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Kelsey Grammer has revealed more about the tragic end of his sister’s life in his new memoir.
In Karen: A Brother Remembers — out May 6 — Grammer, 70, recalls his sister’s final moments and the aftermath of her horrific murder.
Karen was killed on July 1, 1975, by a man who had been on a murder spree in the Colorado Springs area. Freddie Glenn was convicted of several murders, including Karen’s, and is serving a life sentence.
Glenn and friends had allegedly been planning to rob the Red Lobster restaurant where Karen worked that night. But when they drove up and saw Karen waiting for a friend to finish a shift, the group drew a gun and told her to come with them, Grammer shared with People in a retelling of the police report.
“For what?” she asked, the Frasier star told the outlet.
Karen was tied up, raped multiple times, and left with 42 stab wounds. In her final moments, as Grammer wrote in the memoir, she crawled 400 feet from the alley she was dumped in to seek help in a trailer park nearby.
“She had fallen backward from the trailer door after knocking for help,” Grammer wrote in the memoir, according to an excerpt obtained by People.
“She had been on her knees, crawling her way. Seeking help with her last ounce of life.
“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. There were defensive wounds on her hands.
“What I had hoped were a final, few moments of kindness from some stranger, were nothing of the sort.”
But Karen’s death wasn’t the only tragedy Grammer has had to face.
His father, Allen, was killed at home by a taxi driver in 1968 during a wave of racial violence in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Five years after Karen’s murder, his paternal half-brothers, twins Billy and Stephen, were killed while scuba diving in a suspected shark attack.
In dealing with these tragedies, Grammer revealed in the memoir that he turned to alcohol and drugs to cope. That resulted in personal struggles, including multiple drunk driving and cocaine possession charges between 1988 and 1996, and a rehab stint at the Betty Ford Center.
“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,'" Grammer told People of his struggles. "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.'"
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