Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery - Ep. 3: Contaminated

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

We retrace the final days of Karen’s life: she’s been so badly contaminated by radioactive material that men in hazmat suits show up to inspect her apartment, strip much of it down to the studs, and seal her possessions into 55-gallon drums for disposal. Karen grows fearful the contamination will kill her. Years after her death, Karen's family sues Kerr-McGee for the contamination and for the first time, her allegations against the company are tested in court. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. In October 1974, just about four weeks before her death, 1974, just about four weeks before her death, Karen Silkwood filed into the local Veterans Hall with about 20 or 30 other workers from Kermagee's nuclear fuel plant. And then two of the country's leading experts in nuclear physics told the crowd something most of them had never heard before. Plutonium-239 is at least 20,000 times more toxic than Cobra venom,

20,000 times more toxic than potassium cyanide, which is the gas used in gas chambers, a thousand times more toxic than heroin, and the thing that it causes is principally cancers. According to these scientists, the job these workers were doing, it was riskier than they thought. It could make them very, very sick, possibly even kill them. Steve Wodka, the union staffer who'd been working with Karen, had flown these experts to Oklahoma and recorded the meeting. At one point, he looked out over the

room of workers sitting in folding chairs and asked, Has the company ever explained what the consequences are of exposure to plutonium? No. Most workers hadn't heard much from Kermagee about the risks of high doses of plutonium exposure. Some workers eventually chimed in to say they'd been told it's like heavy metal poisoning or that it can cause bone cancer. Those things are true. But these scientists wanted the workers to know that's only part of the story. More importantly, it can also cause lung cancer. Because if you're dealing with plutonium dust like Karen and her co-workers were, you might wind up inhaling it. In that case, the scientists explained, plutonium gets lodged in

the lungs and stays there for months or years, and things in the body can go haywire. Cells get pretty stirred up, and when you get the cells riled up, they don't know how they should act. You know, they don't know that they're a lung really anymore, and they sort of start acting on their own. And that's cancer. It won't happen immediately, they explained, but eventually it could. And for some of the workers, this new information really freaked them out, including Karen. She knew exposure to plutonium was really serious, but this was the first she'd heard about lung cancer. If there is something going wrong, we are going to be susceptible to cancer. We're not going to know about it for 20 years.

And some of it's got to be done. She was far from the mic, so it's hard to make out every word. But what Karen said was, if we're going to be susceptible to cancer, and we're not going to know about it for 20 years, then something has got to be done. There was a not-so-subtle subtext to this meeting. It was meant to inform workers, yes, but also to remind them they needed the union to look out for them. Remember, there was an election coming the next week that could dissolve the union at the plant. Steve Watka made his pitch. You see, if we lose next week, you're not going to have anything. And I can't see things getting any better here. And I can only see them getting worse. From my

own personal experience, similar situations, when a union's been kicked out and the people have been at the mercy of a multi-billion dollar corporation like Kerr-McKee. One of Karen's fellow union leaders at the plant, Jack Tice, you heard him in the last episode, told us that not everyone who came to the safety meeting seemed persuaded, both about the health and safety claims and about keeping the union alive. Do you remember how people reacted to those doctors and what they had to say? Were they afraid? Did they not believe it? those doctors and what they had to say? Were they afraid?

Did they not believe it? I'm going to say it was split. Yeah. So it was a split workplace, you know, between union and non-union members. Absolutely. You know, you have people that hated unions and was resentful. Union participation was at an all-time low

and support was flagging. But when the election came, the union won, with 80 votes to keep the union, 61 against. The union got more votes than they had members, which meant even some non-union workers voted to keep the union. Steve Watka says it was a huge victory. We did get a call on October the 16th. There was no delay. I mean, they counted the votes, you know, right there. And Karen and Jack were very happy, very happy that we won.

The union had survived. Karen could put that worry to rest, but by mid-October 1974, Karen had just one month to live. A month that went quickly downhill. A month she spent worried about mysterious contamination incidents at work that left her increasingly convinced she was going to die. As Karen was trying to close in on the proof she needed to show there were big problems at Kerr-McGee, it felt like something dark was closing in on her. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood Mystery.

Episode 3, Contaminated. I'm Mike Boettcher. And I'm Bob Sands. A lot of what we know about Karen's final month is because of a lawsuit filed after her death. Her family sued Kerr-McGee in 1979. And last year, Bobby and I spent the better part of two weeks researching the Silkwood lawsuit, camped out in the University of Oklahoma's law library, poring over boxes of trial exhibits and hundreds of pages of court transcripts. The documents took me back 50 years to when I covered that dramatic trial in Oklahoma City. It gave Karen's family and supporters some relief and satisfaction, but only for a brief moment. You heard in the last episode, Karen had her first exposure to plutonium in July 1974.

Air filters showed there had been contamination in the lab she'd been working in. She was told her contamination was low. Plus, Karen hadn't learned the full picture of how dangerous plutonium exposure could be. She wasn't too worried. Kerr-McGee kept an eye on Karen's exposure levels for the next few weeks. And in terms of new exposures, things were kind of quiet for Karen from August through October. But in early November, Karen's contamination started to get a lot more serious. Serious and also mysterious.

Tuesday, November 5th. Eight days before Karen's death. Karen had been working with plutonium in a glove box. She waved her hands in front of a radiation monitor and they were contaminated. That meant a trip to the company's health physics office for a more thorough check. According to Richard Raschke, author of The Killing of Karen Silkwood,

the process went something like this. They would use a counter up and down your body to see whether they detected any contamination, like on your clothing, on your body. Click, click, click, click, click, click, you could hear it. The next thing is they took nasal swipes. Put a cotton on a stick up your nose and then hold it against the counter. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. A health physics officer checked Karen and got readings on her coveralls, her body, and on a nasal smear,

according to court documents. But she'd been working in a sealed glove box. There was no leak in the glove, and there was no radiation in the room. How on earth had she gotten contaminated? Karen headed to the showers to try to wash the radiation off, but this wasn't any normal shower. It was high-pressure water beating down on her skin, plus scrubbing at the radioactive contamination with Tide detergent and bleach. Here's Steve Watka again. You're essentially rubbing off that layer of skin. So your skin is becoming raw. It was a painful, miserable process. And turns out, according to one expert we talked to, it could also be a very bad idea

to rub someone's skin raw when they've been exposed to plutonium. It could actually allow the plutonium to get into the body instead of removing it. These days, decontamination protocols try to avoid damaging the skin. After the scrubdown, Karen was sent home and told to collect samples of her urine and stool for five days, which was standard practice after that kind of exposure. standard practice after that kind of exposure. The company wanted to monitor how much plutonium was passing through Karen's body as a way of estimating how much internal contamination she had. On the next day, Karen went back to work. Wednesday, November 6th. Seven days before her death. Karen got to the plant just before 8 a.m. She did some paperwork and didn't handle any plutonium, according to trial testimony.

That day, the union had its first bargaining meeting with the company to negotiate their new contract. So on her way from the laboratory to the meeting... She checks herself, and she's hot. This is the second day in a row. It was on her arm, which meant another trip to the health physics department, where they tried to wash the contamination off with soap and water.

It didn't budge. They decontaminated her partway. They can't get part of it off. It's actually fixed in her skin. Karen was upset. She was going to be late to this bargaining meeting. They can't get part of it off. It's actually fixed in her skin. Karen was upset. She was going to be late to this bargaining meeting. She asked the health physics techs if she could go.

She's allowed to go to the meeting. She goes to the meeting. She comes back. And then they scrub her down finally to get the contamination off. When the Tide and bleach mixture didn't work, they added even harsher chemicals, which finally did the trick. But then she asked for a nasal smear, and that turned up positive. In fact, the head of the health physics department would later say that Karen's nasal smear readings were about as high as they were the afternoon before,

which was odd because she'd just been decontaminated. And not just once, it was her second scrub down in two days. Why was her nasal smear still turning a positive? According to trial transcripts, Karen was distraught and visibly upset. The health physics techs irrigated and decontaminated her nose and told her to come back to their office the next day, first thing, even before going to the lab. So, the next day. Thursday, November 7th. Six days before Karen's death.

She parks her car, she walks in the front door, and she's hot. Contaminated again. Third day in a row. Not only that, her nasal smear readings were even higher than they had been the day before. And she hadn't even started work yet. The levels that they measured on her on the 7th of November were the highest levels they claimed they had ever seen on anybody at that plant. They found contamination on Karen's face, right hand, left index finger, and a few other places on her body. They did a preliminary test of her urine samples and found plutonium there too.

The readings were much higher than they expected. The health physics technicians checked Karen's car and her locker for contamination. Both were clean. She had another brutal decontamination shower and the inside of her nose was irrigated multiple times also. This was all really weird. Karen and her urine kits were registering high on these radiation meters, even though she'd been decontaminated the day before. And all she'd done was gone home and come back to work. That's clear proof that it's not something in the plant. It must be something off-site,

that it's got to be something at her apartment. So three health physics techs and Karen got into a car and drove over to her apartment. They have a Geiger counter, and they walk in the front door surveying and the Geiger counter is going off. Their instruments had detected radiation. High levels in the bathroom and kitchen and lower levels in other rooms in the apartment.

Two of the most contaminated items in Karen's apartment were packages of bologna and cheese in the apartment. Two of the most contaminated items in Karen's apartment were packages of bologna and cheese in the fridge, which is, again, really bizarre. But first order of business, the plutonium needed to be cleaned up. So Karen's apartment got its own version of a decontamination shower. They come back with their moon suits to start ripping the place apart.

Well, when I got down there, they were still loading stuff in barrels. Jim Smith was a manager at the plant. You heard him in the last episode talking about how production pressure at the plant caused all kinds of problems. He was down at Karen's apartment the day it got cleaned out. Years later, Jim described what he saw to a documentary film crew. Everything went. The refrigerator, the couch, coffee tables, the television set. I think they took the toilet off the floor.

Baseboards off around the... Just cleaned it out. Left nothing. Jim Smith told the film producers he remembered Karen standing outside her apartment, watching as everything she owned got packed up and hauled away. She was down there,

standing out front bawling, and then she disappeared. I don't know where she went. Did you talk to her that night? No, she was just about half hysterical. Karen's apartment was a toxic, empty shell. She moved into a hotel. Emotionally, physically, she was at a real low.

But then, she got some unexpectedly good news. Good news that would reveal yet another mystery. Karen wasn't the only one who wanted to understand how plutonium got all over her apartment. Kerr-McGee wanted answers, too, and early on they started looking at one person, Karen. Kerr-McGee lawyers talked to Karen that day they found plutonium in her apartment, trying to get her to admit she was somehow at fault. Karen stood firm. She hadn't contaminated herself. In a signed statement taken by a Kermagee attorney, Karen said, I have no knowledge of what happened, but I feel the contamination is coming out of my body. At some point, Karen left and went to her boyfriend Drew's house. He talked about that day with ABC News the following year.

She showed up down here and she was shaking like a leaf and she was hysterical. She was incoherent and she kept saying over and over again that I'm going to die. Steve Wodka talked to Karen that day too. She tells me what's going on. She gives me some of the data on the counts that they were finding on her. And we were really concerned that she was going to die, die immediately, because she had gotten a huge dose. If she didn't die immediately, she would be sick for a long time until she passed. No one knew how much plutonium Karen had inhaled or ingested, No one knew how much plutonium Karen had inhaled or ingested,

so Steve was worried that she might have acute radiation poisoning and would need to be hospitalized immediately. The presence of plutonium, loose, outside the plant, wasn't just a health issue for Karen. It was now a matter of national security. The Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, which regulated the plant, needed to investigate. The situation was blowing up. Karen was worried and asked Steve to come to Oklahoma.

I said, look, I'll fly right down. Don't talk to the company. Don't talk to the AEC until I get there. So I fly right down the next morning and I get there. Drew and Karen, they picked me up at the airport and she was in pretty bad shape. I could tell she was wearing like, you know wearing big sunglasses and she took them off and there were these really dark, dark circles under her eyes and she was gaunt. She didn't look well at all. Karen would spend the last days of her life going through hours of grueling interviews. Literally, she's being interviewed back to back by AEC people, by the company's medical advisor, and this goes on all day.

They asked Karen for all the details she could remember, her medical history, her professional history, trying to piece together what had happened. It was exhausting. She is crying. She says, look, I'm crying. The tears are burning her skin because her skin was so raw from all the decontaminations of her skin. For weeks, Karen had been undeterred in her secret mission to prove Kerr-McGee was falsifying quality control documents. But with all these contaminations, she seemed to waver. She called her family in Nederland, Texas, and her sister, Rosemary Silkwood Smith, says she was really low,

like the fight was draining out of her. One weekend, and I had been over at Mother and Dad's, and Karen was hysterical one night when she called and said, they're trying to kill me. And I didn't know what she was talking about. She was asking me to come up there. I was working. I had two children at the time. My husband at the time said,

no, it's virtually impossible for you to go. And I was upset about that. But I knew she was in trouble because Karen didn't lie. And she didn't call me out of the blue like that. And was it really out of character for her to use the word hysterics and they're trying to kill me? Was that kind of feeling coming from her unusual?

Very, very. She would never have done something like that unless it was the truth. As you heard in the last episode, Karen told Steve that she wasn't going to quit Kermagee until the plant was shut down or the safety conditions improved. But after multiple contaminations, she felt differently. Her sister, Linda Silkwood-Vwood Vincent, remembers she wanted to leave. I remember Mom getting a call two or three weeks before she was killed,

and she had told us then, told Mom then, she was ready to come home. She wanted to come home. She just had some things she had to finish. She had to finish what she had started at Kermagee, trying to help the people there. Finish what she started. In other words, she just needed to close the chapter on her undercover mission and deliver those documents to the New York Times. After Karen was contaminated three days in a row and plutonium turned up in her apartment,

Kerr-McGee arranged for her to go through more sophisticated testing. They sent Karen, her roommate, and her boyfriend Drew, who'd also spent time at the apartment in early November, to the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. early November, to the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. You might know Los Alamos as the central place where nuclear physicists coordinated their research for the Manhattan Project. Yes, that Manhattan Project, the one that produced America's first atomic bomb. The Los Alamos scientists put Karen through what's called a whole-body counter, scientists put Karen through what's called a whole body counter, a sophisticated machine that could measure how much radioactive material was inside her organs. The doctors at Los Alamos found

that Karen did in fact have internal plutonium contamination. We have a copy of their report. But they told her not to worry, that her counts were below the AEC's permissible level for plutonium workers. She wouldn't die of radiation poisoning, and this exposure wouldn't give her cancer, they said. She was going to be okay, and so were her roommate and boyfriend. Drew called Steve Watka with the results. Now we have some basis to believe that she's going to make it. She's going to survive. It was good news, and Karen was feeling much better after these results. But big questions still remained. How did Karen get contaminated in the first place?

How in the world did someone who was increasingly worried about plutonium get exposed to it over and over? How did it get on her skin, into her lungs, and onto the food in her refrigerator? How did this toxic material somehow leap from the protected areas at the plant, into Karen's body, and into her home. Karen never figured it out before she died, but it turns out there was a clue in Karen's urine and stool kits. See, the full analysis of Karen's urine and fecal samples took over a month to process, so the results from her collections in late October and early November 1974 wouldn't come back until after her death on November 13th.

But when they did come back, they were really hot. Quote, astronomical, one attorney said later in court. Hot to the point where a Kermagee radiochemist could see plutonium with the naked eye in Karen's samples. The plutonium couldn't have passed through Karen's body, the radiochemist later testified in court. He said her kits were unequivocally spiked. Someone must have taken some plutonium and intentionally put it into the sample jars before she used them. And once that plutonium got into Karen's kits, we do know how it got all over her apartment

and into her body. Here's Richard Raschke again, author of The Killing of Karen Sokwood. It turned out that she was giving a sample that day, a urine sample that day, was giving a sample that day, a urine sample that day, and that she accidentally spilled some urine on the floor and wiped it up, and that her bologna and cheese sandwich was sitting in the bathroom. And so when she picked it up to take it to her bag that she was going to carry into the plant, she contaminated it. She put it in the refrigerator until it was going to carry into the plant. She contaminated it. She put it in the refrigerator until it was time to go to work. We don't know if she ever ate the sandwich, but according to the AEC, she had ingested plutonium. All of this, the spiked kits, Karen accidentally spilling her urine jar.

It all explains a lot of the strange and alarming events during this period. It explains how high levels of contamination got into her apartment as she cleaned up the spill, touched other items like that bologna sandwich, and put it back in the fridge. It explains why she kept showing up for work contaminated even when she hadn't been working with radioactive materials. And it explains the disconnect, why the levels in urine and fecal samples were higher than the levels Los Alamos found in her body.

No one disputes that Karen's kits were spiked. The only question was, who spiked them? The AEC investigation was never able to determine who spiked Karen's kits. And later at trial, Kerr-McGee would argue Karen did it to herself, that she wanted to embarrass the company, create problems so she could later blame them. Karen's good friend Don Gummo didn't buy it. I am absolutely sure in my heart of hearts that she did not contaminate those urine and fecal samples. Just because of the respect and fear she had for plutonium, I can't imagine that she took a sample of plutonium home with her and

contaminated her apartment in that food. I don't believe it. Steve Watkins says there was something fishy about the timing of the spiking too, because he says it all started one week after the union won the decertification election. We have the entire history of all of her urine samples from the beginning of 1974 on. And they're all basically normal until you get down to this one week after the union wins a decert. As you heard in an earlier episode, Steve's been spending his retirement reinvestigating Karen's case, and the spiked kits is the part of Karen's story Steve has really zeroed in on. To Steve, the timing of the spiked kits smacks of retaliation against Karen for her union organizing. The urine and fecal kits were stored on open shelves in a hallway in the plant so they were easy for employees to grab on their way out. There were names on them so anyone could

have grabbed Karen's kits and tampered with them. Someone from Kermagee management or a fellow plant worker with a vendetta. Karen wasn't universally liked. There were mixed feelings around the plant about the advocacy work she was doing. Steve thinks whoever spiked Karen's samples was doing it to get her to quit, intimidate her, or make her give up. It would have crippled Silkwood's ability to be in the contract negotiations, to complain about health and safety. I mean, she would have been contaminated. She would have been out of the plant. She would be dealing with all her health issues

rather than trying to work on the contract negotiations. You know, it was a good strategy because that's exactly what happened. And Steve didn't know it at the time, but Karen had allegedly stumbled onto a new problem at the plant, something more alarming than lax safety protocols or even falsifying important quality control reports. One night, about a month before Karen's death, she called a friend and former Kermagee employee, James Knoll,

and she told him something that she hadn't told anyone else, at least not that we know of. Can you tell us about that phone call? She talked about the people there being hired were quite young and had no experience and weren't trained properly. But her biggest concern was the missing material. She was really distraught about missing plutonium. You know, material unaccounted for. Material unaccounted for.

It has a funny acronym, MUF. And Karen told James that there was a very specific amount of MUF, in this case plutonium, missing from the Kermagee plant. 17 kilograms are just over 40 pounds. That might not sound like a lot, but it'd be more than enough to make a crude nuclear weapon and kill thousands of people, if not more. The AEC warned around this time that the instructions for how to make a simple nuclear weapon were out there. So all anyone would need, say a terrorist or foreign adversary, was access to this loose, unauthorized material, and they could fashion their own homemade nuke. So, based on what James Knoll told us, this means Karen had gone from trying to improve the working conditions for herself and her co-workers to identifying a possible national security threat.

Karen didn't tell James why she thought there was plutonium missing from the plant or how she discovered it. We know that she was snooping around, but why she told James and not Steve or anyone else at the union is also a bit of a mystery. It's one of about a million questions we'd love to ask her. But Karen Silkwood was out of time. Just a few weeks after she called James, she got in her Honda Civic, drove seven miles down the highway, and crashed into that concrete wall. But the battle between Karen and Kerr-McGee

didn't die with Karen. If anything, it only heated up. Karen never got to meet New York Times investigative reporter David Burnham. But just a few days after she died, he published a report about her death and the safety concerns she was trying to raise. Steve Wodka says that once Burnham's article came out, things just broke wide open. About two months after Karen died, the AEC published its own findings about the allegations Karen and the union had raised, the ones she brought to D.C. in that initial meeting with Steve Wodka and the OCAW. The agency was able to wholly or partially substantiate 20 out of the 39 claims Karen

had made. Incidents of messiness and neglect, like leaky pipes, people getting contaminated, and cleanup not being done quickly, are thoroughly enough. And people storing plutonium samples in desk drawers. Those things were substantiated, wholly or in part. But the agency didn't substantiate other things. Like Karen's main allegation, the one we heard her talk about in that phone call with Steve Watka, the lack of adequate training or instruction on the hazards of the job. All in all, the AEC said the failings by Kermagee, quote, did not pose a hazard to workers or the public. At least that's what they said publicly. But we know from a memo from the AEC's regional director that, privately, the AEC met with the company's CEO, Dean McGee, just a few months after Karen's death. The memo later came out in congressional hearings and showed that the AEC told Dean McGee that there were, quote,

serious management control problems at the plant, old equipment prone to breakdowns, personnel turnover, inadequate training or lack of supervision. And the memo also said, quote, Kerr-McGee management are not committed to as low as possible exposures to plutonium. Kerr-McGee went into lockdown mode, not commenting on Karen's death or the allegations she'd made. But again, privately, it was another story. The company started its own investigation. It started polygraphing its workers, polygraphing its workers, 237 in total, including Karen's friend, Don Gummo.

Well, the deal was, if your nose was clean, you shouldn't have any problems about taking a lie detector test so we can find out if you took plutonium. So I thought, well, that's a fair deal, because I didn't take any plutonium. So Don went for his polygraph test. And they had a whole nother list of questions they wanted to ask. They were interested to know what I knew about Karen is what they were interested in. So they ask about drug use. They ask about taking plutonium. They ask about things that you would expect them to. And then they wanted to know, well, have you ever slept with her? Well, do you know anybody else who's slept with her?

And they're asking me these questions while I'm sitting there wired to this machine. It was kind of unpleasant. Workers told Steve Watka they were asked whether they were working with the union. The purpose of the polygraphing was not to find out who was telling the truth and who was lying. The purpose of the polygraphing was to figure out who had been talking to Silkwood, who had been talking to Watka, and who else might have known what else was going on, so that any of the people who we were working with could be either isolated or fired. And Steve says that's exactly what happened. The company wound up transferring or firing employees at the plant, notably Karen's friend Don Gummo and her fellow

union leaders, who'd also raised safety concerns at the plant. As for the intel collected on Karen, it would take some years, but Kerr-McGee would put that to use, too. After Burnham's reporting in the New York Times, it wasn't long before Karen's story swept across the country. The issue she tried so hard to bring attention to in her life became national news stories after her death. ABC News did an investigation. You may have read or heard about the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood when it happened in November. On the face of it, it was a simple case of an auto accident caused by a drugged or drowsy driver.

But there were nagging other facts. National Public Radio produced a six-part series. Karen Silkwood was mysteriously contaminated by plutonium just eight days before she died. And the Atomic Energy Commission in its public reports never established the circumstances of her contamination. There was an in-depth article in Ms. Magazine. Even Penthouse did an investigation. The New York Times also did a deep dive into the missing

nuclear material. A Kerr-McGee executive told the paper that at times, the plant where Karen worked couldn't account for up to 60 pounds of plutonium. And remember, that's way more than you'd need to make a nuclear bomb. And it wasn't just Kerr-McGee in the hot seat. Its regulator, the Atomic Energy Commission, had to answer to the missing nuclear material allegations, too. had to answer to the missing nuclear material allegations too. They did an investigation into the facilities they regulated across the country and determined that there were thousands of pounds of missing nuclear material. They conceded that the material could fall into the hands of a terrorist group and be fashioned into a crude bomb,

but they reportedly pointed out there were no unresolved cases of theft. After these revelations, the AEC reportedly tightened security at facilities like Kermagee. And what about Karen's allegations that Kermagee was falsifying important quality control reports, potentially covering up defects in the fuel rods it was making. Well, the AEC investigated the claim and reported that, yes, a worker had in fact touched up defects in these reports. He admitted to making changes, but said it was to avoid more work, not to hide faults in the fuel rods. The agency dismissed the claim as an isolated case. The company who bought the fuel rods from Kermagee said they rejected some of them,

but the vast majority performed safely. The meltdown that the union feared never happened. And then things kind of quieted down for a couple of years. That is until we got the first of two major investigations, two big attempts to understand how plutonium escaped the plant and contaminated Karen and her apartment. The first was a congressional hearing in 1976, something Karen's family had really campaigned for.

Hollywood filmmaker Buzz Hirsch spent a lot of time with Karen's father, Bill Silkwood. He was sitting there at a card table and he had a typewriter in front of him and he was punching keys in the typewriter with one finger, writing letters to congressmen trying to get, you know, some interest in investigating his daughter's death. Buzz is now 80. He produced the 1983 movie Silkwood, about the final months of Karen's life. As Buzz researched Karen's story, he spent weeks in Nederland, Texas, hanging out with Bill Silkwood. They'd drink vodka on Bill's front porch. On the fireplace, you know, wall behind him was this big picture of Karen, and he was very

fond of Karen, and he was crushed when she died. The congressional hearings Bill had helped push for ended up being a flop. They devolved into a spectacle. The subcommittee hit a brick wall trying to get information from the FBI and wound up threatening the Department of Justice with a subpoena. And the question about safeguards at the plant sent the hearings down a rabbit hole involving an FBI informant with possible ties to the Soviet Union. A fascinating story, but a distraction from Karen's case. The hearings ended anticlimactically. They were indefinitely postponed and then never restarted.

So, the first big attempt to get some accountability for Karen's contamination didn't provide many answers. But Karen's father Bill had another idea. He'd take Kermagee to court. But as 1976 was coming to a close, he was running out of time. The statute of limitations was running out. Plus, it would take almost half a million dollars to hire a team and do all the investigative work it was going to take to beat Kerr-McGee in court. And Bill Silkwood didn't have that kind of money. The National Organization for Women helped fundraise. They partnered with civil rights advocates, social justice groups, progressive Catholics, and other religious leaders, environmentalists, and anti-nuke folks,

all with their own interest in the Silkwood cause. It was then that Karen really took off as a national symbol for feminists. Karen Silkwood is dead. She lived her last week in terror. She was killed for what should be every person's right, the right to better our conditions. She became a martyr for the anti-nuclear cause. Popular musicians like Jackson Brown, Bonnie Raitt, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash played Karen Silkwood Defense Fund concerts, and folk singers from around the country wrote odes to Karen.

Karen Silkwood was a worker in a nuclear plant. She worked six months, then joined a picket line. As money was being raised, the Silkwood attorneys were hard at work investigating the case and preparing for trial. The Silkwood legal team was an uneasy alliance of four lawyers, a couple of liberal activist attorneys, a local Oklahoma attorney, and a showboating charismatic lawyer from Wyoming who was known to be one of the best trial attorneys in the country. One of the young idealistic lawyers was Art Angel. It was the biggest case, of course, even now, 45 years later, that I've ever worked on.

Angel's home office has mementos from the Silkwood trial up on the wall, a framed article from the L.A. Times about the verdict, and pictures on the steps of the Supreme Court of him and Bill Silkwood. Not only is it David and Goliath in terms of the disproportionate resources and, you know, the people that there were, but we were a ragtag bunch. Our paralegals,

one of whom had been a Haight-Ashbury street person, you know, we had two priests who were our investigators and, you know, office organizers. In March of 1979, the Silkwood versus Kermagee lawsuit finally entered federal court in Oklahoma City. Karen Silkwood's family was seeking up to $70 million in damages. After the disappointment of the congressional hearings, this was the Silkwood family's best chance at vindicating their daughter to validate her safety concerns at the plant and possibly shed some light on her contamination and death. As I mentioned before, I covered the trial as a young reporter, and one of the things I remember was it was a civil trial, yes, but judging by the suspense in that grand ceremonial courtroom and the attention this trial

got, you would have thought it was a criminal case. All the major news networks sent reporters, and hundreds of people would wait outside after the proceedings to watch the attorneys and Karen's family come out. Art Angel says the main question for the jury was whether Kerr-McGee was negligent. That they were responsible for her contamination and that they ran the plant in a negligent or grossly negligent way. The Silkwood team first had to present the dangers of plutonium to the jury. They talked about Karen's autopsy, which showed radiation in her lungs, liver, lymph nodes, even her bones. And several doctors testified to her elevated risk of cancer.

One of the most memorable parts of the trial was when the Silkwood lawyers put Dr. John Goffman on the stand, a scientist who'd worked on the Manhattan Project and was the third person in the world to ever handle plutonium. The trial attorney from Wyoming, Jerry Spence, questioned Goffman on the stand. Spence was this larger-than-life, charismatic guy, the guy who kind of became the star of this trial. He's up at the front of the courtroom in his buckskin jacket with fringe. And he asks Goffman, doctor, are you saying that at her death she had lung cancer? Goffman answers, I'm saying unequivocally that a person like Karen Silkwood, exposed to that much plutonium, is married to lung cancer. They are inseparable.

Again, attorney Art Angel. So, you know, it artfully linked the scientific stuff with something that, you know, you can kind of emotionally connect with as well. Kerr-McGee's attorneys brought in their own doctor to speak to Karen's contamination. And he said, quote, there was no evidence of any acute injury from her contamination, nor any evidence of any radiation sickness, nor any evidence of any cancer as of November 13th. He said, quote, based on reasonable medical certainty, Silkwood, had she lived, would have had no health effects from her exposure. So, if Karen hadn't died in that car wreck in November 1974, would cancer have ended her life prematurely? Or would she have been fine like the Kermagee witness said? It's impossible to say for sure. We talked to one expert who said, knowing what we know today,

Karen's exposure in 1974 might have slightly increased her risk for cancer above average for the general population. But that risk was still relatively low. But the Silkwood expert witness, Goffman, also made the point that Kerr-McGee was negligent in the way they educated, or better yet, didn't educate their plant workers about the dangers of plutonium. In his review of the company's safety handbook, the word CANCER, Goffman said on the stand, should be on every page and probably in caps. Quote, The second thing the Silkwood side had to prove was that it was Kerr-McGee's negligence

that allowed the plutonium to escape the plant and make its way into Karen's apartment. Because, as Spence explained, if the lion got away, Kerr-McGee has to pay. It's that simple. That's the law. If the lion got away, Kerr-McGee has to pay. Meaning, since Kerr-McGee's plutonium got away into Karen's home, they were responsible for Karen's contamination, and they owed the Silkwood estate. So Spence tried to convince the jury that Kerr-McGee was the kind of lax operation where plutonium could escape without people noticing. They brought in Don Hammock, an Oklahoma State trooper turned operator at Kermagee's plutonium plant. He

testified that, quote, there was no security at the plant. What do you mean there was no security? Jerry Spence asked him. There was nobody to check or see what anybody was taking out. You could have taken it out of there any way you wanted to do it, Hammock said. How could you have taken it out? You could put it in your pocket if you wanted to. How much could you take out? All you could carry, Hammock said. And remember the 40 pounds of missing plutonium that Karen called her ex-coworker James Knoll about? Well, that came up too. There was a dramatic moment before the trial even started. The judge was considering testimony alleging the smuggling of nuclear material out of the plant.

And after a closed-door meeting with high-ranking officials from the FBI and the CIA, the judge said the testimony wouldn't be allowed due to national security concerns. He later wrote in his memoir that any disclosure of what he learned in that meeting, quote, would have international repercussions and endanger the lives of secret operatives and greatly damage our national security. But also, he said, he didn't think the information had any relevance to the Silkwood case. And then during the trial, Jim Smith, the plant manager you heard earlier in this episode, testified that on Kermagee's watch, 40 pounds of plutonium

could have gone missing, just like Karen had alleged. Kermagee acknowledged that there was some unaccounted for material, but that it wasn't missing, and it hadn't left the plant. Instead, they said, it was just inside their equipment, spread over tanks, surfaces, glove boxes, and nearly a mile of piping throughout the building. They said Karen's contamination didn't happen because of their negligence. Instead, they repeated a familiar argument. Karen contaminated herself. And Art Angel says they tried to prove that by attacking her lifestyle.

Their strategy was to make her an other. She is not like you because she lived with a lesbian. She's not like you because she smokes pot. She's not like you because she didn't stay in her place and was talking back to and being insubordinate to her bosses. It was really, don't believe her, don't rule for her, because your lifestyle and your background are different from hers. Reporters asked Karen's parents, Bill and Merle Silkwood, how they felt about the attacks on their daughter. Kerr McGee implicated your daughter.

You might say that they even tried to smear her. How do you feel about some of the things they said? The same thing that's been going on since she was killed there. It's nothing but a cover-up, a sloppy job that they do. And really, it's the only defense they had. How about you, Mrs. Silkwood? How did that make you feel? Well, it made me feel bad,

but I should be used to it. They've been doing it since she died, but I know it's not true, so I can live with it. Kerr-McGee's attorneys argued that the company took good care of Karen during her contamination. They sent her to Los Alamos for testing, the finest medical facility and the finest medical personnel in the country. Only for Karen to scheme behind their backs as they saw it, manufacturing a safety incident to embarrass the company and use as leverage to improve the bargaining position of the union. In their closing arguments, Kerr-McGee lawyers said Karen worked with Steve Watka and the OCAW to, quote, In total, the trial lasted nearly three months. The attorneys interviewed over 30 witnesses. The jury deliberated for almost 24 hours. And when it was finally time for them to return their verdict, I remember filing into the crowded courtroom. About 200 of us packed tight,

and when the verdict was read, I don't think a single one of us was breathing. Art Angel remembers that outside, a thunderstorm raged. You know, it was like a Hollywood movie director had choreographed each detail. There was a hush in the courtroom where everybody was waiting for the jury. And the thunderclaps were kind of punctuating as the jury read off the answers to the questions. One. Do you find that Karen Silkwood intentionally carried from work to her apartment

the plutonium that caused her contamination? The jury said no. And two, do you find Kermagee Nuclear Corporation was negligent in its operation of the facility so as to allow the escape

of plutonium from the facility and cause the contamination of Karen Silkwood. The jury said yes. That was it. Kerr-McGee was negligent. The Silkwood family had won. The jury awarded the Silkwood estate $10.5 million in damages. ABC reporters caught Karen's parents after the verdict was read. I feel like Karen has been vindicated, and what she was saying was true, and I think the American public believes her now. The McGee Corporation out there was running a sloppy organization. It was unsafe.

And the health conditions were very poor. That's what she was saying. I just think it's wonderful and I'm finally glad that they've got Karen's name clear. She was only trying to help those people get a clean plant. She was going to quit and come home. She was just trying to help those people get a clean plant. She was going to quit and come home. She was just trying to help. The Silkwood case was a landmark case. It established an important legal precedent that a nuclear facility could be held responsible for damages outside their facility.

After the verdict, Karen's friends and supporters drove out to Crescent, to Highway 74. They stuck a sign in the hard red clay near the crash site. In flowy, wood-burned script, the sign listed Karen's birth date, the day she died, and the day she was, quote, vindicated, the day the jury gave its verdict. And if only it ended here. But it didn't. The verdict was eventually overturned on a technicality, then appealed until it made its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Twice. U.S. Supreme Court. Twice. The whole legal battle ended in a settlement in August 1986,

12 years after Karen's death. Kermagee paid Karen's estate almost $1.4 million and admitted to no wrongdoing or liability for Karen's contamination. But none of these court proceedings dealt with Karen's death. And according to Karen's sisters, Linda and Rosemary, their father really struggled with the fact that no one was ever charged in Karen's death. Until the very end of Bill's life in 2004, he was sure someone killed Karen. And Linda says he never stopped looking for proof that could lead to a conviction. I always thought by now we would have known something. So it kind of surprises me we don't.

Somebody out there feels like they've gotten one over on the American public. But I think anybody who's familiar with the case, they know. They know the truth. They see. You see. Or you haven't worked on it this long. Right? True. Very true. Next time,

we travel to New Mexico to re-examine a critical piece of physical evidence from Karen's accident. And we dig into the decades-old recordings of a private investigator and the theory he was closing in on. Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery, is a production of ABC Audio in collaboration with Standing Bear Entertainment. I'm Mike Boettcher. My co-hosts Bob Sands and I

served as consulting producers on this podcast, along with Brent Donis. Thanks to the ABC News investigative unit and investigator producer Jenny Wagnon-Kortz, chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin, reporter producer Sasha Pezenik, and associate producer Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced by Vika Aronson. Nancy Rosenbaum was our Senior Producer. Tracy Samuelson was our Story Editor. Associate Producer and Fact Checker, Audrey Mostick.

Story Consultant, Chris Donovan. Supervising Producer, Sasha Aslanian. Original Music by Soundboard. Mixing by Rick Kwan. Arielle Chester was our social media producer. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Katie Dindas, 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.