cover of episode 83. The Chemical Lab Coverup

83. The Chemical Lab Coverup

Publish Date: 2024/8/14
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He's the most terrifying serial killer you've never heard of. Haddon Clark has confessed to several murders, but investigators say he could have over 100 victims. At the center of the mayhem, a cellmate of Haddon's that was able to get key evidence into Haddon's murder spree across America

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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hey everybody and welcome back to the Into the Dark podcast. I am your host Peyton Moreland and I am so happy you are here. If you are watching on YouTube you probably noticed that I kind of updated my set a little bit. This feels a little bit more moody and honestly I think just a little bit more me. I also am using a handheld mic so if I sound a

I think it's okay, but honestly, I'm not an expert in these things, and so I'm just kind of going with it. But thank you for supporting. Thank you for being here. If you don't know, Into the Dark is a true crime podcast where we also venture into tinfoil tales, which is basically something that rhymes with conspiracy theory. And

And we also dive into ghost stories, we dive into hauntings, we dive into alien abductions. Basically, we just go into the dark together. Now, before we get into the episode, I always start with something called my 10 seconds, which is just...

Basically, I can talk about anything to start off on a lighter foot before we get into the nitty gritty. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that now. So the other day I was sitting out front with Daisy. She likes to run in the grass and I like to sit in the grass. So it's just good outside time for us.

and these two dogs walked by, and they were very calm. They were on leash. There was an owner with them, but the owner kind of let them off leash because they weren't running anywhere, and I was trying to get Daisy to acclimate because she is very scared of other dogs and just rolls over on her back, and so we were kind of just working on her confidence a little bit. And then before I knew it, these two dogs, the guest dogs, they were...

trying to make puppies. They were trying to make puppies in my front yard and the male dog was successful in the insertion. And so then, you know, they were trying to make puppies and then they were done and then they were stuck. Okay. They were stuck together and

I start freaking out because the male dog is trying to pull away and the female dog is crying because she's in pain. And I'm like, oh my gosh. So I run over and I grab both of their rear ends and I squish them together so that they can't separate. And I just sit there and hold them so that one of them can't yank. And then I looked it up and I guess if you just massage the female's back or tummy area, it can kind of relax enough that hopefully they can get unstuck.

But that lasted for about 35 minutes. Yep, 35 minutes in my front yard, me rubbing the female's tummy, telling them, you guys can do it. Come on. I was giving them positive encouragement. I was telling them, listen, you guys can do this. All you have to do is just slowly pull apart and

They were very confused, but eventually they did pull apart successfully. And I was so happy. And poor Daisy just is too young to be seeing that. She was definitely scarred. She was definitely scared. But so yeah, that happened. And it was very traumatic for everyone involved because I just did not want the puppies to be hurting.

So yeah, that's my 10 seconds and let's go ahead and jump into today's case. Okay, so trigger warning, this episode includes discussions of suicide and self-harm. So please listen with care. Okay, so we've all seen movies

movies and TV shows where people get killed for knowing too much. And I mean, that's frightening when it's part of fiction, but we'd all like to think that these sorts of things don't happen in real life, at least not very often. Except that might be exactly what today's case is about. Allegedly, a woman was murdered because she was about to expose the secrets of some very powerful people.

Or maybe she died in a horrible accident that got blown out of proportion. It's hard to say for sure because this story is still controversial even to this day.

It might be about a preventable tragedy, a suicide, or a murder that was successfully covered up. So all of the trouble began on July 31st, 1974. That was when a 28-year-old laboratory analyst named Karen Silkwood noticed that something just wasn't quite right at her job.

She worked for the Kermagee Nuclear Corporation, and as you can probably guess from their name, Kermagee was in the nuclear power industry. They operated a plant in Oklahoma, and their lab analysts, like Karen, often handled dangerous radioactive materials like plutonium.

Accidents in the lab could be dangerous and employees did have to follow strict safety protocols. And I'm just going to say this now. Karen did not have a normal job like most of us listening to this podcast. Okay. She was working in a laboratory with plutonium. Okay. She is a baddie. If the people in the lab didn't follow protocol, they would risk being exposed to deadly levels of radiation. Okay.

Well, that day, Karen was handling some plutonium and other nuclear materials. And the machinery that she worked with had filters in it.

And to take a complicated scientific situation and make it simple for you guys, it was possible to look at those filters to see if anything was leaking. If they were clean, everything was good and safe, and if they were dirty, that meant there was probably radiation in the air and it was time to evacuate the lab. Now during the shift before Karen's, so before she got to work, the people working there looked at the filters and they were clean. And then the shift right after Karen's also had clean filters.

But when someone went back and looked at the filters from during Karen's shift, they had high amounts of radiation. Something had gone wrong. It was almost like something dangerous was leaking while Karen worked, but then the leak somehow stopped as soon as she clocked out.

So it didn't really make sense. In fact, for a little while, the plant's managers thought someone might have tampered with Karen's filters to get that specific result, but nobody could prove it. And it was also possible that Karen really was exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during her shift, but...

No one really knew for sure. So obviously at this point, Karen's bosses bring her in and they tell her about the possibility that she could have been exposed. They're not sure how it could have happened. It doesn't really make sense, but they're obligated to tell her. And Karen wasn't sure whether or not she should be exposed.

worried. I mean, she'd always been good with chemistry, but until recently, she'd never pictured herself in a career actually as a nuclear plant employee. Instead, she had used all of her scientific knowledge to work in medicine before this. So she'd actually applied for a job at Kermagee in the summer of 1972. This was when she was just 26 years old. And

And now she'd been in the position for two years and she still didn't have a great understanding of just how dangerous plutonium was. So her bosses all assured her that her job was safe. No one ever mentioned that radiation exposure could cause cancer or other deadly illnesses.

And it just wasn't common knowledge the way it is today. Now, nobody ever gave her a reason to think that she might be putting her life on the line every time she showed up for work. So even though Karen had a general idea that it probably wasn't good for her to be working in a contaminated lab, she really wasn't that worried because she didn't understand the gravity of the situation.

Now, her manager told her to go to some extra doctor's appointments and keep an eye on things as they weren't really sure what had happened. And she figured as long as she did that, everything would be OK. Now, as the case goes, a few months later, in the fall of 1974, Karen was actually elected to an official position within her union. And as part of her new position, she had to focus on one major workplace issue, and that was safety issues.

Now, not long after Karen got this new duty, she was talking to another union leader and she actually mentioned the situations a little while back with the filters. And when her coworker heard this, she was very shocked and immediately worried about Karen.

And then when the co-worker saw how confused Karen looked, he explained to her how dangerous radiation exposure could be. Like if those filters had really said that and she had worked that entire time with radiation exposure, she could be in trouble. And this was literally the first time anyone at work gave Karen a clear picture of the risks her job posed.

And this brought on a whole wave of different emotions for her. It was really scary for her to realize just how easily she could have gotten sick or even died. And she was furious, too, that her managers had kind of kept such important information from her. So it shouldn't be surprising that after this conversation, Karen was especially focused on workplace safety.

Sadly, the laboratory leak wasn't the only major problem that she noticed. This was once she knew what to look for. There were chemical spills. Some people were instructed to bend the rules, including rules that were supposed to keep people safe.

And worst of all, the plutonium kept going missing from the plant. And it wasn't clear if people were stealing or misplacing it. The point is the company was supposed to have a certain amount of plutonium and they had less than that amount. Basically a bunch went missing and no one knew where it had gone. All of this to say the potential leak in Karen's lab was just the tip of the iceberg once she started digging.

There were very real, very serious problems happening at Kermagee. So Karen became very outspoken and critical of her own company. And naturally, this created some tension with her managers and her bosses.

The relationship between the union members and Kermagee's executives at this point become openly hostile. And the uglier the situation got, the more geared up Karen was for a fight. It's basically becoming an uprising led by Karen. So now it's November 5th and Karen was working in the lab again. And once again, she was handling plutonium and to keep herself safe, she was using a glove box.

Basically, this was a setup where the plutonium was behind a thick wall of glass and Karen reached through the glass using thick protective gloves. So she never actually came in physical contact with the plutonium and everything was airtight to prevent her from breathing it in. Now, in theory, this is supposed to keep her safe.

But even with all of those precautions, Karen and other employees were actually supposed to occasionally scan themselves with a handheld detecting wand. The idea was if there was a leak, then they would catch it early. So at 2:45 this day, Karen and another coworker went on break. And like always, they scanned themselves with the wand before they left the room.

But this day, the wand pinged and it detected radiation on her supervisor's shoe.

Now, right away, Karen and the supervisor took off their clothes, including the shoe. They had another company official look them over to see if anything had actually gotten on their skin. Safety teams also went through the lab to see if they could find the leak and fix it. And after a few minutes, Karen and her supervisor got good news. Their skin was clear and the radiation hadn't gone any further than that one shoe. Plus, there were no measurable leaks in the lab, so everything was safe.

Now at 3.30, they came back to the glove box and got to work again. Well, two hours after that, it was time for Karen to take another break. She scanned her whole body and everything came back good. She was clean and healthy. So she enjoyed that break and then came back and worked for one more hour. Now at 6.30, it was time for another scan. So basically they are doing these scans all the time at work. That's how dangerous it is.

And again, she had been scanning herself all day. And other than the shoe incident, which ended up being pretty minor, everything had been fine and normal.

Now, Karen was just trying to be extra safe. So she scanned herself at 6:30 and the results came back and they said that both of her hands and her right arm all the way up to her shoulder had been contaminated with something radioactive. And I'm not saying just a little bit radioactive. She had 40 times the maximum safe dose on her body. Now,

This was alarming, of course, but it was also confusing. See, Karen asked for help right away. And for the second time that day, a safety team came in and examined the entire lab and there was no leak. Everything was fine.

Now, I mentioned earlier that they kept filters in the lab to help pick up on radiation levels in the room, and the filters were totally clean too. Basically, there was no sign whatsoever that anything radioactive had ever made it through the glass, and yet somehow, between her break at 5.30 p.m. and the new scan at 6.30 p.m., Karen's body had become very contaminated.

Now, there were a couple of different possible explanations for how this could happen. One theory is that Karen might have gotten exposed some other way. Maybe during her break, she touched something that she shouldn't have. And these readings had nothing to do with her work over in the glove box. Another possibility was that this was just more evidence that it was dangerous to work at Kermagee.

There may have been a leak in the lab and the fact that the safety team couldn't find it wasn't comforting. It potentially proved that nobody knew how to handle these kind of accidents. Maybe the safety team just didn't know what they were doing or they were lying about the lab being clean for some reason.

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Because Karen's results were high enough that the company policy said she had to report directly to a doctor. So she did that the next day, it was November 6th, and they gave her a nasal swab because the most dangerous thing you can do with plutonium is inhale it. So her readings were high enough to suggest that she had probably breathed in toxic radioactive fumes. And unfortunately, there was nothing her doctor could do for her.

There was no way to get that radiation back out of her lungs. So instead, all they could do was keep their fingers crossed that Karen's body would pull through and she would be okay. They'd also keep an eye on the situation and run more tests. The doctor told Karen to collect samples every time she used the bathroom so her doctors could check the urine and feces for radiation.

So Karen follows the doctor's orders. She goes home and every time she relieves herself over the course of the night, she collects a sample. Now the next morning she came into the office with four full urine cups and one container of fecal matter from the night before.

Carmagee's doctors tested those samples and they gave Karen a physical exam again. Now, all of the results from her skin, her nose and her samples were even higher than the day before. This just doesn't seem possible. The only way her radiation levels could go up was if she'd been exposed to even more radiation and

After she had left the nuclear plant. So in other words, the doctors were now suspicious that Karen hadn't been in a workplace accident. That there had actually been something radioactive back at her home.

So on November 7th, two days after Karen got those alarming results in the glove box, a team of physicists who specialized in health and safety went to Karen's apartment. And they went through every room, scanning the walls and the floors and the furniture to try and see what might have poisoned Karen. Now the team picked up a ton of radiation all over Karen's home, including on her pillows and her bed sheets. Her clothes were soaked in it.

A safety team actually had to pack them away in metal drums. They didn't want anyone to touch them because it was that dangerous. And these were the clothes Karen had been wearing before that day. Now in the bathroom, they got positive readings from the toilet, the floor, and a bathroom mat. In the kitchen, the levels were very high and very dangerous, especially on her cabinets, stove, and floor. But the highest concentrations of all.

were on a bologna cheese sandwich that was in Karen's fridge. Now, it was intensely radioactive, enough that if someone had eaten that sandwich, it definitely would have killed them. Now, obviously, the bologna didn't just get contaminated all by itself sitting in the fridge. It seemed a lot more like someone had dosed that sandwich in the hopes that Karen would then eat it and die.

In fact, there was almost no way that all of this radiation could have ended up in the apartment naturally or on accident. There was no plutonium found in the apartment, no evidence that Karen could have somehow brought something home with her.

There was only one way all of that stuff could have gotten so radioactive, and it was that someone must have brought plutonium to the apartment, dosed the sandwich and everything else, and then removed it, bringing it back out of the apartment. So when everyone finds this out, they realize this had to be intentional.

And even more alarming, Karen never kept her apartment door locked. Apparently, she just wasn't worried about break-ins. So if someone did want to poison her food with radiation, it would have been very easy for them to get in and out.

When the company's representatives asked Karen if she thought someone had tampered with her food, she actually offers a different possibility. See, I mean, I think it's very easy at this point for Karen to be like, hey, I have been beefing with my managers because of all of the safety issues. It is very probable that the manager's

at the laboratory who had access to this, took it to my apartment and tried to poison me because of the uproar that I'm causing. But instead, Karen told a story that was just bizarre. According to Karen, all of the radiation came from her. She said that she was just that contaminated and

She revealed that when she'd collected one of those urine samples, it had spilled. So according to her, all of that radiation on her toilet and bathroom floor had come from that accident. And apparently she tried to clean it up, but she couldn't get rid of the lingering radiation that was all over the bathroom. And as for how it ended up in her kitchen...

Karen said that she'd been planning on making a bologna and cheese sandwich for lunch, but for reasons I don't entirely understand, instead of just making it in the kitchen, she carried the package of bologna into the bathroom, set it down on the closed toilet seat. Now, it was in a package, so there was no direct contact between the food and the bathroom surfaces, but still, bologna on the toilet? Yeah.

Anyway, Karen thought that when she just sat the bologna on the toilet seat, even with it in a package, that was enough to make the bologna super radioactive. Enough that when she eventually made the sandwich, it gave off those very intense high readings. Now again...

This story makes no sense. First, the bologna was way more radioactive than everything else in the bathroom. And there was no way a little bit of spilled urine on the floor would make this sandwich that contaminated. And also, I have to wonder, like, who would really put bologna on their toilet seat?

It sounds like Karen realized that this all sounded pretty hard to accept when she tried to explain how all of the poison had ended up in her house.

because after this she also added that one time she had brought a bologna and cheese sandwich to work to have for lunch and she ended up not eating it that day and then brought it home again so she changes her story and says maybe this sandwich wasn't radioactive because of this over-the-top spilled urine story maybe something actually happened to it at the plant and she unknowingly brought something toxic home with her

Which does make more sense, and I'll just say, though, this was all very weird. And it's hard to say why Karen couldn't keep her story straight with a simple question about a bologna sandwich. If someone else was trying to poison her, she had no reason to cover for them. But just six days later, the questions about the bologna and cheese sandwich would be the least of Karen's problems.

On the night of November 13th, 1974, a long-haul truck driver called 911. He reported that earlier that evening, he had been driving on a seemingly empty highway when he had spotted something metallic on the side of the road.

Now, once he pulled over to get a better look, the truck driver saw it was a smashed up Honda Civic car in a ditch and there were no other cars around. The Honda had been in a single car crash.

Somehow it had gone flying off the road and it had apparently hit a culvert fast and hard enough to completely smash the driver's side of the car. Now the trucker could tell at a glance that the woman in the driver's seat was dead. And it was Karen Silkwood. And she had passed away at just 28 years old.

Now, interestingly, executives from Kerr-McGee showed up at the scene pretty quickly after Karen was identified. Nobody knew who had called them or how they even knew that Karen had been in a car crash, but all of a sudden her employers are there. It was almost like they just understood that they had to be there without being told.

So when Karen got an autopsy, the results said that she had taken Quaaludes. And those are drugs that can be used as a sleeping aid and sometimes as a date rape drug because it's very common for people to pass out after taking them. Now, Karen really should not have been driving under the influence of Quaaludes. But in fairness, she had a prescription for them. So in theory, they were supposed to help her sleep.

Except some of her friends come forward after the news of her crash and say that Karen had kind of been abusing these drugs. Reportedly, Karen had very severe anxiety and Quaaludes helped her feel more calm.

So she'd apparently lied about having bad insomnia to get the prescription. And then she would take them all the time, not just when she wanted to sleep, but also during the day, like all day long. So when police learn this and they see the Quaaludes in her system, they figure she must have taken the pills and then started driving around, but she was drowsy. And maybe because she had been misusing her prescription for so long, she didn't realize that she wasn't safe to get behind the wheel at this point.

Or perhaps the wave of sleepiness hit her while she was already on the road. Either way, the official story was that she fell asleep while driving and then the car drifted into the culvert. So her death was a tragic accident. Now, the Quaaludes weren't the only interesting discovery that came out during Karen's autopsy.

When the medical examiner realized that Karen worked at Kermagee and that she'd been in a couple different workplace accidents, they actually tested Karen's remains for radiation exposure. The radiation had permeated her lungs and other internal organs and also her skeleton. So she had so much radiation in her that at this point it was in her bones, right?

Now, the doctors couldn't agree on how bad the radiation poisoning was. It affects people's bodies differently depending on things like weight, gender, and age. Karen was very slim. She was just 100 pounds and had other risk factors like the fact that she was a heavy smoker.

So some physicians thought that if she hadn't died in the car accident, she would have been all but guaranteed to get cancer and die young. And others thought that these radiation levels maybe were survivable. But one thing they all agreed on was that the exposure had happened one week or less before her death.

Which means this was possibly during that potential leak while she was working in the glove box. It was almost one week to the day before her fatal car crash. But I'll remind you, there was radiation all over her apartment too, including her food. And the autopsy results didn't just show that Karen had breathed in plutonium, she had also swallowed some.

Now, Karen had been clashing with her managers a lot. Managers who knew where she lived and would have had no difficulty getting inside her apartment since it was always unlocked. Some of Karen's friends began wondering if the executives at Kerr-McGee had poisoned her food to kill her to stop her from coming forward about how things were being ran at the laboratory.

Others suspected that maybe they had something to do with Karen's car accident too, since the radiation hadn't killed her yet. So let's cover more of what the police saw at the scene of the crash, and you can decide for yourself if you think it's suspicious. First, there were some skid marks on the road, not close to the culvert that Karen hit, but a little further down the street.

Her car wouldn't be skidding if she just fell asleep and drifted off the road, right? So instead, these skid marks seemed like someone might have actually hit her car from behind and

and she slammed on her brakes, but then she accelerated to get away from them when she realized that they weren't stopping. And then she drove a little while before losing control of the car, and then that was when she crashed. Or I guess she could have slammed on her brakes and then sped back up and crashed her car for no reason. Karen's Honda also had fresh dents on the back of the car. The back, even though the car hit in the front,

when it hit the culvert. So this is kind of what make police think that maybe someone hit the back of her car because she had dents. Again, this seemed more consistent with the idea that someone might have rammed her from behind to get her off the road. Now on top of that, the steering wheel was bent in a very particular way. It could have only ended up like that if Karen was clutching the wheel very tightly and bracing herself at the moment of impact.

Now, of course, that would have been impossible if she was asleep at the wheel and just happened to drive off the road. Maybe the most damning piece of evidence had to do with Karen's reasons for even being out that night.

Before her death, she had told some people that she was on her way to meet with a reporter from the New York Times. She had an entire folder full of paperwork about all of the safety violations and other wrongdoings that were happening at work.

Apparently, she also had proof that roughly 40 pounds of plutonium had gone missing from the lab and no one had known what happened to it. No one reported it. I mean, this wasn't just a safety issue. This would be considered a national security problem. It meant the plutonium might have been stolen by terrorists or foreign spies. And the executives at Kerr-McGee had done nothing to notify the authorities or try to track down the missing plutonium. According to Karen, she said,

She was fully prepared to expose her company to the world via the New York Times. The information in this folder would basically destroy Kermagee. But when she died, those documents vanished. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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So she tells everyone about these documents that she has, that she's on her way to go do this interview and she's bringing the documents. And then when her car is found with her body, the documents were missing. Almost like someone had taken them from her car, which wouldn't be that hard to do because like I said before, there were an awful lot of company executives involved.

at the crime scene. Okay, so Karen's death starts making the news. It is talked about that she worked at the laboratory, that maybe she had thought there were some sketchy things going on. Her friends came out and said, no, she was actually on the way to expose them. Like things were not good at the workplace. It was very dangerous. And so Kerr-McGee gets a chance to comment on the Karen situation at this point because people now want to confront them and see what they have to say. And this is it.

They claim that Karen, their employee, drugged herself with the missing plutonium. To hear them tell it, Karen was desperate to prove that her workplace was dangerous, desperate enough to poison herself, putting her own life in danger just to win the union fight. And it

It would have been easy for Karen to take a little bit of plutonium home. She could have smeared it on her bologna cheese sandwich, sprinkled it through the rest of her apartment, and then even swallowed some. She also could have used some stolen plutonium to stage the accident in the glove box.

They even said that Karen had intentionally caused the car crash that killed her. Their story goes that she took Quaaludes specifically because she knew that she would fall asleep at the wheel. And according to them, this was, again, part of a plan to try to make Kermagee look more evil and violent than they really were to frame them.

They also said those explosive incriminating documents that she had told people about, they didn't exist. The reason no one could find them in the car was because the company hadn't done anything that bad and so Karen didn't have the documents. Instead, they claimed Karen had been spreading rumors about how she'd found all of this evidence just to make the whole situation look more suspicious. Allegedly, she literally faked her own murder just to win a work dispute. Now, a lot of people heard this story and were like,

no. First, it wasn't consistent with Karen's personality. She wasn't the sort of person who liked a lot of attention and she definitely didn't want to make herself a martyr. Plus, Karen didn't need to take plutonium and fake a workplace accident. If she wanted to convince people that the Kermagee plant was dangerous, there were plenty of

Now,

Even with all of this very confusing evidence, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, aka the people that were in charge of Karen's investigation, ruled that Karen's cause of death was an accident. They still believed that she fell asleep behind the wheel and crashed. And after that, the case was closed. At least the official case.

That didn't stop Karen's family from filing a lawsuit against Kermagee. They continued to believe that the company had sent someone to force Karen off the road that night and kill her and that Kermagee had stolen all of that paperwork. So her family asks for $11.5 million. And according to their lawyers, the massive amount of money would send a powerful message that,

that rich corporate executives could not kill people and get away with it. Even if they avoided any criminal charges or prison time, they would have to pay. Now, this is pretty crazy, but by the end of that trial, the nuclear plant actually was found liable for Karen's death, and they had to pay almost the full amount that the family asked for. The jury held them liable for about $10.5 million. Okay.

But instead of forking over the money, Kermagee appealed the decision. And this whole process took years and they went back to court in 1981. But this time around, the courts sided with the corporation. Basically, Kermagee's lawyers said that nobody could prove that they had killed Karen. They still maintained that she might have done all of these terrible things to herself.

And I don't know if the courts believed those arguments necessarily, but there was also a legal gray area around whether Karen's family ever even had the right to sue Kermagee in the first place. It was complicated and involved different ways of interpreting workers' compensation laws.

The point is there was enough doubt for them to actually overturn the earlier decision. And the only fines that Kerr-McGee had to pay were to actually replace Karen's clothes that had to be disposed of because of the radiation exposure. So they did end up giving Karen's family about $5,000. Now I do want to say though, it's not like Kerr-McGee escaped all of the possible consequences because

The specific plant where Karen had worked actually shut down just one year after she passed. And Karen will go on to get a lot of credit for this. People believed the closure was a direct result of her advocacy and her death. The corporation as a whole actually went out of business in 1987.

And sadly, their safety track record was not good. There were chemical explosions and civilians who lived near their plants actually had unusually high rates of cancer and birth defects.

Kerr-McGee lost lawsuit after lawsuit, and the courts repeatedly ordered them to clean up nuclear waste that they had been disposing of improperly. Even today, if you go to the part of Oklahoma where Karen's plant used to be, you can detect radiation on the ground and in the water.

More or less, this all proved that Karen was definitely right to be alarmed about the conditions at the facility. And sadly, she never lived to see Kerr-McGee face the biggest consequences.

So that is the story of Karen Silkwood. To this day, her death is still officially classified as an accident. And there are a lot of people who think that can't possibly be true. She may have taken her own life to sabotage Kerr-McGee. She might have been murdered by them. But one thing is certain. Karen wanted to bring Kerr-McGee's bad behavior to light.

And the mystery surrounding her death means it got a lot of attention, more than they might have if she had survived. So even though she didn't live to see it, Karen actually did win the battle that she spent fighting. And that is the case of Karen Silkwood and the tinfoil tale that surrounds her death.

Okay, you guys, in the comments, talk to me. What do you think? I mean, the thing about tinfoil tails is you just never know. You never know. It could make sense. Powerful people do really bad things, but also it could have been an accident. What do you think? All right, that is it for this case, and I will see you next time as we dive further into the dark together. Goodbye.