Mike Boettcher
speaker
174 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Mike Boettcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
We pulled out box after box, each one sealed with layers of thick packing tape.
The very last box in the very back corner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 101–120 of 174 · page 6 of 9
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