On November 13, 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood was killed
in a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma
City. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant
operated by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she had been
critical of the plant’s health and safety procedures.
In September, she had complained to the Atomic Energy
Commission about unsafe conditions at the plant (a week
before her death, plant monitors had found that she was
contaminated with radioactivity herself), and the night she
died, she was on her way to a meeting with a union rep and
a reporter for The New York Times, reportedly with a folder full
of documents that proved that Kerr-McGee was acting negligently
when it came to worker safety at the plant. However, no such
folder was found in the wreckage of her car, lending credence to
the theory that someone had forced her off the road to prevent her
from telling what she knew.
The story was chronicled in Mike Nichols‘s 1983
Academy Award nominated film Silkwood in
which she was portrayed by Meryl Streep.
