Who was Karen Silkwood and why was her death so captivating that it spawned a Hollywood movie? We’ll meet two Oklahoma reporters determined to run down the facts. An investigator’s tapes rediscovered in a dusty storage vault raise the voices of the dead. Follow "Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery" now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your podcast app of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who was Karen Silkwood?
Join me, Deborah Roberts, for 2020 The After Show, part of the 2020 podcast. Listen now ad-free on Amazon Music.
Last year, my buddy Mike and I found ourselves inside a giant warehouse with hundreds of big wooden storage containers stacked floor to ceiling.
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.
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.
We pulled out box after box, each one sealed with layers of thick packing tape.
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.
The very last box in the very back corner.
Fingers down. Holy cow, I got goosebumps. On the outside, in black sharpie, was the name. Silkwood. Yeah, it's all here.
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.
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Chapter 2: What led to Karen Silkwood's tragic death?
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.
They called me up and said, you want to go to Oklahoma? Oklahoma and meet this woman who has good information on a scandal going there where the Kerr-McGee, which was the company that owned A lot of nuclear processing plants was messing up.
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.
When the union tried to get Burnham interested in the story, at first, he didn't bite.
It was not quite on my beat, and I said, no, thank you. And the bureau chief undid that answer and said, you're going out to Oklahoma City. So there it was. Burnham was going to OKC.
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.
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.
Instead, here's what we know from that night.
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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