The Tapes, from Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery
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Hey, listeners, we're sharing something special this week. It's an episode of the new podcast Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery. It details the death of a 28-year-old whistleblower, which 50 years later continues to haunt Oklahoma and the nation. The young plutonium plant worker died in a fatal crash while driving to meet a reporter with The New York Times. She agreed to deliver sensitive documents that were never found.

Two reporters who covered the story in 1974 have spent years trying to piece together what many in Oklahoma speculate. Karen Silkwood may have died for what she knew. Now, here are newly discovered investigative tapes, deathbed revelations, and long-awaited interviews reexamining what happened that night. Fifty years later, the story still resonates. Nuclear secrets, threats to the powerful, and why the truth stubbornly refuses to stay buried.

Okay, here comes the episode. You can listen to more episodes of Radioactive wherever you get your podcasts. 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, let's see.

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. The death of Karen Silkwood. Hi.

Karen died in a single car crash off a dark, empty Oklahoma highway exactly 50 years ago this November.

she was on her way to meet a New York Times journalist, reportedly to hand over documents she'd secretly been collecting at her job at a nuclear facility. But she never made it to that meeting. On the way, Karen fell asleep at the wheel, possibly under the influence of drugs, drove off the highway, crashed into a ditch, and died. 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.

I'm Bobby Sands. And I'm Mike Boettcher. We're two old gray guys who've been in this journalism game a very, very long time. Mike and I met as young reporters at competing Oklahoma news outlets. We were both on the scene of a hostage situation back in 1973.

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. That summer, reporting came through that KTOK newsroom about a 28-year-old union organizer making noise about safety conditions at a local nuclear facility. 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 was a rank-and-file worker, one of only a few women who worked in that plant. And yet, here she was, standing up to her employer, Kerr McGee, an atomic energy giant. 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. And so when news of Karen's death broke in November of 74, when that bell dinged on the wire, I paid really close attention. 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

There was mystery and controversy swirling all around it.

Over the years, we kept a close eye on the Silkwood case, and for a time, so did the rest of the country. For much of the next half hour, I'd like to look with you at a real-life whodunit. Karen Silkwood, a young woman who tried to expose the dangers at a plutonium plant in Oklahoma. Died in a car crash on the way to deliver documents allegedly about safety abuses at the plant to a reporter. The official reports don't reveal that Karen Silkwood was a person caught up in a power struggle.

bluntly stated she was spying on her employer. 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?

Well, there were also investigations by several news outlets. And Karen's story got lots more attention in 1983 with the release of the Hollywood movie Silkwood, based on her life. Meryl Streep, starred as Karen, actually got Streep an Oscar nomination. They're killing me. They're trying to kill me. They want me to stop what I'm doing. 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. Karen Stubwood, today we thank you. We honor your memory. We will try to make that truth known as you did.

Mike and I held on to Silkwood over the years as we covered countless other stories. Investigations into grisly murders, storm chasing through Tornado Alley. There was war reporting overseas and the Oklahoma City bombing, which shook our home state and the country.

We covered that for NBC. Oklahoma Citians consider themselves halfway from anywhere. This morning, they were right in the middle of hell. And then a couple of years ago, we decided to try and pick back up with Silkwood, do the job we would have loved to have taken on as cub reporters 50 years ago. 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. It appeared at the scene, and from the physical evidence at the scene, that she ran off the road by herself. To us, there seemed to be more to Karen's story, and we weren't the only ones who suspected it.

It's a widely held belief Karen Silkwood died for what she knew. So what had Karen uncovered? Who had she upset? Why did her car hit that concrete wall? Was there a second vehicle involved? We just can't seem to shake the idea that justice hasn't come for Karen yet. But maybe it will. There are fewer and fewer people alive to share what they know from the night Karen died.

many of the people who worked with Karen in the plant are dead. Plus, even 50 years later, some people are still reluctant to talk about what happened. Hello? Yes, ma'am. My name is Bob Sands. I'm a producer. I produce documentaries. Have you got just a moment to chat with me? What is it about? It's about the death of Karen Silkwood. It's not anything I can talk about. I've sworn to secrecy. It's not anything I can talk about.

Well, see, this is the kind of stuff I want to sit down and talk with you about on camera. I don't want to go on camera. I'm not going to testify to anything. Too long ago. But we've got some new leads, like something Bobby's been holding on to for decades. In the mid-90s, about 20 years after Karen's death, I was handed a secret tape with the instruction I could not reveal its contents until certain people named in the tapes died.

Well, that time has come. We'll hear what an investigator was trying to shed light on decades ago and what he came up against. He did advise me that this could become very dangerous and that my life could possibly be

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. And people with clues that could possibly help solve the puzzle of her death. People who've been holding on to the old investigative tapes we dug out of storage and even physical evidence from the night she died.

In one case, an accident investigator saved a crucial piece of Karen's wrecked car, even making sure to pass it on to his daughter on his deathbed. With the idea that someday, someone could figure out what really happened to Karen. That someday, someone would come looking for it. Well, here we come. So, 908. 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? - So over the years I've described a breakfast at a kitchen island bar piece where

One side is the kitchen, one side were two barstools, and I can remember my older sister and I having breakfast, just cereal of some sort, at that bar. Michael doesn't remember much about his mom. He has a few fragmented memories. That breakfast, a trip to the zoo, maybe a trip to the state fair, though he's not sure about that last one.

Looking at Karen's old apartment makes him feel like some of those memories he's been grasping for could be unlocked if he could only see through the apartment's brick walls and 50 years into the past. Then we can't see inside, but, you know, yeah.

It's tempting to want to go peek in the window and see if anything flashes or if I remember anything from that long ago. 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. That movie came out when I was 14, 15 years old. I didn't understand how Hollywood worked. So, you know, Meryl was Karen in my head. Jokingly, my daughters refer to Meryl affectionately as Grandma. You know, Hollywood played such a key role in

how we view everything. So I kind of drew myself to think, right, so that's who she was. Michael is a former Marine and four years ago he started his own investigation into how his mom died, how her car smashed into that concrete culvert wall, and he shares a suspicion other people have. Was it a single car accident? Did she simply fall asleep at the wheel?

Or was she forced off of the road and struggling to get back on and not seeing the concrete culvert in the dark in front of her, smashing into it and ending her life? There's never been a definitive answer. Both sides told a very different story that night of what happened. And as her son, I would like to have a definitive answer of what really took place. 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. Right. With his hands tied, which, you know, it's, I'll take what I can get, but I don't know that I'm going to have all of the tools I need for this particular mission. Why are your hands tied? How are they tied? What ties them?

The fact that there's still so many people afraid to tell what they know or what they've heard. It's amazing to me that 50 years later, a company that barely even exists, if it does exist at all,

still has that kind of control or that kind of intimidation. The company that one Karen worked for was Kerr-McGee, named for its powerful leaders, Robert Kerr and Dean McGee. In Oklahoma, Kerr-McGee was Oklahoma. You know, you can't go downtown and not step on their streets. There's the Dean McGee of the Robert Kerr Boulevards intersectioning down by the courthouse. So, I mean, Kerr-McGee helped build Oklahoma.

Back in the early 1970s, Kerr-McGee was a Goliath in Oklahoma and in America's oil and gas industry. But if Kerr-McGee was Goliath, Karen never set out to be David, though she certainly became one. 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. ♪

She was the only girl in her chemistry class, which was kind of back then was unusual. That's Linda Silkwood Vincent, Karen's youngest sister. Girls didn't take chemistry class. You know, you took homemaking and those kind of things. You were going to be a housewife. She was, like I say, she was the only girl in her chemistry class. So she had dreams. Mm-hmm.

She planned on doing something with her life. You know, it just took a little detour for Lola. And that was a guy? Yeah. We met Linda and Karen's other sister, Rosemary Silkwood Smith, at Rosemary's home 30 minutes east of Houston.

We wanted to get a better picture of who Karen was as a young woman before she turned into the fearless whistleblower we know. 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. When Linda was born, that was like her baby.

She was so tickled. She was very affectionate. She was a very loving and caring person. Karen took care of people. She would help friends with their schoolwork and volunteered as a candy striper at the hospital. But Karen also liked living on the edge a little bit. She was gutsy. Football stadium was across the street, and we used to climb that tree and get on the roof and

and watched the football game. And she taught you how to drive? Yes. In a 64 Volkswagen Bug with the four on the floor. How old were you? Twelve. And later in life, Karen raced cars and was pretty good at it, too, in her white Honda Civic. She had told me that she had raced and won that race

trophy and I said you're racing your little car and

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. Well, Mary isn't quite right. With her being 19 and Bill only 18, no one would legally marry them without their parents' permission. But the two teenagers were headstrong and determined.

Karen's son, Michael, says his mom was stubborn, for better or worse. She'd get into heated debates with her father-in-law. Michael says other people would have been intimidated to challenge this big, accomplished, headstrong Navy vet. Not Karen. He's like, yeah, you know...

Everybody else would get up and leave the room because they thought we were legitimately mad at each other. He said she just believed what she believed, and I believed what I believed, and neither one would back down. So I always found that interesting.

where I get my stubbornness from, although my father's got it too. So I get it from both sides of the family. In the early days, life with Bill was exciting. Bill Meadows talked about those early days in an A&E documentary from 2001 called Karen Silkwood, A Life on the Line. We used to go down to Lake Dallas and jump off of the railroad trestle in the lake, which was about 40, 50 feet high. She kept doing that.

The last time she did, she was, I think, seven months pregnant with Christy. 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. Bill Meadows told us that in his marriage to Karen, when things were good, they were very good. And when they were bad, they were very bad. Karen's sisters also remember highs and lows. She tried to come home more than once every

The first time, Bill came and got her. And the second time, he brought his dad with him, and she went back with him then. And then she just decided that was going to be her life. 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. To her sisters, Karen seemed resigned to stay in the marriage, but then she found out about something else. She found out that he was having an affair. After that, Karen decided she had to leave, and she decided to leave the kids with Bill. Because she knew...

His family could provide for them better, take better care of them. He was never going to let her win at that. In August 1972, Karen moved out. She gave Bill an uncontested divorce.

Her children were five, three, and almost two years old. A mother giving up custody of her kids was really unusual in the early 1970s, and it's something that after Karen's death would be used against her to try and paint her as a bad mother and a bad person. Rosemary and Linda say Karen absolutely loved her children. Her eyes would just shine when she was around.

the kids, and she truly loved her children. 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. It's odd because sometimes I get overwhelmed with emotions and I don't have anything to tie that to because again, mom was gone when I was really young. She was out of the picture when I was really young and I'm like, just need a second. I think it's about what I missed, you know, like what could have been affects me more than actual sadness of

A hole he's trying to fill by learning all he can about the woman who never got to raise him. About her life and her death.

Nobody came forward and said, "Hey, we did it." Nobody admitted wrongdoing. I mean, it was swept under the rug. So for the family, the reason we're still talking about it, the reason I'm still talking about it is because I would love for, in my lifetime, I would like to know what happened. You know, I don't expect at this point in time, 50 years later, for there to be a perp walk, somebody in handcuffs saying, "I did it." That's not what we're looking for. We just want to know if anybody out there knows what happened, what happened.

That's precisely what we've been trying to figure out. 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. Okay, so here, this is my FBI investigation documents. Everything's in cryological order.

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. So very 70s of him. These days, Steve's got a head of white hair and a full gray beard.

He recently retired from his career as an attorney advocating for people with work-related cancer. He's now spending his retirement in a small New Jersey beach town, trying to figure out what happened to Karen Silkwood 50 years ago.

Filing freedom of information requests with federal agencies, pouring over decades-old legal documents, and files with ink that's faded but still legible. So there's 599 file items. That's just FBI. Steve also has the only recordings we've been able to find of Karen's voice. Okay, now talking to Karen Silkwood, and today is...

Monday, October 7th. Alright, now what about this getting to these kids joking about getting hot? We've got 18 and 19 year old boys, you know, and 20 and 21. I mean, and they don't, they didn't have the schooling, so they don't understand what radiation is.

They don't understand, Steve. They don't understand. 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. She says, this plant is essentially being operated by a bunch of kids, 18 and 19-year-old kids, kids that were hired off of the local farms,

who didn't know anything about radioactive materials and what's going to happen to them as they grow up

and this material was inside of them. At the time of this call, Karen was still learning about the effects of repeated exposure to radioactive materials. She was concerned that she and her co-workers didn't get enough information or training at the plant, especially about how plutonium could accumulate in the body over time.

You'll hear a lot more from these tapes in the next episode. 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. She was strong. I mean, she knew she was on the right side of things, and what was going on in the plant was wrong. And I think I gave her her strength.

Though brief, those seven weeks would wind up changing the course of both of their lives. It all started with Karen's concerns about the plant. She claimed things there were sloppy and unsafe at Kerr-McGee's nuclear facility in Crescent, Oklahoma.

Plutonium, the stuff she and other assembly line workers were handling, has a half-life of up to 20,000 years. Getting contaminated with that stuff can have major health consequences. The belief is that that intense radiation that goes on, essentially for the rest of the person's life, causes lung cancer. So the handling of plutonium

is supposed to be very strict. There's supposed to be essentially no contact whatsoever with this material. There's always supposed to be a barrier between the worker and plutonium. And what was going on in this plant was that barrier was being breached on a daily basis. 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. But a claim like that? They'd need evidence. Company documents. And Karen said, "I'll do it. I'll pull it together." And we say to her, "Well, okay."

Report back to me, but keep your profile low or non-existent. No one should know that you're doing this. 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 Kermagee, 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. She sat right over the table by herself, and she kept flipping through the papers, you know. 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. I asked her how she felt. And, you know, that's the first time I'd ever noticed Karen a bit nervous, you know. We stood right there in the Hub, and we talked. And she told me, she said, I've got everything together. And she did. Well, I swear to God in front of God, you know, she had it.

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. Then Karen left and got into her 1973 white Honda Civic to drive the 30 miles to meet Steve and Burnham, who were waiting for her at the hotel with her boyfriend, Drew Stevens.

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.

Karen was seven miles from Crescent when her Honda Civic went from the right lane of the highway across to the left and off the road onto the grass along the road's shoulder. 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. Law enforcement estimated that the moment of impact happened around 7.30 that night. The collision crumpled the front end of Karen's small two-door Honda, making the windshield fly out and leaving the vehicle sitting on its left side in the red mud of the ditch.

In pictures, the front end of the car looks like a crushed tin can. Karen Silkwood didn't have a chance. 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. When Karen didn't show up for the meeting in Oklahoma City, Steve Wodka, David Burnham, the New York Times reporter, Andrew Stevens, Karen's boyfriend, started to get nervous. So we were there at the Holiday Inn meeting.

And we were waiting and waiting. It's ours. 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. And I said, something's wrong. So I ended up making phone calls. And finally, Steve reached one of Karen's fellow union leaders. He says to me, Steve, I just learned that she was killed in this auto accident.

And Drew is like sitting as close to me as you are. I had to turn to him and say, my God, you know, she's dead. First, there was grief, primarily for Drew. He was devastated. And he cried. He cried to me. Then there was action. The union guy, the reporter, the boyfriend, they all had this one impulse to go to Karen. We all climbed in Burnham's car.

And we drove up the highway, and I don't know how it is that we found it, but we actually found the site. But by that point, Karen and the wrecked Honda, the entire accident scene had been cleaned up. Nobody was there at that time. We're walking around in the dark. It was cold and windy, and I found her paycheck in the mud. He found Karen's paycheck, her Kerr-McGee paycheck,

in the mud. Decades later, Steve still wonders, what if he and Burnham had gone to Karen that night instead of having her come to them? There's no question that the night of November 13th, 1974, she should have stayed right there in Crescent, and Burnham and I should have gone up there, found someplace up there, and just talked to her there and not have...

Put her at the vulnerability of driving down the highway. There's no question about that. That small decision, it haunts him. We just didn't perceive the danger. By the time Steve, Drew, and Burnham arrived at the scene of Karen's crash, just about every trace of her had vanished. Everything except that paycheck in the mud. Karen, gone. The car, gone.

And crucially, those documents, the one she was supposed to deliver to Steve and Burnham, gone. What exactly was Karen uncovering about Kermagee? What secrets could those documents have held? That's next time. That was a preview of Radioactive. You can listen to more episodes of Radioactive wherever you get your podcasts.