20/20 - 'Radioactive' - Ep. 4: The Investigators

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Three investigators tried to solve the mystery of what happened to Karen Silkwood on that dark highway the night of November 13th, 1974. An accident investigator hired by the union believed so strongly that Karen’s car had been forced off the road that he saved the bumper as evidence, handing it down to his daughter on his deathbed. A private eye pieced together a theory that Silkwood was under surveillance. And a state trooper launched his own investigation inside law enforcement. They all hit dead ends. Or did they? 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

A couple of months ago, Bobby and I set out on an epic road trip from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, New Mexico, eight hours through a lot of flat, dry land. For most of the way, there wasn't much to see except giant windmill farms, a few antelope, and some rest stops. Okay, well we got about three hours more to Albuquerque. What do you think we're going to find there? Well, I am hoping that we actually find some of the keys we need to begin to put a close on this case.

I mean, you and I have been chasing this thing for years, and it took a lot to dig out this information that's in New Mexico, that we're hoping is what we think it is, and I'm just really anxious to get there and start looking. We decided to drive all this way. I mean, we could have flown, but I do hate flying. Yeah, I was tempted to say meet you there, but eight hours in a car? That's nothing when you think about the thousands of hours we put into investigating Karen Silkwood's story.

At the end of this road trip, there was a crucial piece of evidence we wanted to see. Evidence that had been passed down in a family, from one generation to the next. Our journey to uncover that piece of evidence had finally brought us here. Here we met another Karen in this story. Karen Pipkin Guerrero greeted us at the front door. Welcome to Albuquerque. It's really good to be here. Come on in guys. Thank you.

Go ahead, Bob. She has long flowing dark hair and was wearing brown knee-high leather boots. She's retired and lives in this split level home with her husband and two rescue dogs. It's a beautiful spot surrounded by mountains with lush greenery all around. I first talked to Karen Pipkin Guerrero on the phone about a year ago when I heard that she might have this piece of evidence. It took some convincing but she agreed to let us come see it. Karen led us through a door and into her garage. Oh my, that's it right there?

Yeah. Oh my gosh. I feel like I should have gloves on to touch it. What we were looking for was perched on top of a refrigerator underneath some fishing rods, next to a jug of windshield wiper fluid. Can I take it down? Sure. Oh, yes.

Please take it down? Sure, oh yes. Please take it down. And just like that, we were holding the bumper from Karen Silkwood's 1973 Honda, the car she was driving the night she died on that Oklahoma highway 50 years ago. I had this vision that it was going to be in some hermetically sealed glass case. You know, here was this key artifact of the Silkwood story. And there it was, more than 500 miles from the crash site, gathering dust in a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Wow.

My God. Only macro, there's black stuff in it still. Yeah. Is that good? Yes. Yeah, it's good. That's exactly what they were talking about. The reason Karen Pipkin Guerrero has this bumper is because her dad was an accident

investigator and Karen Silkwood's union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, hired him to look into what caused the fatal crash. His name was A.O. Pipkin. He ran an accident reconstruction business out of Dallas, Texas. Pipkin was a big guy who wore bright orange jumpsuits no matter the occasion, even when he was eating at a five-star restaurant. A reporter once described him as looking a little like an orange balloon. And this bumper? He thought it was important enough that he held on to it for the rest of his life. And just before he died in 2011, he asked his daughter Karen to hang on to it too. So what did he think was going to happen to this when he asked me to bring it home with me? That's my thing is did he think something was going to come up and it might

be important? I mean was there any other case where he asked you to guard these papers or keep that item? or keep that item? Never, never. The only time he ever asked me to hold on to anything was that silkwood bumper when he was close to passing. And he said, you've got to promise me you will take it. And I don't break promises to anyone, much less my dad. No. And of all the cases that he did, this was the most important

one to him. There was a reason it was important to him. What was that? What was it that just? Well, something bothered him about it. Karen's wondering, and we're wondering, if there's something more that Pipkin's investigation files could tell us. So we've made a plan to have the bumper re-examined by an accident reconstruction expert. And then we'll share whatever new information we find with the Silkwood family. We're hoping that a fresh look at all of the evidence, the photographs, diagrams, the original accident reports, and now the bumper, might turn up new information,

maybe even get us one step closer to understanding how Karen actually died that night. He was so into this case and getting it reconstructed. So maybe this will help prove my dad was right. Yeah. With the new technology, technology is so advanced today than it was in the 70s, you know, and I want to know that. Yeah.

I want to know that. So do we. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery, Episode 4, The Investigators. I'm Mike Becher. And I'm Bob Sands. So let's start at the beginning. The night Karen died, Oklahoma State Highway Patrol Trooper Rick Fagan got a call from his dispatcher about a car wreck on a two-lane state highway,

possibly a fatal one. Fagan was a baby-faced newbie. He'd been a trooper for just five months, and Karen's death was reportedly one of the first fatal car crashes he'd ever investigated. Fagan drove directly to the crash site, and by the time he arrived around 8.15, there were several bystanders. Two men and a 14-year-old boy had been driving by when they noticed a car tilted on its side in the muddy ditch.

They stopped, tried to shine headlights at the scene, and called out. No one answered. They approached the car and could see a hand visible out the driver door. All three reported papers were strewn around the accident scene. All three said they watched as the patrolmen gathered them up and placed them back in the car. Fagan got down into the ditch. He and a couple of other people tipped the car back on its wheels and pried the driver's side door open so they could pull Karen's body out.

Here's how Fagan described the scene to ABC News in 1975. At that time I found a white female behind the steering wheel of a small foreign car and she appeared to be dead at that time. All in all he stayed at the crash site for about an hour then he drove home. By the time Steve Wodka, Karen's friend and union contact arrived at the crash site around 11 p.m., everyone was gone. The car had been towed and all that was left was Karen's Kermage paycheck in the mud. Eventually Steve went back to his hotel. And then sometime after midnight, Trooper Fagan got a phone call from the local police

department over in Crescent, saying the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to inspect Karen's car for radioactivity. Steve wasn't there, but here's what he's pieced together about that late night inspection. They open up the garage, and these three people show up. Well, only two of them were with the AEC. The third was a Kermagee representative. Fagan said the men spent about 20 minutes going through Karen's car, including her papers. They waved around a Geiger counter to check if anything was hot or contaminated. Steve thinks this would have given the Kermagee employee

the chance to look at every single piece of paper. In order to survey things for plutonium, like a spiral notebook with 50 pages in it, you just can't just wand the top of it and say it's clean. You've got to go page by page by page and see if there's any contamination in it. As Steve sees it, if someone from Kermackie had discovered documents that were damaging to the company, then this would have

given them the opportunity to disappear those documents. Poof! Gone! The next morning, Fagan returned to the crash site and checked the road for skid marks. He found no marks and it suggested to him she had fallen asleep. That same morning, Steve Watko went to see Fagan. Steve says he initially had no reason to doubt Fagan or his investigation, but that feeling didn't last very long. Fagan tells me right off the bat that she fell asleep and went off the side of the road. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you don't understand. She was just on the highway for a few minutes. Steve was suspicious.

How could Fagan have reached this conclusion so quickly, less than 24 hours after she died? Why wasn't this being investigated more thoroughly? Steve tried explaining to Fagan that there was more to the story. Karen was on her way to a really important meeting. This idea that she'd fallen asleep, it didn't make any sense to Steve. And I'll never forget Faken saying, look, in my mind, she fell asleep at the wheel of the car unless you can prove it differently. And that, that started in my mind the fact that, oh wait a minute, the fix is in. Something is going on here.

How could this guy just shut the door on my face? He's supposed to be an investigating officer. Steve became even more suspicious when he retrieved the box of Karen's things that had been recovered from her car. Remember, he'd been waiting for Karen to show up that night to meet the New York Times reporter. She was supposed to deliver the evidence she'd been collecting, evidence that would support her allegations that Kerr-McGee was falsifying quality control reports. Steve was eager to see if the papers he was looking for were among the belongings recovered from her car.

And we ripped the box open and went through everything and there was nothing in there about quality control. The way Trooper Fagan described the documents was strange too. Remember, three witnesses described scene documents scattered around the crash site, and how a patrolman gathered them up and put them in the car. Trooper Fagan later told an FBI agent that the night of the crash he saw a thin, red spiral notebook in the back of Karen's crushed car, along with two stacks of paper in the back of Karen's crushed car along with two stacks of paper in the back seat. And that description of two stacks of paper sounded off to Steve Watka. Now this is this car had hit this concrete wing wall going 40 to 45 miles an hour.

Silkwood was impaled on the steering wheel, but yet he says there's these two piles of paper sitting on the back seat. It defies the law of gravity. Another thing that didn't quite make sense? The red spiral notebook that both Fagan and Karen's co-worker Gene Young said they'd seen the night Karen died. The only papers in the box of things from Karen's car were notes from a union bargaining session. And there was something about the look of those papers that didn't add up. This is a muddy, crass site.

There is this reddish Oklahoma mud on the left-hand driver's side of the car. You got these three guys sitting there, paper scattered all over the place. Not one piece of the papers that were given to us had any mud on them. No mud whatsoever on the stuff that was given to us. Steve smelled a rat, and so he told his bosses that the union needed to hire its own investigator to look into the crash. That's where A.O. Pipkin enters the story.

He'd analyzed thousands of crashes, including the one that killed Hollywood starlet and model Jane Mansfield. That was in 1967. The Union wanted A.O. Pipkin to see if the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol's version of events held up. So when A.O. Pipkin arrived in Oklahoma on November 16, 1974, he started assembling his puzzle pieces one by one. He inspected every inch of Karen's car. He walked the accident scene and measured Karen's tire marks on the grass. He read Fagan's accident report. He took photographs, he drew diagrams, and he hired outside experts to review his work. When he put all the puzzle pieces together, there were a few things that really stood

out to him. One, Karen's car had crossed the center line and veered off the left side of the road. Pipkin wrote in his report that typically, when a driver falls asleep at the wheel, they drift to the right, not to the left. That's because the road has a little peak or crown at the center. It slants so the rain will run off. So that was his first takeaway. The way the car had gone from the right to the left-hand side of the road. That didn't mesh with the Highway Patrol's sleepy driver theory. Second, Pipkin examined the tire tracks in the muddy grass, and noted the direction the car appeared to follow once it left the road.

He thought if Karen had been asleep, her car would have drifted down a grassy slope, away from the road, and eventually stopped. She never would have smashed into a concrete wall. But the path the car actually took, staying relatively parallel to the highway, suggested to Pipkin that Karen was likely trying to steer the car back onto the road. likely trying to steer the car back onto the road. Here's Steve Wodka again. If she truly had fallen asleep at the wheel, she'd be alive. She would have lived. So only by being awake and trying to hold this car on course would you have the trajectory that she did. The third thing that caught Pipkin's eye was damage to the left rear of Karen's car,

two dents, one on the bumper and one just below on the fender. Now there were other dings on Karen's car. She'd been in a minor accident a couple of weeks earlier that damaged her right rear tail light. But what interested Pipkin was on the left. The dent on the bumper was about two inches long and less than an inch wide. Fagan believed the dents could have been caused after the crash when the car was dragged out of the ditch by a tow truck driver. The bumper could have hit out of the ditch by a tow truck driver. The

bumper could have hit one of the concrete retaining walls. Ted Sebring, the tow truck driver, said he was confident he didn't dent the car and when Pipkin had outside experts look at the dent under a microscope they didn't find any traces of concrete. Neither did the FBI, though the agency still thought it was possible the dent could have been caused after the crash. But there was something else wedged into one of the dents, metal particles, and Pipkin thought those particles could possibly have come from another vehicle. And he thought, other evidence suggested the presence of another car too. And he thought other evidence suggested the presence of

another car too. When he examined the tire tracks Karen's car left in the muddy grass he thought they suggested Karen had lost control of the car before it ever left the road. The car was rotating instead of tracking in a straight line and Pipkin wrote in his report that suggested, quote, either an impact by an unknown vehicle or a combination of an impact by an unknown vehicle and then driver overreaction and subsequent loss of control. So Pipkin's puzzle was complete and the picture he saw looked different from the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol's explanation of the crash. Here's what he

told ABC about his findings. In my opinion and the people that I've had working with me, there's no circumstantial evidence there to indicate that somebody may, another vehicle may have hit the car in the rear. Pipkin's evidence suggested that a second car could have hit Karen from behind. On November 18th, five days after Karen's death, Pipkin called Steve and his bosses to report his findings. He told them the same thing he later told National Public Radio. He told them the same thing he later told National Public Radio. I do not believe that the accident was caused by Karen Silkwood falling asleep at the wheel and the car just going off the road by itself. Karen wasn't asleep.

Pipkin's finding was explosive. The OCAW immediately sent a telegram to the U.S. Attorney General and to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, demanding an investigation. Now Oklahoma law enforcement and Kermagee were the ones being looked at under a microscope. A higher up in the highway patrol was assigned to re-investigate the crash. A guy named Lieutenant Larry Owen. He doubled down on the conclusion that this was a one-car accident. And in January 1975, about two months after Karen's death, he also added a new detail. Karen

had been under the influence of drugs that night. Here's Owen in an interview with ABC. I would either put her probably either totally asleep or in some state of stupor from induced by the medication she was taking. The medication? It was those Quaaludes Karen had been prescribed to help her sleep. The state medical examiner said that she was probably

under the influence of them when she crashed. Fagan would later say in a deposition that two of Karen's co-workers had told him she'd been quote, exhausted, unable to sleep, very fatigued. And these coworkers, both allegedly told Fagan, they'd offered to drive her home that night. But Fagan's account didn't square with another important eyewitness. As you heard earlier in the series, Karen's coworker and friend, Jean Young,

had also been at the union meeting that night. As far as we know, she was the last person to see Karen alive. In a 1980 interview for a documentary about the nuclear industry, Jean Young described her recollection of Karen as they were leaving the union meeting. And she was alert.

You know, Karen was very much alert that night. Media reports after Karen's death also challenged the idea that her medication would have put her to sleep. A toxicologist we spoke with said we can't draw any conclusions about what the levels found in her body might have meant. There are too many unknowns, like whether Karen had developed a tolerance for the medication. unknowns like whether Karen had developed a tolerance for the medication. Reporters also questioned other elements of the highway patrol's investigation. Here's NPR's Bob Renumann talking to Lieutenant Larry Owen about why he hadn't inspected Karen's car.

But you could have asked for it, you never did. We checked to try to find where it was. We could not locate it in either Crescent, Edmond, or Oklahoma City. Are you saying that the investigative work of the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol couldn't find this car that I, a reporter from Washington, D.C., could find? We should have kept the car in our custody, but that's strictly in hindsight. But you could probably still even get the car right now. Yes, but from the standpoint if two parties have scrapings, surely one of them is going to give us the information or at least release the information to the press at some point on what they found. You wouldn't think you

want to do your own? Well, at this point, you know, in time, I'm not really sure, you know, two months hence what good... We reached out to the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol about their investigation, but they didn't have any comment. But I was able to get Larry Owen on the phone. He's retired now, but stands by his conclusion that Karen Silkwood fell asleep at the wheel. He said that nothing had changed in 50 years. Last month he spoke about his investigation with KOCO, a local television station in Oklahoma. He said that

Karen's car covered almost a football field before she crashed. And made no attempt to steer, made no attempt to brake. and you know that's that's not somebody that is awake and alert trying to keep from having a ref. The FBI did its own investigation into Karen's death, and in the spring of 1975, they told the New York Times that Karen's death, quote, didn't appear to be a murder. No foul play, they said. Case closed. In congressional testimony, the FBI's lead agent on the case said his agency was satisfied

with the thoroughness of its investigation. But a congressional attorney criticized the FBI's handling of their investigation, saying it was, quote, in essence, a character assassination of Silkwood, unquote, and that the agency was blatantly taking the word of Kermagee and government officials instead of doing their own independent work. It wasn't only Silkwood's reputation that got attacked. Pipkin's credentials were questioned too. And once Pipkin's name came out in the papers as being part of this investigation, his daughter

Karen Pipkin Guerrero says he started getting menacing phone calls. He just got threats that were like scary, like you know death threats type things. Who they came from or I don't know. I have no idea. But my dad wasn't afraid. But my dad wasn't afraid. Pippen was convinced that Karen Silkwood hadn't been asleep at the wheel, but not much happened with his findings. And his daughter said he never forgot this case. And remember this was a guy who'd investigated

thousands of car wrecks. There was something about this investigation that got under his skin. He was 100% positive that Karen Selkwood did not die from falling asleep at the wheel. And he believed that till the day he died. Other people thought there was more to the story too and new investigators started digging. In the dry states of the southwest there's a group that's been denied a basic human right. In the Navajo Nation today a third of our households don't have running water. But that's not something they chose for themselves.

Can the Navajo people reclaim their right to water and contend with the government's legacy of control and neglect? Our water, our beauty! Our water, our beauty! That's in the next season of Reclaimed, the lifeblood of Navajo Nation. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. There's another person in this story we want you to meet, someone else who held on to things he'd collected in the Silkwood case, until the day he died. My name is Joe Royer and I'm an investigator.

I'd like to know if I could come by and speak with you or if you'd be interested in talking to myself and one of the other investigators on this case we're working on. What case is that? The Karen Silkwood case. About your involvement in your investigation of Drew Stevens and Karen Silkwood. Joe Royer was a private investigator based here in Oklahoma City. Joe and I actually used to work together at a radio station here in town. He did sales and our nickname for him was Snake Oil Salesman. That's because he was always so well groomed. Joe had this full head of thick dark hair that he liked to slick back. He just

looked like a million bucks every time he walked into a room. I never knew that Joe had been a PI back in the day. I actually used to be a PI myself. I dug around on Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu. So you'd think, us both being PIs is something we would have talked about. But Joe kept that part of his past completely private. At least from me. That included his work on the Karen Silkwood case. I only found out about that years later, after he died. He was even tight-lipped with his wife, Jenny, and they were married for 45 years. Joe wasn't afraid to share anything with me. He liked to talk about his goings-on, except one case, and Joe didn't want to talk about it,

and that was Karen Silkwood. Why do you think he kept that so secret? I don't know why Joe did that. I really don't, except he thought maybe there was some underlying issues, dangers, I don't know. I don't know why. He would share everything else. Not this one? No.

Here's some of what we've been able to put together about Joe's investigation into the Silkwood case. In the fall of 1977, we know that Joe was hired by lawyers who were working of 1977. We know that Joe was hired by lawyers who were working on the Silkwood civil trial that you heard about in the last episode. As far as we can tell, he had a specific task to investigate whether Karen had been surveilled before she died. Where did this idea come from? A journalist who reportedly had a special relationship with the FBI, told a congressional attorney that she had transcripts of what appeared to be phone taps and bugs of Karen's telephone calls, though she never produced those documents.

And we know from interviewing Karen's co-worker and friend, Don Gummo, that Karen had been afraid someone had been following her. Remember, a few weeks before she died, she went to see Don late at night, and she told him she was rattled because the car had been tailing her. So Joe wanted to get to the bottom of who might have been listening in on Karen. If Joe could find evidence that Kermagee had been involved in the alleged surveilling of Karen before she died, then the Silkwood lawyers would try to use it in court. If someone had been following Karen, could they have been involved in her death? So just like Karen had done at the Kermagee plutonium plant,

Joe started snooping around looking for proof. And he secretly recorded his conversations on these little cassette tapes. Those were the tapes we found in a storage warehouse in Oklahoma City just over a year ago. Joe's wife Jenny gave us access. Right here Bobby. It's the Silkwood investigation tapes. Here they are. Oh, they are. Holy mackerel. Here's a bunch. This is priceless. As we listened to the tapes, we discovered that Joe's investigation was rather narrow. We don't know why, but most of Joe's investigation focused on one subject, a group of people who were more often doing the investigating rather than being investigated.

The Oklahoma City Police Department. Joe spent most of his time looking at whether the OKCPD had been involved in surveilling Karen. We know that the head of security at the Kermagee plant where Karen worked had ties to the police. In the 1960s, Jim Reading worked as a detective for the Oklahoma City Police Department and led the department's intelligence unit. When Kermagee did its own investigation into Karen's death, Reading led the charge. When Joe started asking if the OKCPD had been surveilling Karen before her death, the department said absolutely not.

I think our conversation is over. You're fishing something, and you're not going to get it here. No, I'm not fishing for anything. Joe talked to I.G. Purser. He'd been the chief of police for Oklahoma City back in 1974, the year Karen died. Now, as far as the Silkwood deal goes, there was no illegal wiretapping or anything like that ever on our part approved, really, or even with my knowledge at all. So that's the next question for you too. No illegal wiretaps, the former police chief said.

Illegal because in the 1970s, some states had laws on the books that allowed local and state law enforcement to do wiretaps, but Oklahoma wasn't one of them. In Oklahoma, that kind of surveillance was forbidden. The only people who could do it legally were federal agents who had a court order. But Joe wasn't the only one wondering if the OKCPD was crossing a line. Around the same time of his investigation, the local paper reported that the OKCPD had quote sophisticated electronic hardware and that they were capable of doing illegal electronic surveillance. But a PD spokesman denied using illegal wiretaps. They said most of

their equipment was boxed up in storage. We listened to Joe as he tried to get could be of any help to him. I'm just curious, would you be interested in talking to us about it? No, let's say the attorney's here. Yeah, well, I can understand. He even pretended to be in the market for surveillance I had talked to a few of my friends that are on the police force and they suggested I try to contact somebody in this area about the equipment and what was... He didn't have much luck.

Then finally he found someone who let in a little bit of sunlight. This is Joe Royer. Did I wake you up? Yes. I'm sorry. Hey listen, I'll tell you what. If I can bother you for five minutes... Joe had found a source who, in 1970, had worked as a secretary for the Oklahoma City Police Department's Intelligence Unit. She'd left by the time Karen died, and were not naming her because she told Joe she did not want her name attached to his investigation. She'd agreed to talk to Joe, but she was reluctant.

And I don't want any trouble. Okay. I don't want any trouble with my job, and I don't want any trouble with my car or anything else. Well, don't worry about that, you know. Joe's source said that when she was with the police department, her bosses asked her to type up records of recorded phone calls. Joe was trying to get to the bottom of whether those calls were illegal wiretaps.

Right, but you do know that they were doing illegal wiretaps at that time, and that's important. I think, no, I won't say they were. I said, I think they were. Yeah, well, at least you were transcribing telephone conversations with two parties on the conversation. Right. And neither one of the parties were police officers, right?

I'll say that over the phone, but I won't say it in court. OK. And I won't, Joe. OK. Well, whatever you say. I'll do anything to avoid it. OK. Well, I just want you to realize that the information you gave

me was valuable. And the reason why this information was valuable? Because Joe thought he'd finally gotten someone to talk about how the OKCPD not only had the tools to do wiretaps, but also that they might have used those tools. There could have been other explanations for these calls. Maybe they were conversations involving police informants. But Joe clearly thought he'd caught them doing something they weren't supposed to do. And I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but that is against the state laws for an

agency such as the Oklahoma City Police Department to be involved in wiretapping. Only federal officials or federal law enforcement people can engage in this. You know, the information you gave to me was to illustrate that they, yes, they were involved in it. Well, what are you trying to prove? What are you and your attorneys trying to prove? Well, we're trying to find out who exactly tapped Kieran Silkwood, and it looks like right now that the most logical person in line would be the OCPD because they had all the equipment available at that time in 1974 and it's obvious that they were capable of doing this because of what you

told me about transcribing what you refer to as the log tapes. Haven't you talked to any of the other secretaries? I've tried to. Joe's source has just told him that in the early 1970s, when she worked for the police department's intelligence unit, that police officers had recorded telephone conversations between two people where one person was not a cop. The puzzle pieces were coming together, but Joe never finished his investigation. As he was sniffing around the police in the spring of 1978,

he started to suspect that someone was sniffing around him and his family too. His wife Jenny was out shopping for clothes for her kids and noticed she was being followed by a couple of men with suits, hats and ties. She told Joe about it. And there was another time when she and Joe heard some loud noises outside their home late one night as they were getting ready to go to bed. And I thought somebody was throwing rocks at the house. But it sounded a little different. And I said, did you hear that?

He said, yeah, did you hear that? Yeah, he said, well, that's gunfire. And sure enough, he walked outside and you could see the smoke in the air. They had shot several holes in our house, whoever they were. We don't know if Joe Royer ever reported these threats, but he was evidently rattled enough that a couple of months later, Joe packed up his family and moved them to Florida.

He was adamant that no one should know their whereabouts, for over a year, they kept it a secret. He said, we are not telling anyone where we are. No address, no phone number. Your mother cannot know. And my mother and I talked every day. And I couldn't tell anybody. As far as we can tell, Joe never found the hard evidence he was looking for that the

Oklahoma City Police had Karen Silkwood under surveillance. Oklahoma City Police replied with a no comment when ABC News reached out about allegations of surveillance of Karen Silkwood. For Joe, there was no smoking gun, and none of what he gathered ever ended up in court. The judge limited the case to Karen's contamination. But what Joe was sniffing around, more than a decade later,

someone else would pick up the scent. Alright, this is Tuesday morning, the 15th of November, and replacing a call to Larry Dillinger. Important call. And here we go. Hello? Mr. Dillinger? Yes. Yes sir. I don't believe we've ever met. My name is Bob Sands. Have you got just a minute to chat? Yeah, I suppose so. Okay. In the early 1990s, this guy named Larry Dellinger worked as a trooper for the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol. I explained that we had a friend in common. And this friend…

…gave me a tape recording years ago, and swore me to secrecy. I know where this is going. Yeah, I kind of figured you'd figure this out pretty quick. Back in 1992, Larry stumbled into some information about Karen Silkwood's death that troubled him. So he started taping himself, making a record of what he was doing, just in case. Larry gave the tape to a friend for safekeeping. A year later, it was passed to me with instructions that I wasn't supposed to do anything with it until certain people named in the tape were dead.

Those people are gone now. Because of the seriousness of what's being alleged on this tape, we're not going to share their names here. One day in September of 92, Larry was down at the county courthouse here in Oklahoma City when a man struck up a conversation with him in the elevator. Now Larry, he didn't know this guy from a hole in the wall, but they got to chit-chatting, made a friendly connection. Then a week or two later, Larry ran into this same guy again.

This time he asked what Larry thought about one of the higher-ups in Oklahoma law enforcement. Someone they both knew. Now Larry was honest. He said he didn't really like this person. Then out of nowhere, the guy says this higher up was involved in the death of Karen Silkwood, and that some other Oklahoma City police officers were involved too. Larry, he was stunned. I thought, is this guy nuts or does he know what he's talking about? I'm in awe. But this was just unbelievable almost.

So unbelievable that Larry decided to start making secret tape recordings so he could document what he was hearing. Some police officers who'd been working off duty for Kermagee... He advised that they had run her off the road and killed her, and they had done it in an Oklahoma City police car. It didn't state if it was a marked unit or detective car or what, but it was an Oklahoma City car. I've thought about this for quite a while.

So today is September 15, 1992. As part of his job, Larry kept something called a day book. It's where he took field notes on things like arrests and accidents. To this day, Larry has held on to all of his daybooks, along with copies of his accident reports. When we interviewed him in 2024, he asked him to read from the day book he was keeping in the fall of 1992. I see on Tuesday, September the 15th in 92, I have entered here met with… And here he lists the source's name. …in reference to the Silkwood murder. Larry didn't mince words. That's how he made sense of

what he was hearing. Again, to recap, this source Larry had become acquainted with told him that back in 1974 some Oklahoma City police officers allegedly had side jobs working security for Kermagee. And they had been hired by someone at Kermagee to scare Karen Silkwood. They were allegedly following her when she left this restaurant in Guthrie. They had been drinking, I was told, and they were supposed to scare her, but they ran up behind her and pushed her a little bit. Lo and behold she lost control and went

off in the ditch and it killed her. Larry took these allegations seriously. If they were true then this was a crime, a big one, possibly a murder case. Like a lot of other people who've investigated Karen's death, Larry started seeing smoke. But where was the fire exactly? So Larry started to sniff around the Oklahoma City Police Department. He was circling some of the same territory that private investigator Joe Royer had been circling around in the late 1970s. Larry and Joe, they were investigating different things. Joe was trying to find evidence of any police surveillance.

Larry was looking into whether Karen may have been murdered. But Larry had a big leg up on Joe, because he worked inside law enforcement. So then I kind of got the asking around Oklahoma City officers just in casual and they say, you didn't know that? Kind of common knowledge around the police department. Common knowledge? Well, if that was the case, Larry had never heard about it before. So Larry arranged to meet with his source to get more information. And the source said he knew someone who had even more details about what had happened to Karen.

So Larry kept recording. And they are supposed to meet me tomorrow for dinner to give me the whole complete story. I don't know who he is. Supposed to know tomorrow. Larry's source warned him about the danger of looking into the Silkwood case, so he took some precautions. I started carrying a gun almost everywhere I went.

Very rarely did I go anywhere without a gun, and I'd never done that before. Despite the possible danger he was being warned about, Larry pressed ahead. Today is Wednesday, October the 7th, 1992. I had dinner with... He went to that dinner meeting and got more details, including the names of some of the officers who were allegedly involved.

In the days and weeks that followed, Larry took this information up the chain to his supervisor and then to a district attorney. He said well that's a federal deal. We don't know anything about it. That's a federal deal. They're doing it all. You need to call the FBI. So Larry was eventually connected with an FBI agent and they talked on the phone. Afterward Larry recorded his thoughts. He appeared to be very interested and said it would be followed up on and that

he'd probably get back with me. Also asked if he, if I minded, if he used my name when interviewing people in which I told him no that was just fine. Later that month, Larry heard back from the FBI agent. The agent said he'd sent the information Larry had shared up the chain, and that in his opinion, it did warrant an investigation. But still, Larry was skeptical, even suspicious that the higher up in law enforcement, one of the targets of the investigation, might know someone in the FBI and have figured out what Larry was up to. I'm getting concerned that he may very well know about this already.

I'm becoming increasingly concerned about security at the FBI office and that as I was told in the beginning I might be in danger. Again, at this point, that's all the information I have. Larry's investigation went cold. He didn't hear anything back from the FBI until the following year, 1993. That's when he made his last recording. The FBI agent said he'd turned over the information Larry had shared to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, or OSBI.

In April 1993, Larry met in person with an OSBI agent. On the 19th of April, he met with me in my office and I gave him all of the information I've had. We was very interested. The OSBI agent was so interested, he called one of the sources who'd originally told Larry about these allegations, and he set up a meeting so he could interview that person.

The agent said he'd keep Larry informed. So Larry waited. And waited. And nothing ever happened. And when you get shuffled around and I finally, I just realized this old highway patrol lieutenant out here, you're not going to get anywhere. You might as well just forget it. And that's pretty much, I never forgot it.

I tracked down that other source Larry met with, the one he had dinner with back in 1992. The one who gave him more details about what might have happened to Karen, and who alleged that OKCPD was involved. Well, that person didn't want to do a recorded interview with me, but he did talk to me. He said the people who'd originally told him this story didn't have solid evidence. It was nothing more than whiskey talk, not admissible in court. He didn't put a lot of stock in it. And that's what this source told the OSBI agent, who did show up to interview

him by the way. But once this source said whiskey talk, the OSBI agent reportedly closed his notebook. Once again, case closed. When we reached out to the OSBI to ask about their meeting with Larry and what they did with the information he gave them, we didn't get an answer. The FBI said it didn't wish to comment on the questions we sent them, but a spokesperson for the Oklahoma City Police Department did get back to us. He said that the OKCPD didn't investigate Karen's death, and so, quote, it would be

inappropriate for us to comment on a case we had nothing to do with. In response to a question about whether police officers were allowed to take security jobs when they were off duty, he said there was no way to know what the policies were on outside employment back then, or who was working extra jobs at that time. It's been more than 30 years since Larry Dellinger struck out trying to find if there was any truth to the chatter that off-duty Oklahoma City police officers were allegedly involved in the death of Karen Silkwood. It still bothers him.

I just think the poor girl got a raw deal. She got killed. She got murdered. And these girl got a raw deal. She got killed, she got murdered. And these guys got away with it. And they're all gone now, I guess. So you can't put them in jail, but we can vindicate her. And I just think that's important. I guess maybe just the way I am, I just think that's important.

She's got children that have grown up without their mother. She had no life. She was born in 1946, same year I was born. I've just turned 78, she'll be 78 sometime. Why should these guys have gone on and lived their life? I don't know, it's just not right. We put this theory to Steve Watka, Karen's union confidant.

Remember, Steve has spent his retirement doing his own investigation into Karen's death. And this idea that Kermagee was somehow responsible for her death? Steve has long been skeptical. It just doesn't make sense to him. He said that if Kermagee had figured out what Karen was up to, carrying those company documents out of the plant, they could have just fired her. After all, she'd stolen company property. To me, it was more like an amateur job. Somebody else who much, much lower, someone who didn't have access to the corporate power, someone whose

job would have been directly on the line, realized what was going on with the documents. I think that they probably had the most to lose. That makes sense to us, but again, it's just a theory. A theory informed by countless hours reading, researching, and thinking about what happened to Karen Silkwood on November 13th, 1974. But still, just a theory. Steve is part of a small army of people who've tried to investigate this case. Law enforcement, the accident investigator A.O. Pipkin, the private investigator Joe Royer, the state trooper Larry Dellinger, Karen's son Michael Meadows.

They've each carved off their own piece of this mystery and given us something to build on. I guess we can add our own names to that list now too. Our investigation is wrapping up, but we have one thing left to do, and it's a big thing. As we mentioned at the start of this episode, we've asked an accident investigator to review the case file we've gathered on Karen's accident, the new photos we took of the bumper in New Mexico, law enforcement reports, and Ayo Pipkin's original investigation materials, his photos, diagrams, and measurements of the crash site. After weeks of waiting and wondering, praying, hoping that he'd be able to make the deadline for our final episode,

we finally got the call that he was ready to talk. So we gathered Karen's children and sisters and A.O. Bipkin's daughter to hear the accident investigator's presentation. And what he told us? It wasn't what we were expecting. That's next time. Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood mystery is a production of ABC Audio in collaboration with Standing Bear Entertainment. I'm Mike Betcher.

My co-host, Bob Sanz, and I served as consulting producers on this podcast, along with Brent Donis. Thanks to the ABC News Investigative Unit and investigative producer, Jenny Wagnon-Korz, chief investigative reporter, Josh Margolin, reporter producer Sasha Peznick, and associate producer Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced

by senior producer Nancy Rosenbaum and Vika Aronson. Tracy Samuelson is our story editor, associate producer and fact checker Audrey Mostec. We had production help from Meg Fiero, story consultant Chris Donovan, supervising producer Sasha Aslanian, original music by Soundboard, mixing by Rick Kwan. Ariel Chester is our social media producer. Special thanks to Liz Alesi,

Katie Dendoss, Cindy Galley, and the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism. Josh Cohan is ABC Audio's director of podcast programming. Laura Mayer is our executive producer. This guy is an evil genius. He's the best serial killer that ever existed. He compared himself to Ted Bundy. The serial killer you don't know. Who is this guy? Pure evil. This is not just any killer. In his own words... Put my head right up to her ear and I said, Junior, this was coming. The hit True Crime series returns.

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