CONTROVERSIES

WERE THEY MURDERED?

KAREN SILKWOOD

Victim: Karen Gay Silkwood was a 28-year-old laboratory worker in the Kerr-McGee Corporation's Cimarron facility, a plant near Oklahoma City which manufactures highly radioactive plutonium fuel for nuclear reactors. She had begun work at the plant in the fall of 1972, after her six-year marriage had broken up. Her three children were left in the custody of their father after he remarried.

Silkwood joined the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union (OCAW) and was elected to the union's governing committee in the spring of 1974. Throughout that summer she noticed a rapid decline in safety standards at the plant after a production speed-up caused a high worker turnover. As a result, newly hired employees assumed positions for which they had received little training. She started taking notes on what she saw and interviewing workers who had become contaminated or who had reported safety violations. Silkwood herself became contaminated by airborne particles and had to go through the decontamination process. She and two other members of the union's steering committee were invited to Washington to the OCAW national offices, where she told union legislative officials that the plant's procedures were sloppy and unsafe. These officials were the first to inform her that plutonium, one of the most toxic substances known, was believed to cause cancer. The officials asked her to work undercover to gather company files as corroborating evidence of mismanagement. She continued to take notes at the lab and relayed her findings to union official Steve Wodka in Washington when she had collected contamination reports and information on defective rods. After she again became contaminated and no source at the plant was discovered, inspectors went to her apartment, where both her bathroom and kitchen were found to be extremely "hot." Since plutonium by law has to be kept under the strictest security, questions arose as to how any had escaped from the nuclear facility.

During the six days before she died Silkwood spoke to investigators from the Atomic Energy Commission and the Oklahoma State Health Dept., attempting to explain how she had gotten contaminated in her own home. Silkwood supporters later claimed that Kerr-McGee had planted the plutonium in her apartment to scare her off her union activities, while Kerr-McGee maintained that Silkwood herself had carried it back to her apartment in order to make the company look bad. When doctors informed her that she was infected with "less than one-half of the maximum permissible body burden" of plutonium, her fears were assuaged somewhat. She returned to work at the lab and went through with her plans on the night of Nov. 13 to meet with a New York Times reporter and Steve Wodka and give them the documents she had collected.

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Her Death: Shortly after six o'clock that evening, Silkwood left a union meeting at the Hub Cafe in Crescent to meet with the Times reporter and Steve Wodka in Oklahoma City, about 30 mi. away. She was driving her white Honda Civic about 50 mph down Highway 74 when the car went off the left side of the road, ran 240 to 270 ft. along a ditch, and hit the south wall of a concrete culvert. The car traveled approximately 24 ft. into the air, then crashed on the culvert's north wall at about 45 mph. Silkwood died instantly.

Official Version: The Oklahoma State Highway Patrol ruled that Silkwood had fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted off the left side of the road to her death. Although a drifting car tends to pull to the right, a 1974 Consumer Reports review of the Honda Civic Hatchback described its tendency during acceleration "to lunge and pull to the left." The patrol also cites an autopsy report showing that methaqualone, a sleep-inducing drug prescribed for Silkwood to combat stress, was present in her blood, stomach, and liver. This explains why Silkwood made no effort to apply the brakes or veer away from the concrete culvert. A dent discovered in the car's rear bumper was said to have been caused by the wrecker that dragged the Honda over the concrete wall. Later, Justice Dept. and FBI investigations agreed that there was no foul play, and two congressional subcommittees subsequently dropped their investigations.

Theories and Unanswered Questions: The union's accident investigator found that the Honda's tire tracks showed that the car had skidded violently off the left side of the highway, then had straightened and driven along the shoulder for nearly 100 yd. He cites this as evidence that Silkwood was prevented from returning to the highway by the presence of another car. Not until she saw the culvert did she frantically try to steer the car back onto the road. The investigator argues that a drifting car would have veered into a field before it reached the culvert, and that the highway's center-line crest would have deflected a drifting car to the right, not the left. The "drifting car" theory is also disputed by eight independent toxicologists interviewed separately by investigating reporters. They agreed that Silkwood had built up such a tolerance to methaqualone that the small amount of the drug found in her body would not have lulled her to sleep. An auto-crash expert hired by OCAW found that the dent in the car's rear bumper resulted from "contact between two metal surfaces." Under magnification, the dent showed scratch marks leading from the rear of the car toward the front, an indication that the car had been struck.

Other curiosities surround her death. A Rolling Stone investigation suggests that the Kerr-McGee plant was missing substantial amounts of plutonium from its inventory--enough to bring millions of dollars in a potential nuclear black market. The magazine speculates that Silkwood may have unwittingly stumbled across falsified Kerr-McGee inventory records as she was gathering information for the union. One of the last people to see her alive described in a sworn affidavit the documents Silkwood had with her the night of her death, contained in a brown manila folder and a large notebook. They have never been found.

The mysteries surrounding the Silkwood death remained unsolved when the suit brought by her parents finally reached the courts in March, 1979. The presiding judge allowed only one issue to be decided: Kerr-McGee's negligence in Silkwood's contamination. Other counts, which might have uncovered possible liability for her death, were thrown out. Lawyers for the Silkwood case theorize from the pattern of circumstantial evidence that Silkwood was under surveillance by Kerr-McGee, who knew about her special union assignment. The lawyers were not allowed to present a Kerr-McGee official's testimony that documents with the plant insignia had been found in the car and that--according to the owner of the garage where Silkwood's car was towed--only police, government, and Kerr-McGee officials visited the wreck during the night of the accident.

Though the jury decided on May 18, 1979, to award $10 million in punitive damages to the Silkwood estate (Kerr-McGee has apealed the decision), there is still no resolution to the question of whether she was murdered and, if so, by whom. In November, 1980, the case was reopened when congressional investigator Peter Stockton filed a suit against the FBI and officials of Kerr-McGee, claiming that they had conspired to put an end to any further inquiry into Silkwood's death.