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Kelsey Grammer is opening up about his sister’s murder like never before.
In his new memoir “Karen: A Brother Remembers,” out May 6, the “Frasier” star, 70, recalls how on July 8, 1975, police told him his 18-year-old sister had been found raped and stabbed to death.
“For a long time, the grief was so dominant that I couldn’t access happiness,” Grammer told People in a story published Friday. “The book helped me get to a new place with that.”
He added, “I wanted to breathe life into her and welcome her into the world. We were Kelsey and Karen, brother and sister.”
In his book, the “Cheers” actor details how, just hours after he spoke on the phone with Karen, she went to work at Red Lobster, which her murderer, Freddie Glenn, and two other men had planned to rob.
The man held her at gunpoint and told her to come with them. In the police report, Karen said, “For what,” which was a sassy reply that spoke to her character, Grammer recalled.
The men took her to an apartment, raped her, then drove her to an alley, where Glenn stabbed her 42 times and nearly decapitated her, as she tried to crawl for help in her last moments.
Grammer told People that he was torn whether to include the “graphic, impersonal review” of Karen’s last moments from the police report in the book.
He said the details were “not pleasant” but “there is something beneficial in knowing [the truth]. It is ammunition to keep Freddie Glenn in jail.”
Glenn was convicted of Karen’s murder and several other murders in the Colorado Springs area. He’s currently serving a life sentence in prison.
“His protestations these days are like, ‘Well, I don’t remember raping her,'” Grammer said. “Bulls—t.”
Grammer added, “You don’t want to eat yourself to pieces because you can’t forgive somebody. But it’s hard to forgive a person who consciously decided they wanted to murder somebody you love. This wasn’t just some temperance issue with him. It was deliberate. I can give you forgiveness, but you’re not going to get out of paying for it.”
In an excerpt from his book shown in People, Grammer wrote about Karen’s last moments. She had crawled “400 feet” from the place where she had been stabbed and “he almost decapitated her.”
“Bloody fingerprints mark the trail of her final moments…She had been on her knees, crawling her way. Seeking help with her last ounce of life….What I had hoped were a final, few moments of kindness from some stranger, were nothing of the sort.”
Grammer, whose father was also murdered seven years before his sister, said that he struggled with alcohol and substance abuse after Karen’s death.
Between 1988 and 1996, he was charged with drunk driving and cocaine possession multiple times.
“I always had something in the back of my head saying, ‘Okay. That’s enough now. Cut it out. You know why you’re doing this,'” he told the outlet.
“But there was the other part of me that wanted to surrender to it and go, ‘Let it mess you up a little bit. Let it hurt.'”
English (US)