Fifty years ago tomorrow, Karen Silkwood, a 28-year-old plutonium plant worker, died in a fatal crash in Oklahoma. She was reportedly on her way to meet an investigative reporter with The New York Times to hand over documents she’d secretly been collecting at her job. The details surrounding her death and made famous by the movie “Silkwood” starring Meryl Streep, continue to be a mystery that haunts Oklahomans and the nation.
“Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery” is a gripping new podcast series from ABC Audio that reexamines her mysterious death with brand new reporting, hosted by veteran journalists Mike Boettcher and Bob Sands. It premieres today. Listen here.
Mike Boettcher was our guest on “Real News with Rick Outzen” this morning.
“I was a young radio reporter here in Oklahoma, and I covered the civil trial in 1979,” he said. “When I covered that trial and after it was over, I said, ‘Man, there are just so many questions unanswered.’ For decades as a conflict journalist working around the world, I covered a lot of different things, but one story always stuck in my mind and it was what really happened with Karen Silkwood. And so, I set out in my older age here to try to answer some of those questions.”
The four-part series unearths newly discovered and never-before-heard audio tapes recorded by two investigators decades apart. Rare interviews include Karen’s son, Michael Meadows, who was 5 years old when she died, and Karen’s sisters, Rosemary Silkwood Smith and Linda Silkwood Vincent. The series will also feature Steve Wodka, who worked for Karen’s union and launched her on the risky mission to gather evidence about problems at the plant, and David Burnham, The New York Times reporter Karen was driving to meet the night she died.
Boettcher has come across new evidence – the interview tapes of private investigator, Joe Royer, who worked on the case for Silkwood family in their civil lawsuit.
“We discovered that this investigator had kept audio tapes, but no one knew where they were. So we went to his widow and into a giant warehouse that looked like it was from Raiders of the Lost Ark with boxes piled high, and they pulled out six boxes that were Joe Roy’s investigative tapes on the Silkwood case. We went from container to container to container, spent a whole day there, and in the very last corner of the very last container, we found the box marked Karen Silkwood tapes.”
The journalist is still investigating Silkwood’s death and hopes the podcast will give them more leads. “We’re continuing with this investigation, and the final part, we are still working on that because we’re developing new information. What you’re going to hear is what we have at that moment, and I think you’re going to find it compelling, and it’s a crucial time in history.”
