Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking, they change laws, change society, or even

earn the label, Crime of the Century. But the stories that made headlines and decades past

aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author, and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.

This is Crimes of the Centuries.

Thank you. This is Crimes of the Centuries. It had been a terrible two weeks.

On Thursday, November 7, 1974, after two days of testing, Karen Silkwood was again found to be contaminated by plutonium.

That, in and of itself, may not have been all that surprising.

Karen worked in the Cimarron Nuclear Facility, a division of Kerr-Magee, located in Crescent, Oklahoma.

The company had a history of such, let's just call them accidents.

The plutonium processing plant was located an hour outside of Oklahoma City, in a rural

outpost where the Kerr-Magee jobs were considered good, especially if you were young and just out of high

school. You didn't need to be a nuclear physicist. You were just doing what they taught you to do,

packing, unpacking, stacking, welding, you know, road work mostly. But it was okay pay and a lot

of people in town would have been glad to have the steady income.

At her quality-controlled job now for four years, Silkwood had recently stepped up to be a union rep

because she cared about worker health and safety at the plant. She'd been doing some sleuthing

in her efforts to get hard evidence that Kerr-Maghi was less than diligent when it came to

protecting its workers from life-threatening breaches. In recent days, she suspected the company

was on to her. And now this. Both urine and fecal samples taken from her at the local

hospital, at the behest of her bosses,

...