The primary time “Frasier” star Kelsey Grammer went to the scene of against the law he was solely 20 years previous — and it wasn’t for a tv present.
In July 1975, Grammer’s “funny, free-spirited” 18-year-old sister Karen was brutally raped and murdered in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Detectives got here to the Grammer household house in Pompano Seashore, Fla., to say that they had a Jane Doe they thought may be Karen, who had moved to Colorado just a few months earlier after graduating from highschool.
She had been kidnapped on July 1, 1976, by a number of males who had deliberate to rob the Purple Lobster restaurant the place she labored. As a substitute they kidnapped her, raped her, stabbed her 42 occasions, practically decapitated her and left her to die an agonizing demise.
The subsequent day Grammer flew to Colorado Springs to establish his sister’s battered physique. She was his solely sibling and the 2 had been very shut, rising up with a single mom, their grandparents and an absent father.
Karen’s homicide, the star writes within the new memoir, “Karen: A Brother Remembers,” has haunted him for the previous 50 years, coloring many features of his life and inflicting him to drown his grief in cocaine and alcohol for years.
“The murder killed a corner of my heart,” Grammer, 73, writes, and mentions a number of occasions within the memoir that his sister was “the love of his life.”
Within the ebook, Grammer describes his sister as “an Oreo cookie dipped in an ice chilly Coca-Cola.
“She was a poem, a light, fun, innocent, and wise.”
Freddie Lee Glenn, now 68, and his confederate, the late Michael Corbett, have been accountable for Karen’s demise and 4 different killings in Colorado Spring in 1975. Glenn, who’s serving a life sentence, has come up for parole a number of occasions.
Though Grammer mentioned in 2014 at one other Glenn parole listening to that he had forgiven the killer, he additionally expressed that he by no means needed him launched from jail.
“I accept that you live with remorse every day of your life but I live with tragedy every day of my life,” he instructed Glenn by way of video.
The ebook, Grammer writes, is supposed to honor his sister, inform folks what she was like — and ensure it stands as ” ammunition to maintain Freddie Glenn in jail.”
Grammer doesn’t flinch on the horrific particulars surrounding Karen’s rape and homicide, however they’re solely a small a part of the ebook — 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 all the time noticed himself as her protector and has discovered it very onerous, he writes, to return to phrases with how he couldn’t 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 severe substance abuse throughout the filming of NBC’s “Cheers” and its later spinoff “Frasier,” with the casts of each reveals making an attempt interventions for him at numerous factors.
“Cheers” co-star Ted Danson just lately spoke out about that point, 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 instructed ABC Information. “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.”
Probably the most highly effective a part of “Karen” comes when Grammer returns to Colorado Springs in 2022 together with his fourth spouse, Kayte Walsh, to go to the placement of the Purple Lobster the place Karen was kidnapped in addition to her previous residence constructing.
The one place he didn’t go was the precise location the place the lads raped her.
Grammer mentioned he wrestled with the professionals and cons of together with the “graphic, impersonal review of his sister’s final moments but ultimately decided it was “beneficial” for himself, the general public — and for any of Glenn’s potential future parole hearings.
After his sister was repeatedly raped by the lads in one among their flats, they drove her to an alley the place Glenn stabbed her 42 occasions and nearly lower 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 nonetheless alive after they left her there and crawled in desperation to the door of a close-by trailer house for assist.
Grammer had all the time hoped that the person who discovered her there did all he may to assist her.
“In my imaginings, the man who found Karen at his doorstep was a “good Samaritan” of kinds,” he writes.
He discovered in any other case.
“I stand corrected and disillusioned that that man didn’t try to assist her however merely referred to as the police after leaving her physique because it lay … eyes vacant, staring on the sky, her legs nonetheless on the steps, her head on the bottom and a clenched fist above her head with a single finger pointing — someplace or nowhere — simply 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” alongside the workplace and partitions of the trailer park. She had been on her knees, crawling her approach … What I had hoped have been a ultimate, few moments of kindness from some stranger, have been nothing of the type.”
After the go to, 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.”
However “Karen” ends on a bittersweet be aware, indicating that Grammer’s journey into the previous is what he felt he needed 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.”
