Reading phoned a cooperative captain in the New Mexico state police intelligence division and hired Pinkerton Security to investigate him. That same day Kerr-McGee security chief James Reading began compiling a dossier on Pipkin. On November 19th Pipkin announced he had discovered substantial evidence - a fresh dent in the Honda’s rear bumper, inconsistencies with the highway’s contour and skid marks at the scene - that indicated a hit-and-run assailant had forced Silkwood off the road. Pipkin, a former Albuquerque, New Mexico, policeman, to check for foul play.
When the OCAW learned of the missing folder, however, it hired auto accident specialist A.O. But by the time Wodka, Stephens and Burnham retrieved the car from a garage the next day, the manila folder and documents were gone.īecause an autopsy showed traces of alcohol and a sedative in her bloodstream, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol ruled that Silkwood had fallen asleep and drifted off the road to her death. The highway patrolman who helped recover Silkwood’s body from a Highway 74 culvert a short distance from the plant says he noticed several documents scattered in the mud and tossed them in the back of her wrecked Honda. During the first week of November she was contaminated with plutonium on three consecutive days in what she felt was an attempt by Kerr-McGee to intimidate her.īut she refused to quit, and on November 13th she collected the results of her snooping in a manila folder and headed for a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma City to meet Wodka, her boyfriend Drew Stephens and New York Times reporter David Burnham. News of her spying soon leaked out, however. Steve Wodka, a young OCAW occupational health expert, helped persuade Silkwood to work undercover and gather company files which would corroborate her allegations. On September 26th, 1974, a few months after her election, Silkwood was invited to the OCAW’s Washington offices where she told the union’s legislative officials that Kerr-McGee’s plant was sloppy, dishonest and unsafe. Her coworkers respected her candor, and in 1974 they elected her to the local steering committee of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW). But as she learned about plutonium’s hazards she slowly turned into a critic of management. Silkwood believed in nuclear power and planned a future at Kerr-McGee when she first arrived in 1972. Dean McGee, his protégé and successor as head of the corporation, advised President Kennedy on defense policies and President Ford on energy. The late Robert Kerr, the company founder, was governor of Oklahoma, ran for president as a Democrat in 1952 and, at the time of his death in 1963, was one of the most powerful men in the Senate. In the early Seventies it helped pioneer the move to plutonium, a rare substance that is more dangerous and valuable than uranium. In 1951 the company became the first oil producer to decide that nuclear power could be a profitable supplement to petroleum and Kerr-McGee soon ranked as the country’s largest uranium supplier. Then she got a divorce, moved to Oklahoma City, headquarters for Kerr-McGee Corporation’s oil and nuclear complex, and found a job at its plutonium plant 20 miles away.įor a quarter-century Kerr-McGee, with assets approaching $1.5 billion, has been a leader in the nuclear industry. Until 1972 Silkwood had been an unassuming housewife who had dropped out of college and sacrificed a career in science for seven years of marriage. Karen Silkwood, 28 years old, a laboratory analyst at one of ten plutonium plants in the country, died on a lonely stretch of Highway 74 in the early-evening darkness on November 13th, 1974, when her tiny Honda Civic Hatchback ran off the road and smashed into the wing wall of a concrete culvert. In the opinion of a congressional investigator, the official handling of the case amounted to a cover-up. Then the top executive of the company that employed Silkwood interfered with a congressional reopening of the case, and the Justice Department joined in hamstringing that inquiry. The FBI had closed the case, leaving many questions officially unanswered.
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