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The first time “Frasier” star Kelsey Grammer went to the scene of a crime he was only 20 years old — and it wasn’t for a television show.
In July 1975, Grammer’s “funny, free-spirited” 18-year-old sister Karen was brutally raped and murdered in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Detectives came to the Grammer family home in Pompano Beach, Fla., to say they had a Jane Doe they thought might be Karen, who had moved to Colorado a few months earlier after graduating from high school.
She had been kidnapped on July 1, 1976, by several men who had planned to rob the Red Lobster restaurant where she worked. Instead they abducted her, raped her, stabbed her 42 times, nearly decapitated her and left her to die an agonizing death.
The next day Grammer flew to Colorado Springs to identify his sister’s battered body. She was his only sibling and the two had been very close, growing up with a single mother, their grandparents and an absent father.
Karen’s murder, the star writes in the new memoir, “Karen: A Brother Remembers,” has haunted him for the past 50 years, coloring many aspects of his life and causing him to drown his grief in cocaine and alcohol for years.
“The murder killed a corner of my heart,” Grammer, 73, writes, and mentions several times in the memoir that his sister was “the love of his life.”
In the book, Grammer describes his sister as “an Oreo cookie dipped in an ice cold Coca-Cola.
“She was a poem, a light, fun, innocent, and wise.”
Freddie Lee Glenn, now 68, and his accomplice, the late Michael Corbett, were responsible for Karen’s death and four other killings in Colorado Spring in 1975. Glenn, who is serving a life sentence, has come up for parole several times.
Although Grammer said in 2014 at another Glenn parole hearing that he had forgiven the killer, he also expressed that he never wanted him released from prison.
“I accept that you live with remorse every day of your life but I live with tragedy every day of my life,” he told Glenn via video.
The book, Grammer writes, is meant to honor his sister, tell people what she was like — and make sure it stands as ” ammunition to keep Freddie Glenn in jail.”
Grammer does not flinch on the horrific details surrounding Karen’s rape and murder, but they are only a small part of the book — which tells the in-depth story of the siblings’ childhood in New Jersey and south Florida and Grammer’s later life and eventual stardom.
Two years older than Karen, the actor always saw himself as her protector and has found it very hard, he writes, to come to terms with how he could not save her.
“She was so smart and good and decent,” Grammer wrote in a letter to the DA who had prosecuted Glenn when he was up for parole in 2009.
“She wrote poetry and loved being alive; we could laugh for hours together … I was supposed to protect her — I could not. I have never gotten over it. I was supposed to save her. I could not. It very nearly destroyed me … When we heard this man might be paroled, the suffering began anew.”
Grammer battled serious substance abuse during the filming of NBC’s “Cheers” and its later spinoff “Frasier,” with the casts of both shows attempting interventions for him at various points.
“Cheers” co-star Ted Danson recently spoke out about that time, admitting on the “Howie Mandel Does Stuff” podcast, “Finally I went up to [Grammer’s] dressing room and I said, ‘I’ve told you how much I love you […] but I have not told you how f—king pissed off I am at you. I’m so angry at you and I felt the need to say that to be real.”
“It’s remarkable that I survived some of that,” he told ABC News. “I might be asleep on one of the benches on the ‘Cheers’ set, and then when it was my turn I’d just stand up and go do it.”
The most powerful part of “Karen” comes when Grammer returns to Colorado Springs in 2022 with his fourth wife, Kayte Walsh, to visit the location of the Red Lobster where Karen was abducted as well as her old apartment building.
The one place he did not go was the exact location where the men raped her.
Grammer said he wrestled with the pros and cons of including the “graphic, impersonal review of his sister’s final moments but ultimately decided it was “beneficial” for himself, the public — and for any of Glenn’s potential future parole hearings.
After his sister was repeatedly raped by the men in one of their apartments, they drove her to an alley where Glenn stabbed her 42 times and almost cut her head off.
“The coroner noted that through a gaping wound in her neck, he could see all the way into Karen’s lung. I had been right in saying he almost decapitated her. Freddie Glenn punched holes in my sister’s body with unimaginable brutality,” Grammer writes.
Karen was still alive when they left her there and crawled in desperation to the door of a nearby trailer home for help.
Grammer had always hoped that the man who found her there did all he could to help her.
“In my imaginings, the man who found Karen at his doorstep was a “good Samaritan” of sorts,” he writes.
He found out otherwise.
“I stand corrected and disappointed that that man did not attempt to help her but simply called the police after leaving her body as it lay … eyes vacant, staring at the sky, her legs still on the steps, her head on the ground and a clenched fist above her head with a single finger pointing — somewhere or nowhere — just pointing.
“She had fallen backward from the trailer door after knocking for help,” he continues. “It was her last hope and disappointment after crawling 400 feet from the place where she had been stabbed. Bloody fingerprints mark the trail of her final moments at exactly 3’6” along the office and walls of the trailer park. She had been on her knees, crawling her way … What I had hoped were a final, few moments of kindness from some stranger, were nothing of the sort.”
After the visit, Grammer was reeling.
“Kayte and I went for a bite of food,” he writes. “Shared a bottle of wine. We talked. Reviewed. I had never felt at the wooden fence just feet from where Karen left her body. It had broken me, Again. Just when I thought nothing else ever could.”
But “Karen” ends on a bittersweet note, indicating that Grammer’s journey into the past is what he felt he had to do to honor his sister’s life.
“This is your story Karen,” he writes. “I hope you like it. It holds you. It holds me. It holds our love. Forever yours, Kelsey.”
English (US)