- In a new book and in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, Kelsey Grammer opens up about the lasting impact his sister Karen’s 1975 murder has had on him
- Grammer reveals that Karen crawled for help in her final moments in an exclusive excerpt of the book, below
- Grammer says that he “couldn’t access happiness” for a long time after Karen’s murder, but “the book helped me get to a new place with that”
On July 8, 1975, Kelsey Grammer’s life changed forever.
The actor, then 20, was at home that day with his family in Pompano Beach, Fla., when detectives knocked on the door. The detectives told him that they’d found the body of a Jane Doe in Colorado Springs, Colo. — whom they believed to be his 18-year-old sister Karen.
The next day, Grammer flew to Colorado and confirmed the detectives’ suspicions. He learned that Karen had been brutally raped and stabbed to death on July 1, two weeks before her 19th birthday, by a man who had been on a killing spree with accomplices in the area.
In his new book Karen: A Brother Remembers, out May 6, Grammer delves into the horrific details of his sister’s murder, as well as the deep and lasting toll it took on his life, which has been touched by multiple tragedies. In 1968, his father Allen was shot and killed at his home in St. Thomas by a taxi driver amid a wave of racial violence following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; In 1980, his paternal half-brothers, twins Billy and Stephen, were killed in a suspected shark attack while scuba diving in the Virgin Islands.
“For a long time, the grief was so dominant that I couldn’t access happiness,” Grammer, now 70, tells PEOPLE for a story in this week’s print issue. “The book helped me get to a new place with that.”
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Karen had moved to Colorado Springs after a semester at college in Georgia to be with her boyfriend. Grammer last spoke to his sister on June 30, 1975, and she told him she planned to come home to Florida after the Fourth of July. When he didn’t hear from her after that, Grammer called the local police.
He later found out that just hours after he and Karen had chatted, she went to the Red Lobster where she worked at around 11 p.m. to wait for a friend to finish their shift. Freddie Glenn and two others had planned to rob the Red Lobster, but when they pulled up behind the restaurant, they spotted Karen.
With a gun drawn, they told her to come with them. “For what?” she asked, according to Grammer’s retelling of the police report. That characteristically sassy response was all Karen, Grammer notes.
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She was taken to Glenn’s car and was left with him as the other men entered the restaurant and decided against the robbery. When they returned, they found Karen tied up next to Glenn.
They drove her to one of the men’s apartments, where they took turns raping her.
Afterwards, the men drove Karen to an alley, where Glenn stabbed her 42 times and nearly decapitated her. In her last desperate moments, Karen attempted to crawl for help, which Grammer writes about in an exclusive excerpt below.
Grammer grappled with whether to include the “graphic, impersonal review” of Karen’s last moments from the police report in the book. Though delving into the details was “not pleasant or comforting,” he ultimately decided “there is something beneficial in knowing [the truth]. It is ammunition to keep Freddie Glenn in jail.”
Glenn was convicted of Karen’s murder and several other murders in the area, and he’s currently serving a life sentence in prison. He has been denied parole four times, and his next hearing is in 2027.
“His protestations these days are like, ‘Well, I don’t remember raping her,'” Grammer says. “Bulls—.”
While Grammer has said in the past that he forgives Glenn for his actions, he still holds him accountable.
“You don’t want to eat yourself to pieces because you can’t forgive somebody,” he says. “But it’s hard to forgive a person who consciously decided they wanted to murder somebody you love. This wasn’t just some temperance issue with him. It was deliberate. I can give you forgiveness, but you’re not going to get out of paying for it.”
Beyond sharing the details of her murder, Grammer paints a picture of Karen in the book as a free-spirited and loving woman who made the most of every moment, whose life was so much more than the way it ended.
“I wanted to breathe life into her and welcome her into the world,” he says. “We were Kelsey and Karen, brother and sister.”
Below, Grammer learns about Karen’s final moments in an exclusive excerpt from Karen: A Brother Remembers.
In my imaginings, the man who found Karen at his doorstep was a “good Samaritan” of sorts. 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.
She had fallen backward from the trailer door after knocking for help. 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” along the office and walls of the trailer park. 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.
Taken from Karen: A Brother Remembers by Kelsey Grammer. Copyright © 2025 by Kelsey Grammer. Published by Harper Select, a division of HarperCollins Focus, LLC. https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/.
Karen: A Brother Remembers comes out May 6 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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