July 8, 1975, was the day that turned Kelsey Grammer’s world upside down.
The then-20-year-old hopeful actor was visiting family in Pompano Beach, Florida, when cops showed up at the door with heart-wrenching news: Grammer’s younger sister, Karen, had been found murdered in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Grammer opens up about this tragedy in Karen: A Brother Remembers, his just-released memoir chronicling his decades-long healing journey that eventually led him to forgiveness.
During a May 6 appearance on the Tamron Hall Show, Grammer admitted he felt “sympathy” for his sister’s killer but firmly opposed his release from prison.
“I try to have a sense of sympathy… But I still said, ‘I hope you do the world some good… in prison. And there’s a number of ways to do that,'” Grammer shared. “It is my belief that any human being, no matter how unimaginably cruel they have been at some point in their lifetime, is capable of being good. So that’s what I hold out for him, but I don’t believe he should be free.
Grammer added: “Whatever abrupted his growth or maturation at one point to allow him to decide to put a knife in someone 42 times… This is not turf that is to be harvested in any place but in that garden (prison), which is a garden surrounded by walls.”
According to The Independent, Karen was living in Colorado when three men snatched her outside the restaurant where she worked. Police report the 18-year-old was raped and stabbed 42 times before desperately trying to crawl her way to a nearby trailer park for help.
“She had fallen backward from the trailer door after knocking for help,” Grammer writes in his book. “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 [the killer] almost decapitated her… There were defensive wounds on her hands.”
Freddie Glenn and his accomplice, Michael Corbett, were convicted of Karen’s murder along with several other killings. The third accomplice remains unknown. Both men initially got death sentences; however, they were later resentenced to life when Colorado’s death penalty was ruled unconstitutional.
Corbett died in prison in 2019.
Nearly four decades after Karen’s murder, Kelsey Grammer gave a gut-wrenching speech at Freddie’s parole hearing in Colorado, saying while he had forgiven the man, he couldn’t support letting him walk free.
“I accept your apology. I forgive you,” he told the Colorado parole board. “However, I cannot give your release my endorsement. To give that a blessing would be a betrayal of my sister’s life. I accept that you live with remorse. But I live with tragedy every day … I want to believe you have actually changed your life. Things you say, I accept a lot of it.”
