Unsolved mystery – Karen Silkwood’s crash

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Today’s Friday lady is a bit unusual, so only read on if you are in for real mystery and suspense – it’s Friday the thirteenth after all. Karen Silkwood didn’t have much to do with cars. Still she became known for one of the more mysterious car crashes in modern history. What happened exactly 41 years ago today near Crescent, Oklahoma? Fact is she got involved in a head-on one-way car crash when her Honda Civic crashed into a block of concrete. Fact is also that Karen had been critical about the health and safety standards at the plutonium plant where she worked as a technician. This after she’d found out she’d been contaminated with radioactivity herself.

What’s more: on the night of her death Karen was on her way in her Honda to a meeting with a union representative and a reporter for The New York Times, supposedly with documents that proved that her employer was acting negligently when it came to safety at the plant. However, no documents were found in the wreckage of her car. And so the theory that someone had forced her off the road to prevent her from telling what she knew came about. Skid marks and a suspicious dent in the Civic’s rear bumper pointed into the direction that she’d been forced off the road, too, but nothing else was ever found. Food for thought? At least for a movie – with Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood, as seen above. It may be just the kind of movie for tonight – even though cars play an ancillary role...

(Words Jeroen Booij, picture courtesy ABC Motion Pictures) 

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