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
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.
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.
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.
Showing 141–160 of 174 · page 8 of 9
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