Cold Open

It’s the evening of November 13th, 1974, on a state highway just north of Oklahoma City.

Flatbed truck driver James Mullins yawns and rubs his eyes. It’s been a long shift behind the wheel, and he’s been up and down this stretch of road every day this week.

Beside him in the cab, his 14-year-old brother-in-law Dalton is dozing, his head lolling up and down on his chest.

James worries he might drift off too.

So he grabs a can of cola and drains half of it in seconds.

But just as he puts the can down in the cup holder, his headlights catch on an object in a grassy ditch at the roadside. It almost looks like the back of a car.

It quickly flashes by. But James thinks he should probably stop to check it out.

He hits the brakes and pulls over at the side of the highway.

Dalton blinks awake, confused by the sudden change in motion. So James explains what he saw. Then, checking that there’s no traffic behind him, he starts backing up along the side of the road.

As he looks through the back window, in the glow of his lights, he can see that it is definitely a car—a small, white Honda, wedged on its side in a concrete culvert that runs under the highway.

He tells Dalton to go take a look. But Dalton's only been gone a few seconds when he calls urgently for James.

James climbs down from the cab and joins Dalton by the culvert. The boy looks pale. And James soon understands why. The front end of the wrecked Honda is crumpled flat against the concrete.

James tells Dalton to stay put and goes down for a closer look.

Steam whistles out of a ruptured radiator hose. James peers inside the car and then recoils in horror.

A brown-haired young woman is pinned to the roof above the driver’s seat. And she is clearly dead.

James Mullins will later learn that the driver of the wrecked car is Karen Silkwood, a 28-year-old lab technician at a local nuclear site. In the final months of her life, Karen had been investigating unsafe practices at her workplace. She was on her way to meet with a New York Times journalist, reportedly with secret documents to share. But she never made it to that meeting. She died when her car came off the highway under mysterious circumstances on November 13th, 1974.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is November 13th, 1974: The Suspicious Death of Karen Silkwood.

Act One: We Have The Power

It’s November 1972, outside the Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, two years before Karen Silkwood’s fatal car crash.

Pacing outside the fence, Karen waves a large placard over her head. Written on it, in large red lettering, are the words “ON STRIKE.”

Karen is 26 years old, and this is her first labor action. The workers’ union at the plant is calling for increased wages, better training, and stricter safety standards. Cimarron’s owner, industrial conglomerate Kerr-McGee, has said no. But with two-thirds of the workforce out on strike, Karen hopes a deal can be reached.

Beside her on the picket line is Karen’s coworker and new boyfriend Drew. Karen has only worked at the Cimarron site for three months—she is new to Oklahoma, in fact. Earlier this year, she walked out on a loveless marriage in Texas and moved north for a fresh start. She heard that Kerr-McGee was hiring and soon got a job as a laboratory analyst at the Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site.

This plant produces plutonium-bearing fuel rods for an experimental reactor in Washington State, and Karen works in quality control. It’s her job to check the rods for cracks or other problems, and she finds it fascinating. Still, when the plant’s union called a strike, she walked off the job and joined her coworkers on the picket line.

There’s something invigorating about this protest. Karen’s marriage was miserable. Her husband had been having an affair, and Karen felt trapped. But marching up and down alongside her new boyfriend and the other union members, she feels part of something bigger than her, something meaningful and good, for the first time in several years. But this solidarity will soon be tested.

Kerr-McGee shows no signs of relenting, and jobs are scarce in this part of Oklahoma. The company has little trouble finding people willing to cross the picket line and work at the plant. Karen and the other union members can jeer and heckle all they like. But for $3 an hour, the strikebreakers are willing to take their abuse.

Still, it’s not the so-called “scabs” that really undermine the strike’s momentum. It’s the weather. As the weeks pass, the warm glow of worker solidarity is increasingly tested by the biting Oklahoma winter.

Christmas nears, and bank accounts start running dry. With the company still standing firm, more and more Cimarron workers start abandoning the strike and head back to their posts. By early 1973, barely 20 union members remain on the picket line. Karen and her boyfriend Drew are among them. But when Kerr-McGee tells them to accept the company’s terms or be fired, the strikers finally give up. The company has won, and it’s time to get back to work.

It’s a bitter defeat for the union. But the strike has lit a fire within Karen Silkwood. She decides to run for union office. And in August 1974, she becomes the first woman to be elected to the three-person bargaining committee that represents Cimarron employees. She’s put in charge of monitoring workplace health and safety. And there’s a lot to keep her busy.

Kerr-McGee has increased production at Cimarron. Shifts have been extended, and the plant now operates day and night, even on weekends. But in the eyes of the union, the pressure to meet production targets has led to corners being cut.

A few weeks after her election to the bargaining committee, Karen starts carrying around a red notebook where she documents her concerns. Three broad categories soon emerge.

The first is a general lack of training and expertise. There’s high employee turnover, and many of the new personnel don’t seem to be trained properly to handle radioactive material.

The second category covers contaminations and spills. These are becoming more frequent, and Karen hears stories about workers being made to use faulty safety equipment. Being told to ignore emergency protocols if they slow down production.

The final issue she documents is the poor monitoring of the materials that come in and out of the Cimarron plant. Considering these are potentially dangerous, Karen feels it’s far too easy to circumvent site security.

As the weeks go by, she will become more and more concerned by what she sees, and she will be determined to raise the alarm with anyone who will listen.

But her time on the picket line has already marked Karen as a troublemaker. And soon she’ll come to believe that someone at the Cimarron plant is trying to silence her.

Act Two: Foreign Contaminant

It’s the evening of November 5th, 1974, at the Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, a few months after Karen Silkwood began documenting health and safety violations at the plant.

Karen Silkwood withdraws her hands from a pair of heavy gloves attached to a sealed, glass-fronted box. Inside, she’s been grinding and polishing plutonium samples, checking the material used in the plant’s nuclear fuel rods.

The gloves are supposed to let her handle this radioactive material without coming into contact with it. Still, before moving on, Karen checks her hands for contamination on the radiation monitor attached to the box. She’s done this several times today already, and the results have always been reassuring—until now.

This time, the monitor clicks angrily, registering plutonium.

Karen immediately goes to the plant’s health physics office for a checkup. Further tests reveal contamination on her arms, neck, face, and hair. A swab from inside her nose also tests positive, and that means there’s the possibility she’s breathed some of the material into her lungs.

She strips off her clothes and scrubs herself clean under a high-pressure shower. She’s heard all about the links between radiation and cancer, and the thought terrifies her. But soon an even more disturbing idea occurs to her.

After she’s been decontaminated, an examination of the gloves she’s been using finds plutonium on the surfaces touching her hands. Yet the same tests reveal no leaks in the gloves. Karen can’t help wondering if she was somehow deliberately exposed—and whether it has anything to do with her union work.

Six weeks ago, Karen and two other union representatives traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet officials from the Atomic Energy Commission. They explained that corners were being cut at the Cimarron plant. Safety was being compromised and quality-control records were being altered to conceal defects in the fuel rods. The AEC confirmed it would look into these allegations, and since then, Karen has continued collecting information on the safety violations she’s witnessed at the plant. Now, though, the danger has become intensely personal.

After decontamination, Karen returns to her desk but stays away from the gloveboxes. When she leaves at the end of her shift, one final check with the radiation monitor confirms that she’s clean.

The following morning, though, she tests positive again. She can’t understand it. She’s only been doing paperwork. She undergoes further cleaning and asks for her locker and car to be checked. And both come back negative.

The next day, she doesn’t even go to her desk. She goes straight to the health physics department for a test.

And once again, she’s contaminated.

Now, investigators accompany her home. Their instruments detect plutonium in the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom—even on food packaging inside the refrigerator.

Many of Karen and her roommate’s possessions have to be removed and destroyed.

Karen is now convinced that someone is deliberately contaminating her in an attempt to stop her whistleblowing campaign. But her employer Kerr-McGee rejects that accusation. And questions whether she smuggled plutonium home herself to embarrass the company.

On the advice of physicians, Karen undergoes further tests at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. Its advanced equipment can determine the amount of contamination present inside her body. And doctors there confirm that there is plutonium in Karen’s lungs. But they tell her the amount is below the permitted occupational limit and say she’ll be fine.

Karen leaves New Mexico feeling reassured and heads back to Oklahoma. She has plenty of work still to do. She has a meeting arranged with a reporter from The New York Times, and she plans to hand him documents she believes will prove that Kerr-McGee has falsified records and violated safety regulations at Cimarron.

On November 13th, she attends a union meeting at a cafe in Crescent, a small town about five miles from the plant. And according to a coworker, Karen has a folder of papers and her spiral notebook with her. Shortly after seven, Karen leaves the cafe and climbs into her white Honda Civic. She heads south on Highway 74 toward Oklahoma City and her meeting with the journalist.

But after about only seven miles, her car crosses the highway’s center line and leaves the road. It travels along the grassy shoulder before smashing into the concrete wall of a culvert at around 40 miles an hour.

Karen is killed instantly.

The Highway Patrol concludes it was a tragic accident. Karen had been under a lot of stress at work. She had lost weight and was taking sedatives. It’s likely she fell asleep at the wheel.

But Karen’s friends in the union refuse to accept that. They’ll hire an investigator to examine the car and the wreck site. His findings will challenge the official account of the accident—and raise the possibility that Karen wasn’t alone on the highway the night she died.

Act Three: Scandal. Outrage.

It’s November 16th, 1974, in the garage of a suburban home in Oklahoma City, three days after the death of Karen Silkwood.

Crash investigator A.O. Pipkin crouches down beside the crumpled remains of Karen’s white Honda Civic. The front of the little car is crushed. But Pipkin is more interested in damage at the other end.

He photographs a dent in the rear bumper. Nearby, there’s another mark on the car’s body.

Karen’s union has hired A.O. to investigate her death. The Highway Patrol believes she fell asleep at the wheel, and A.O. wants to know whether the physical evidence supports that explanation.

After inspecting the car in the garage, A.O. travels to the crash site. He studies the police report and measures the tire marks Karen’s car left in the grass.

The route it followed troubles him. After crossing the center line and leaving the highway, the Honda traveled roughly parallel to the road before hitting the culvert. To A.O., this suggests Karen was trying to steer back onto the pavement.

And then there’s the damage at the rear of the car. A.O. believes it could indicate contact with another vehicle. Police suggest the car might have been damaged while being pulled from the ditch and stand by the conclusion that Karen fell asleep.

But Karen’s union remains suspicious. There are also unresolved questions about the documents she had with her in the car. A trooper reported seeing the papers and a red notebook in the wreck. But not all of them were returned with the rest of Karen’s belongings. And no one can say where the missing papers are now.

This all leads to the impression that foul play was involved. Later federal investigations confirm some of the union’s complaints about working conditions at Cimarron. But they find no conclusive evidence that Karen’s death was suspicious.

Kerr-McGee ends production at the Cimarron plant in 1975. The following year, Karen Silkwood’s father files a lawsuit over her plutonium contamination. And in 1979, a jury awards her estate more than ten million dollars. Years of appeals follow before Kerr-McGee finally agrees to a settlement of almost $1.4 million.

So her family receives compensation, but no definitive answer to the questions that surround her death. And decades later, the truth is still to emerge about what really happened to Karen Silkwood on November 13th, 1974.

Outro

Next on History Daily. November 16th, 1959. A new musical opens on Broadway, telling the story of the von Trapp family and their daring escape from the Nazis.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Owen Paul Nicholls.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.