Originally appeared on E! Online
Content warning: This story contains graphic details.
Kelsey Grammer is still processing his sister Karen Grammer’s gruesome death 50 years later.
On July 8, 1975, the “Frasier” star, then 20 years old, answered a knock at the door only to be told the devastating news that his 18-year-old sister had been raped and fatally stabbed a week prior in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“For a long time, the grief was so dominant that I couldn’t access happiness,” Grammer told People in an interview published May 2, ahead of the release of his book, “Karen: A Brother Remembers.” “The book helped me get to a new place with that.”
And in the book, which comes out May 6, the 70-year-old delved into his sister’s final moments after spree killer Freddie Glenn — who is currently serving a life sentence in prison for the murder of Karen and two others — and two of his accomplices took turns raping the college student before taking her to an alley and stabbing her 42 times to the point of near decapitation. (Michael Corbett, also sentenced to life in prison for the three murders, died in 2019.)
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“In my imaginings, the man who found Karen at his doorstep was a ‘good Samaritan’ of sorts,” Grammer wrote in an excerpt of his book shared to People. “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.”
Grammer went on to detail that in the moments following the stabbing, per a police report, Karen knocked on a trailer door in a desperate attempt to find help. In the process, she fell backward and crawled 400 feet from where she had been stabbed, documenting the tragedy in the bloody fingerprints and knee imprints she left behind.
“The coroner noted that through a gaping wound in her neck, he could see all the way into Karen’s lung,” Grammer continued. “I had been right in saying he almost decapitated her. Freddie Glenn punched holes in my sister’s body with unimaginable brutality. There were defensive wounds on her hands.”
And upon learning that “What I had hoped were a final, few moments of kindness from some stranger, were nothing of the sort,” Grammer was determined to tell the story of his free-spirited and loving sister, whom he loved so dearly.
“I wanted to breathe life into her and welcome her into the world,” the “Cheers” alumnus told People. “We were Kelsey and Karen, brother and sister.”
