Ep. 5: The Phantom Vehicle
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I just wanted to say, hello, I'm Steve Irwin. I just get an idea who everyone is. Oh, wow, there's a lot of everyone's. Yeah.
Yeah, there's a bunch of us. There's a bunch of us. Steve Irwin peers into a Zoom screen. A couple rows of faces stare back at him. It's not his usual audience.
Hi, Linda.
Hi, Michael.
Is that Rosemary over there?
Hi, Michael.
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.
But today, he's presenting to members of the Silkwood family. They've gathered to hear what he has to say about the fatal crash that killed Karen Silkwood 50 years ago. Maybe Steve Irwin will finally have some of the answers they've been waiting for.
Why did Karen's car leave the road that night and crash into a concrete culvert?
Seven miles into her trip, exhausted, stressed out from her multiple contaminations and scrub downs, maybe clouded by her prescription sedative, Did she fall asleep at the wheel, as law enforcement has always said?
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. 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.
And it's the culmination of weeks worth of effort, that drive to Albuquerque to photograph the dent in the bumper, collecting every scrap of original evidence we could find from all the different accident reports from Troopers Fagan and Owen, A.O. Pipkin, and the FBI. We took all the photographs, diagrams, hand-drawn sketches, witness interviews, and report narratives and uploaded them to Steve's team in Dallas to see if new tools and technology could tell us something that wasn't possible to know in Karen's day.
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. 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. 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.
Steve Irwin feels the weight of this moment.
I felt all of y'all's presence the entire time that we were doing this work.
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.
So I feel a little bit of a connection to that case because of it. And it's a story that requires my science to help tell part of it. You know, that's part of kind of, you know, it feels like, wow, this is really interesting. And in part because it is that kind of national tale.
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.
We invited Karen to be on the Zoom, too, given how she had held on to the Silkwood bumper, waiting for the moment it might be needed. She and Steve hadn't met before. Hi, Karen.
Hi there.
I don't know if we've ever met after all this time.
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Speakers
22 identified
Mike Boettcher 14 min
Bob Sands 10 min
Steve Irwin 5 min
Linda Silkwood Vincent 2 min
Christy Riddles 1 min
Pat and Tex LaMountain 1 min
Unknown Speaker 2 1 min
Karen Pipkin Guerrero 1 min
Unknown Speaker 5 1 min
Advertisement Voice F 1 min
Michael Meadows 1 min
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Jim Smith
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Ryan Reynolds
Unknown Speaker 1
Unknown Speaker 3
Karen Silkwood's Parent
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Unknown Speaker 4
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