Kelsey Grammer reflects on sister’s murder: ‘It’s not a badge of honor to have suffered grief like that’

Karen Grammer liked to dunk Oreos in ice-cold Coca-Cola until the cream filling hardened and the cookie softened. She wore glasses. She didn’t have a strong relationship with her dad, but was extremely close to her grandfather. She smoked Marlboro Lights. She once jumped naked on her bed in her college dorm room while listening to Leon Russell music. She, at least according to her high school yearbook, had a hell of a trip to Disney World before graduation. She got really into the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

If she were alive today, her older brother suspects, she’d be living in Florida. Maybe she’d work with animals or do something artistic. She always liked working with her hands.

Karen was kidnapped, raped and murdered on July 1, 1975, just two weeks shy of her 19th birthday.

The details of the attacks are more horrific than anything anyone, let alone a loved one, should ever have to know. And especially because Karen was the younger sister of Kelsey Grammer — then a 20-year-old Juilliard flunkie — it is easy to sensationalize her final moments.

(Harper Select)

So the older Grammer did what he wasn’t able to do 50 years ago: He protected his sister. In “Karen: A Brother Remembers,” which came out Tuesday, the “Frasier” actor sometimes references the atrocities the men committed (the verb “slaughtered” is invoked a few times and he notes, from the coroner’s report, that the gash on her neck was so big that you could see all the way into her lung). But his primary aim is to capture his sister’s joyful and vivacious spirit and interview her friends about her final years. He writes that it’s not so much a grief book as a life book; a detailed history of his and his sister’s childhoods and how she stayed with him “before and after her human experience.”

Told in a free-flowing style that Grammer happily concedes he borrowed from Henry Fielding’s “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” it features stories of their teen years along the Florida shore and explores how these events impacted his life and career.

If these memories from five decades ago seem particularly sharp, it’s because Grammer says his sister appeared to him a few years ago and told him what to write. Grammer regularly works with mediums — he was even an executive producer on the Patricia Arquette procedural “Medium” — and says during a recent Zoom, “I think all this stuff is immediately available to us as long as we drop the filters and just believe it.”

Awards

For Kelsey Grammer, ‘Frasier’ 2.0 is a fresh approach to a familiar character

Returning to Boston lets the intellectual psychiatrist character both start fresh and settle into familiar ground.

June 6, 2024

It’s not that grief, and coping mechanisms, don’t appear in this book; one of the ways Grammer passed the time as a newbie actor at San Diego’s Old Globe theater was to grab a crab sandwich from Point Loma Seafoods with some wine or beer, and head to the neighborhood’s military cemetery to sit at the grave of a Vietnam soldier who was around Grammer’s age at the time of his death.

The actor says now, “An old friend of mine said that the cause for addiction is usually unresolved grief, and that holds up for me” because “[I] had a pretty big basket load of grief that I had to deal with.”

“I was coming into a phase in my life where everything should have been wonderful,” Grammer says of his younger self, known as much for his multiple Emmy wins as the tabloid headlines about his myriad relationships and marriages, and substance abuse issues. Now happily married to his fourth wife, Kayte, with whom he shares three children, Grammer says that back then, “I was wealthy and famous and successful and doing the thing I love more than anything in the world, and yet I couldn’t forgive myself. So I had to find some way to do that. And this book actually helped kind of put the final bow on the package.”

This means accepting that there are things he will never be able to answer, like how Karen, a waitress, came to be sitting in the Red Lobster parking lot when she wasn’t scheduled to work that night (he theorizes she was lonely and wanted to wait for her friends to finish their shifts). Or if she knew what was coming when spree killer Freddie Glenn and two others approached her as she sat by a red Volkswagen Beetle, showed her a gun and told her to come with them. He does think her reported response — “for what?” — sounds just like his brassy little sister.

Books

Griffin Dunne’s sister’s murder provides the pulse of his family memoir

Griffin Dunne was born into privilege but has also endured his fair share of trauma and tragedy, which he recounts in his family memoir, ‘The Friday Afternoon Club.’

June 7, 2024

Working on the book also means reliving, and sometimes re-questioning, his own life choices. Grammer writes that Karen’s spirit told him to forgive himself for the regret he felt about his college girlfriend’s abortion. He says he no longer believes that Karen’s death was some kind of eye-for-an-eye “Old Testament nonsense.” In the book, he describes his “limping faith” toward Christianity. During our interview, he talks of the “reawakening” he experienced while promoting his 2023 film “Jesus Revolution.”

“I don’t go out proselytizing, but I am not going to deny my faith; I’m not going to deny Jesus Christ,” Grammer says.

This, inevitably, brings up Grammer’s complicated thoughts about the death penalty. Glenn was sentenced to the gas chamber for Karen’s murder, but two years later Colorado abolished the death penalty.

“I’ve always had mixed feelings about the death penalty because I hate to be the society that puts to death the guy who is innocent,” Grammer says, before adding, “This guy’s not innocent.”

In his book, Grammer writes that it eats at him that Glenn’s petitions to the parole board are never about remorse but rather that he used to be a “good kid.”

“Sometimes it was really overwhelming; it can still stop me in my tracks,” Kelsey Grammer says about the grief of losing his sister.

(John Russo)

“I can love the young man,” Grammer writes. “The young man whose hopes grew so dim, he could think of no way to empower himself other than to kill an innocent girl. And I am giving him a lot of credit in this characterization. It takes every fiber of my being, but my heart goes out to him. To that boy. To him only. Not the killer he became. The killer he remains. I leave him to God.”

Grammer knows that revisiting the case gives it more publicity and he is also aware that there have been TV specials about it (although he stresses that these have not always been accurate). His family suffered other tragedies, such as his father’s shooting death from a hate crime and the drowning deaths of two of his half brothers. He writes in the book that his paternal grandfather’s response when Grammer told him of Karen’s murder was, “This family is cursed.”

It’s an odd thing to not only be famous, but to also know that the worst things that have happened to you and your family can be reduced to whispered gossip and Wikipedia entries. Grammer says he hasn’t given much thought to the public perception of these events. Plus, he says, “It’s not a badge of honor to have suffered grief like that. That’s just my constant companion.” He adds, “It’s never really letting [Karen] go, but it’s letting some of the charge on the grief go.”

“Sometimes it was really overwhelming; it can still stop me in my tracks,” Grammer says. “What’s funny is now it’s as though something has been lifted from me … when I think of Karen, I don’t think of her death as much as I do of her life. That was the bargain; that was the payoff. And that’s actually been great. I have remembered her and she walks with me now in a way that I wasn’t so in touch with until I wrote the book.”