Karen Silkwood

Case background and investigation

Karen Silkwood was born in Longview, Texas, on February 19, 1946. In August 1972 she was hired as a laboratory technician at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site near Crescent, Oklahoma, which made plutonium fuel. She joined the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union and, according to Wikipedia, in August 1974 became the first woman elected to the local's three-person bargaining committee. In September 1974 she gave the Atomic Energy Commission an account of what she regarded as unsafe conditions at the plant.

On November 5, 1974, monitors detected plutonium contamination on her during a shift, History.com reports, and further checks over the next two days found contamination in her body and in her home. How she came to be contaminated has never been established. ABC News reported that investigators concluded her sample kits had been deliberately spiked, without determining by whom.

On the evening of November 13, 1974, Silkwood left a union meeting in Crescent at about 7 p.m. to drive to Oklahoma City, where she was to meet New York Times reporter David Burnham and union official Steve Wodka. About seven miles from Crescent her white 1973 Honda Civic crossed State Highway 74 and hit a concrete culvert. She died at the scene. She was reported to be carrying documents about the plant; they were not found in the car.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol concluded that she had fallen asleep while driving. An autopsy found the sedative methaqualone, which she had been prescribed, in her blood. According to ABC News, a Justice Department review noted signs that the car turned back towards the road just before impact. According to History.com, some investigators pointed to damage to the rear bumper and to skid marks as a sign that another vehicle was involved, but no official inquiry reached that conclusion and no one has been charged in connection with her death.

Her estate sued Kerr-McGee in November 1976 over her contamination. After a trial in 1979 a federal jury awarded $505,000 in damages and $10 million in punitive damages. An appeals court cut the award to $5,000, and in 1984 the US Supreme Court, in Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp., restored the jury's verdict and sent the case back. On August 22, 1986, the parties announced a settlement of $1.38 million, UPI reported. Kerr-McGee admitted no liability and said it settled to avoid the cost of a retrial. About $500,000 went to Silkwood's three children.

The case was dramatised in the 1983 film Silkwood. In an ABC News documentary, a former Oklahoma Highway Patrol lieutenant said he had been told in 1992 that off-duty police officers working for the company had followed Silkwood and forced her car off the road. ABC noted that the men named were dead and that the allegation was unconfirmed. A crash analyst consulted for the programme thought she was probably awake at the time of the crash but could not establish that a second vehicle was involved.