KAREN SILKWOOD

THE CLAIM

That Karen Silkwood was deliberately contaminated with plutonium to intimidate her, and that she was run off the road and killed to prevent her handing documents to a journalist.

THE THEORY, AS ITS PROPONENTS TELL IT

This file separates cleanly into a proven part and a disputed part, and the proven part is substantial.

Silkwood worked at a Kerr-McGee plutonium plant and was a union activist gathering evidence of safety failures, including allegations that fuel rod inspection negatives were being retouched to hide faulty welds.

In early November 1974 she tested positive for plutonium contamination on successive days. Her apartment was found contaminated, including bologna and cheese in her refrigerator, which is difficult to explain by accidental workplace transfer. The plutonium was from the plant.

On 13 November she left a union meeting to drive to Oklahoma City to meet a New York Times reporter and a union official, reportedly carrying a folder of documents. Her car left the road and hit a culvert. She died. No folder was found in the car.

An investigator hired by the union concluded from damage to the rear bumper that another vehicle had struck her from behind. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol concluded she had fallen asleep, noting methaqualone in her blood and a lack of skid marks.

WHAT IS KNOWN

The contamination is established and its source was the plant. How it reached her apartment has never been explained.

A federal civil jury found Kerr-McGee liable in 1979 and awarded $10.5 million, later reduced on appeal and eventually settled for $1.38 million without admission of liability. The verdict concerned the contamination, not the death.

The crash investigation is genuinely disputed. The rear-damage analysis has been contested, and the state's sleep-at-the-wheel conclusion has been criticised as reached quickly.

The plant was closed in 1975. Congressional and Atomic Energy Commission inquiries followed, and some of her allegations about quality control were substantiated.

EVIDENCE FOR

• Plutonium contamination inside her home, including in refrigerated food, from a sealed facility.
• A civil jury verdict holding the company liable for the contamination.
• The documents she was reportedly carrying were not recovered from the vehicle.
• Substantiation of at least some of her underlying safety allegations.

EVIDENCE AGAINST (THE MURDER CLAIM)

• The official crash investigation found no evidence of another vehicle and did find sedatives in her system.
• The rear bumper damage has an innocent explanation and the analysis supporting impact was commissioned by an interested party.
• Whether she was carrying documents at all rests on her own statements to others rather than on any independent record.
• A contamination intended to intimidate would be a bizarre choice, since it guaranteed investigation and publicity.

ASSESSMENT

Contested, with the contamination proven and the death unresolved. This office finds the civil verdict significant and the murder claim unestablished. What has never been explained, in fifty years, is how plutonium from a sealed facility ended up in a union activist's refrigerator during the weeks she was collecting evidence against her employer. That single fact is why the crash has never been allowed to settle as an accident, and it is a fair reason.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE THE GRADE

• Proven: the contamination. A federal civil jury found Kerr-McGee liable in 1979, and plutonium from a sealed facility was found in her apartment, including in refrigerated food. How it got there has never been explained in fifty years.
• Not established: the murder. The official investigation found no evidence of a second vehicle and did find sedatives in her blood, and the rear-damage analysis supporting impact was commissioned by an interested party.
• Unrecovered: the documents she was reportedly carrying. That she had them at all rests on her statements to others rather than on any independent record.

FURTHER READING

• Karen Silkwood · Wikipedia
• Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp., US federal litigation (1979 to 1986)
• Richard Rashke, The Killing of Karen Silkwood (1981)