Wafric News – May 7, 2025

In a raw and unflinching memoir, Hollywood icon Kelsey Grammer has opened up about the decades-long emotional fallout from the brutal murder of his sister, revealing a dark period marked by substance abuse, self-loathing, and reckless behavior.

In Karen: A Brother Remembers, the Frasier and Cheers star peels back the curtain on the 1975 tragedy that would reshape the course of his life. His sister, Karen Grammer, just 19 at the time, was kidnapped while waiting for her boyfriend outside a Colorado Springs Red Lobster, then sexually assaulted and stabbed 42 times by convicted killer Freddie Glenn and his accomplices.

The shocking violence left Grammer reeling — and, by his own admission, spiraling.

“I cursed myself with too much drinking and drug abuse,” he writes. “And some fairly exotic sexual behavior. It started out being a lot of fun, and then the fun ran out. It was my way of burying myself along with Karen.”

For years, Grammer masked his grief with destructive habits, attempting to drown sorrow with addiction and distraction. But the toll nearly proved fatal. “To resolve grief does not end it,” he notes. “It did almost kill me. But I had to find a way to live without letting it destroy me.”

Freddie Glenn, who also murdered two other people, was sentenced to death in 1976, but the Colorado Supreme Court later overturned the death penalty in 1978. Glenn remained in prison until his death in 2019. Grammer’s memoir includes a 2018 letter from Colorado’s 4th Judicial District Attorney, Jim Bentley, opposing Glenn’s parole and outlining the full horror of Karen’s final hours.

“She didn’t go quietly,” Grammer writes. “She fought for her life until the end. That haunts me — and it drives me to honor her.”

Grammer says it was his sense of duty — to Karen, to his family, and to God — that ultimately saved him from the abyss.

“How did I survive? I just wouldn’t quit,” he shares. “I didn’t want to let Karen down. I owed it to her to keep going. Anything less would have been an affront to her memory.”

The memoir is both a painful reckoning and a tribute, filled with sorrow, love, and the resilience of a brother who chose to live on despite unbearable loss.

Kelsey Grammer’s Karen: A Brother Remembers is available now in bookstores and online.