Marine, and it sounds like you're a Marine on a mission.

Why are your hands tied? How are they tied? What ties them?

The company that one Karen worked for was Kerr-McGee, named for its powerful leaders, Robert Kerr and Dean McGee.

Or did another vehicle try to scare her or run her off the road? We were pretty late in the reporting process for this podcast when we tracked down the bumper of Karen's Honda Civic. And that set this whole accident reconstruction idea in motion.

Steve actually looked to see if he could find a car that would have been on the road in the early 1970s that had a bumper low enough to cause the kinds of dents we see in Karen's left rear bumper and fender.

I've always said we follow where the facts lead us. I was convinced that a close-up look at the bumper was going to unlock this thing. But in the end, that's not what I was hearing from Steve.

Steve says even if a phantom vehicle didn't hit her or didn't hit her hard enough to push her off the road, there's still the possibility that Karen was startled and then overcorrected. The intimidation factor.

So what does it all add up to? Steve says there's no evidence to definitively prove or disprove the presence of a phantom vehicle.

We scrambled to find someone who could do the work, and ABC News hired Steve Irwin and his team to review all the evidence we could pull together for them.

Two hours later, Steve pressed pause on his PowerPoint and opened it up for questions and reactions. People's faces were drawn. This didn't seem to be the definitive closure we were hoping for. There was this uncomfortable pause where no one said anything.

So maybe it was something else. Then Karen's daughter, Christy Riddles, jumped in. She asked a question I think a lot of us had.

What it comes down to, Steve explained, is that Karen lost control of the car. but we still don't know why.

Karen Silkwood's son, Michael Meadows, shared what I think a lot of us were feeling, this mix of gratitude, appreciation, but also some disappointment.

There was a chorus of thank yous and goodbyes.

We were hoping Steve Irwin, with his analysis of the bumper and all the other evidence, would solve the mystery.

I think it's fair to say that's what Karen's family was hoping for, too. Confirmation of a second car or, at the very least, some definitive answer to why her Honda Civic left the road and crashed into a concrete wall as she was driving to what was arguably one of the most important meetings of her life.

It turns out that while technology can do a lot of remarkable things, at least in this case, firm answers weren't part of the deal. At least, not yet.

In this episode, what we learned, how it sits with the family, and where we go from here. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery. Episode 5, The Phantom Vehicle. Our last episode. I'm Mike Boettcher. And I'm Bob Sands. This Zoom call, it's pretty strange when you think about it.

The day after our session with Steve, one of our producers got a text from Karen Silkwood's older daughter, Christy Riddles. Christy was eight when her mom died. She was the oldest of the three kids and the one with the most memories of her mom. Christy was the one on the Zoom call who asked if Steve could pinpoint why Karen lost control of her car the night she died.

Unfortunately, Steve couldn't give her that piece of the puzzle.

Karen Silkwood did play a role in raising awareness about the risks and dangers of nuclear power.

About a month before she died, Karen told the union leader, Steve Watka, that she was going to be gone from Kermagee, and that she was going to shut things down before she left.

One of those workers was Jim Smith. He'd been a manager at the plutonium plant from day one. He told some documentary film producers that before everything closed down, there'd been talk of Kerr-McGee re-upping their fuel rod contract. But that would have required a major cleanup effort.

Still, even after the plant closed, Kermagee continued to operate as an energy company for more than 30 years. After it was acquired, Kermagee and its new parent company agreed to pay a $5 billion settlement with the Department of Justice to clean up contaminated sites from its oil, gas, and chemical operations across the country. This included radioactive waste from the plant where Karen worked.

At the time, in 2014, the DOJ called it, quote, the largest payment for the cleanup of environmental contamination in history. Kermagee wasn't the only company that ultimately abandoned its nuclear investments. That big vision the US government had for this bountiful plutonium economy, one that supplied this evergreen source of cheap energy, well, that dream started to tarnish.

50 years after Karen's death, her three adult children, her two sisters, even one of her granddaughters who never got to meet her, can beam in and watch a guy run computer models simulating the path her car took that night, its velocity, angle, and final moment of impact.

By the late 1970s, there were these big questions about the safety of nuclear power plants and what to do with radioactive waste. And those questions cooled the plutonium economy. Over time, the construction of new nuclear reactors in the U.S. slowed to a trickle.

How would Karen have felt about this shift away from nuclear power and her role in that shift? I wonder what she'd think of this new interest we're seeing in nuclear energy today. All of those big tech companies need sources of energy to fuel their hungry servers, especially with AI on the rise.

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all making serious investments into nuclear power in search of an emission-free source of electricity. the industry that Karen blew the whistle on could very well be on the brink of a comeback.

Throughout our reporting, we asked the people we spoke with what Karen meant to them, why her story still resonates 50 years after her death. We collected what they told us, along with bits of archival tape that spoke to Karen's legacy.

She was an ordinary person like you and I. She seen something there that had to be done, and she did it for the union.

They watch this little digital version of her car smash into a wall on a loop, as if it's backing up and hitting the wall once, twice, three times.

A good woman with a good heart. So we're going to pause our investigation into the death of Karen Silkwood here. We don't have any more episodes planned, but I say pause because Bob and I have been working on this story for years, and I can't quite imagine not working on it.

Steve's been in the business for 37 years. He actually worked with A.O. Pipkin back in the 80s, and Pipkin was an important person in Steve's life.

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, chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin,

reporter-producer Sasha Pesnik, and associate producer Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced by senior producer Nancy Rosenbaum and Vika Aronson. Tracy Samuelson was our story editor, associate producer and fact-checker Audrey Mostek. We had production help from Meg Fierro, story consultant Chris Donovan, Supervising producer, Sasha Aslanian. Original music by Soundboard.

Thanks to Pat and Texla Mountain for the use of their song, Karen Silkwood. 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 Cohan is ABC Audio's Director of Podcast Programming. Laura Mayer is our Executive Producer.

Steve's long-ago work with Pipkin meant something to Pipkin's daughter, Karen Pipkin Guerrero, too. You met her in the last episode when we drove to her home in Albuquerque to see the bumper.

I'm glad. Three generations of Karen's family are here today. Her sisters, Rosemary Silkwood Smith and Linda Silkwood Vincent, along with her son, Michael Meadows. And for the first time, we're joined by Karen's daughters, Christy Riddles and Don Lipsy. Don's 20-year-old daughter Riley is sitting by her mom.

Steve begins with the indisputable facts of the accident. That Karen's car collided with the cement wall of that culvert. The moment of impact. So this is her car. It's taken. He displays a photo of the front end of Karen's tiny white Honda, jagged and crumpled. The hood is collapsed toward the steering wheel like a crushed soda can.

Okay, we got the whole fam family. Steve's an accident reconstructionist. He's used to speaking to juries in courtrooms. He's dressed the part today in a light gray suit coat and tie. Anyway, I just feel better knowing who I'm talking to.

What happened in the moments after the car drove off the road, before it hit the wall? And the question we're all wondering, what caused Karen's car to leave the road in the first place?

Steve and his team looked for signs that Karen might have been trying to regain control after she left the road. Was she steering or braking? He found signs of both.

That would set up the next sequence Steve is looking at. After Karen's car hit the wall and came to a rest, its nose was pointed toward the roadway.

Then there's the question of speed. The speed limit on the highway was 55, and Steve believes it's a reasonable assumption that she was going the speed limit. The alternative would be that she was drowsy or sedated and driving slower than the speed limit. Pipkin calculated by the time Karen hit the wall, she was going 30. Steve says that matches their modeling too.

So the drop in speed after leaving the road to Steve, that indicates the driver took action.

So Karen was awake at the moment of impact. That's the opinion of one expert using the latest in accident reconstruction technology. The idea that Karen was asleep, maybe even in a stupor, as law enforcement once said, that doesn't necessarily check out. And Steve's findings challenge at least one theory that placed the blame for the accident solely on Karen Silkwood.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol didn't have any comment on the new assessment, and they told us there are no plans to reopen the investigation.

Why did Karen's car leave the road that night and crash into a concrete culvert?

Steve has created simulations of three possible scenarios. In one, the car veers off the road to the right, then overcorrects to the left and loses control.

These are both single-car accidents. But what we've all been waiting for Steve to tell us about is the bumper.

It's not what I expected. It's a nice moment, but looking at the rest of the photo, Steve breaks with his old mentor. He doesn't see what Pipkin saw in these stents.

So Steve thinks it's unlikely that these dents were created by another car, what he poetically refers to as a phantom vehicle. That's a vehicle that's alleged to have been present, but leaves behind no physical evidence. But he doesn't totally dismiss the possibility of a phantom vehicle. He zooms in on the dents.

In the simulation, the phantom vehicle sideswipes Karen's car on the driver's side. Then they have to be parallel for a period of time.

We also found a trove of private investigators tapes in a storage locker and tracked down physical evidence from the night of Karen's crash.

Holy mackerel, there's black stuff in it still. Yeah.

50 years later, what we've learned about the life and death of America's first nuclear whistleblower. Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery, a new narrative series from ABC Audio. Coming November 12th, wherever you get your podcasts.

Fifty years ago, Karen Silkwood got in her car alone.

She never made it. And those documents she was reportedly carrying? were never found.

I'm Mike Boettcher. I've covered the world for Network TV and returned home to Oklahoma to investigate the one story I can't get out of my mind.

For years, we've run down leads.

Hi. Nice to see you.

Good Morning America.

Good morning, America.

Let's go now to Channel 2's Mike Bucinich with the latest on what he's learned. Mike.

Or did another vehicle try to scare her or run her off the road? We were pretty late in the reporting process for this podcast when we tracked down the bumper of Karen's Honda Civic. And that set this whole accident reconstruction idea in motion.

Steve actually looked to see if he could find a car that would have been on the road in the early 1970s that had a bumper low enough to cause the kinds of dents we see in Karen's left rear bumper and fender.

I've always said we follow where the facts lead us. I was convinced that a close-up look at the bumper was going to unlock this thing. But in the end, that's not what I was hearing from Steve.

Steve says even if a phantom vehicle didn't hit her or didn't hit her hard enough to push her off the road, there's still the possibility that Karen was startled and then overcorrected. The intimidation factor.

So what does it all add up to? Steve says there's no evidence to definitively prove or disprove the presence of a phantom vehicle.

We scrambled to find someone who could do the work, and ABC News hired Steve Irwin and his team to review all the evidence we could pull together for them.

Two hours later, Steve pressed pause on his PowerPoint and opened it up for questions and reactions. People's faces were drawn. This didn't seem to be the definitive closure we were hoping for. There was this uncomfortable pause where no one said anything.

So maybe it was something else. Then Karen's daughter, Christy Riddles, jumped in. She asked a question I think a lot of us had.

What it comes down to, Steve explained, is that Karen lost control of the car. but we still don't know why.

Karen Silkwood's son, Michael Meadows, shared what I think a lot of us were feeling, this mix of gratitude, appreciation, but also some disappointment.

There was a chorus of thank yous and goodbyes.

We were hoping Steve Irwin, with his analysis of the bumper and all the other evidence, would solve the mystery.

I think it's fair to say that's what Karen's family was hoping for, too. Confirmation of a second car or, at the very least, some definitive answer to why her Honda Civic left the road and crashed into a concrete wall as she was driving to what was arguably one of the most important meetings of her life.

It turns out that while technology can do a lot of remarkable things, at least in this case, firm answers weren't part of the deal. At least, not yet.

In this episode, what we learned, how it sits with the family, and where we go from here. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery. Episode 5, The Phantom Vehicle. Our last episode. I'm Mike Boettcher. And I'm Bob Sands. This Zoom call, it's pretty strange when you think about it.

The day after our session with Steve, one of our producers got a text from Karen Silkwood's older daughter, Christy Riddles. Christy was eight when her mom died. She was the oldest of the three kids and the one with the most memories of her mom. Christy was the one on the Zoom call who asked if Steve could pinpoint why Karen lost control of her car the night she died.

Unfortunately, Steve couldn't give her that piece of the puzzle.

Karen Silkwood did play a role in raising awareness about the risks and dangers of nuclear power.

About a month before she died, Karen told the union leader, Steve Watka, that she was going to be gone from Kermagee, and that she was going to shut things down before she left.

One of those workers was Jim Smith. He'd been a manager at the plutonium plant from day one. He told some documentary film producers that before everything closed down, there'd been talk of Kerr-McGee re-upping their fuel rod contract. But that would have required a major cleanup effort.

Still, even after the plant closed, Kermagee continued to operate as an energy company for more than 30 years. After it was acquired, Kermagee and its new parent company agreed to pay a $5 billion settlement with the Department of Justice to clean up contaminated sites from its oil, gas, and chemical operations across the country. This included radioactive waste from the plant where Karen worked.

At the time, in 2014, the DOJ called it, quote, the largest payment for the cleanup of environmental contamination in history. Kermagee wasn't the only company that ultimately abandoned its nuclear investments. That big vision the U.S. government had for this bountiful plutonium economy, one that supplied this evergreen source of cheap energy, well, that dream started to tarnish.

50 years after Karen's death, her three adult children, her two sisters, even one of her granddaughters who never got to meet her, can beam in and watch a guy run computer models simulating the path her car took that night, its velocity, angle, and final moment of impact.

By the late 1970s, there were these big questions about the safety of nuclear power plants and what to do with radioactive waste. And those questions cooled the plutonium economy. Over time, the construction of new nuclear reactors in the U.S. slowed to a trickle.

How would Karen have felt about this shift away from nuclear power and her role in that shift? I wonder what she'd think of this new interest we're seeing in nuclear energy today. All of those big tech companies need sources of energy to fuel their hungry servers, especially with AI on the rise.

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all making serious investments into nuclear power in search of an emission-free source of electricity. the industry that Karen blew the whistle on could very well be on the brink of a comeback.

Throughout our reporting, we asked the people we spoke with what Karen meant to them, why her story still resonates 50 years after her death. We collected what they told us, along with bits of archival tape that spoke to Karen's legacy.

She was an ordinary person like you and I. She seen something there that had to be done, and she did it for the union.

They watch this little digital version of her car smash into a wall on a loop, as if it's backing up and hitting the wall once, twice, three times.

And that's not what you got back in the early and mid-1970s.

A good woman with a good heart. So we're going to pause our investigation into the death of Karen Silkwood here. We don't have any more episodes planned, but I say pause because Bob and I have been working on this story for years, and I can't quite imagine not working on it.

Steve's been in the business for 37 years. He actually worked with A.O. Pipkin back in the 80s, and Pipkin was an important person in Steve's life.

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, chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin,

reporter-producer Sasha Pesnik, and associate producer Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced by senior producer Nancy Rosenbaum and Vika Aronson. Tracy Samuelson was our story editor, associate producer and fact-checker Audrey Mostick. We had production help from Meg Fierro, story consultant Chris Donovan, Supervising producer, Sasha Aslanian. Original music by Soundboard.

Thanks to Pat and Tex LaMountain for the use of their song, Karen Silkwood. 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 Cohan is ABC Audio's Director of Podcast Programming. Laura Mayer is our Executive Producer.

Steve's long-ago work with Pipkin meant something to Pipkin's daughter, Karen Pipkin Guerrero, too. You met her in the last episode when we drove to her home in Albuquerque to see the bumper.

I'm glad. Three generations of Karen's family are here today. Her sisters, Rosemary Silkwood Smith and Linda Silkwood Vincent, along with her son, Michael Meadows. And for the first time, we're joined by Karen's daughters, Christy Riddles and Don Lipsy. Don's 20-year-old daughter Riley is sitting by her mom.

Steve begins with the indisputable facts of the accident. That Karen's car collided with the cement wall of that culvert. The moment of impact. So this is her car. It's taken. He displays a photo of the front end of Karen's tiny white Honda, jagged and crumpled. The hood is collapsed toward the steering wheel like a crushed soda can.

Okay, we got the whole fam family. Steve's an accident reconstructionist. He's used to speaking to juries in courtrooms. He's dressed the part today in a light gray suit coat and tie. Anyway, I just feel better knowing who I'm talking to.

What happened in the moments after the car drove off the road, before it hit the wall? And the question we're all wondering, what caused Karen's car to leave the road in the first place?

Steve and his team looked for signs that Karen might have been trying to regain control after she left the road. Was she steering or braking? He found signs of both.

That would set up the next sequence Steve is looking at. After Karen's car hit the wall and came to a rest, its nose was pointed toward the roadway.

Then there's the question of speed. The speed limit on the highway was 55, and Steve believes it's a reasonable assumption that she was going the speed limit. The alternative would be that she was drowsy or sedated and driving slower than the speed limit. Pipkin calculated by the time Karen hit the wall, she was going 30. Steve says that matches their modeling too.

So the drop in speed after leaving the road to Steve, that indicates the driver took action.

So Karen was awake at the moment of impact. That's the opinion of one expert using the latest in accident reconstruction technology. The idea that Karen was asleep, maybe even in a stupor, as law enforcement once said, that doesn't necessarily check out. And Steve's findings challenge at least one theory that placed the blame for the accident solely on Karen Silkwood.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol didn't have any comment on the new assessment, and they told us there are no plans to reopen the investigation.

Why did Karen's car leave the road that night and crash into a concrete culvert?

Steve has created simulations of three possible scenarios. In one, the car veers off the road to the right, then overcorrects to the left and loses control.

These are both single-car accidents. But what we've all been waiting for Steve to tell us about is the bumper.

It's not what I expected. It's a nice moment, but looking at the rest of the photo, Steve breaks with his old mentor. He doesn't see what Pipkin saw in these stents.

So Steve thinks it's unlikely that these dents were created by another car, what he poetically refers to as a phantom vehicle. That's a vehicle that's alleged to have been present, but leaves behind no physical evidence. But he doesn't totally dismiss the possibility of a phantom vehicle. He zooms in on the dents.

In the simulation, the phantom vehicle sideswipes Karen's car on the driver's side.