Kelsey Grammer opens about the murder of the sister, pain, forgiveness

Karen Grammer liked to submerge oreos in Coca-Cola icy until the cream filling harden and the cookie softened. She wore glasses. She didn't have a strong relationship with her father, but she was extremely close to her grandfather. She smoked Marlboro lights. Once he jumped naked in his bed in his university bedroom while listening to Leon Russell's music. She, at least, according to her secondary school yearbook, had an incredible trip to Disney World before graduation. She really got into the movie “Butch Cassidy and The Sunday Kid”.

If today he was alive, his older brother suspects, he would be living in Florida. Maybe she would work with animals or do something artistic. He always liked working with his hands.

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

The details of the attacks are more horrible than anything, much less a loved one, should have to know. And especially because Karen was Kelsey Grammer's younger sister, then a 20 -year -old Juilliard Flunkie, it is easy to sensationalize her final moments.

Then, Grammer Mayor did what he could not do 50 years ago: he protected his sister. In “Karen: Brother remembers”, which came out on Tuesday, the actor “Frasier” sometimes refers to the atrocities that men committed (the verb “sacrificed” is invoked several times and points out, from the report of the forensic, that the wound in his neck was so great that he could see all the way in his lung). But his main objective is to capture his sister's cheerful and lively spirit and interview his friends about his last years. He writes that it is not so much a pain book as a book of life; A detailed story of his childhood and his sister and how he stayed with him “before and after his human experience.”

Told in a free flow style that Grammer grants happily that he borrowed from “The History of Tom Jones, a” Henry Fielding foundation “presents stories of his teenage years along the coast of Florida and explores how these events affected his life and career.

If these memories of five decades ago seem particularly acute, it is because Grammer says that his sister appeared to him a few years ago and told him what to write. Grammer works regularly with media, he was even an executive producer in the “medium” of Patricia Arquette procedure, and says during a recent zoom: “I think all these things are immediately available for us as long as we leave the filters and create it.”

It is not that pain and coping mechanisms, they do not appear in this book; One of the ways in which Grammer spent time as a rookie actor at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego was to take a crab sandwich from the seafood of Point Loma with a little wine or beer, and go to the neighborhood's military cemetery to sit in the tomb of a Vietnam soldier who was around Grammer at the time of his death.

The actor now says: “An old friend of mine said that the cause of addiction is generally unresolved pain, and that sustains me” because “” “” “” “” because “because” because “[I] I had a lot of pain with which I had to deal with. “

“I was entering a phase in my life where everything should have been wonderful,” says Grammer about his youngest self, known both for his multiple Emmy and the headlines of the tabloids about his innumerable relationships and marriages, and substance abuse problems. Now happily married to his fourth wife, Kayte, with whom he shares three children, Grammer says that at that time, “he was rich and famous and successful and doing what I love more than anything in the world, and yet I couldn't forgive me. So I had to find some way to do that. And this book really helped put the final arch in the package.”

This means accepting that there are things that you can never answer, such as Karen, a waitress, she became sitting in the parking lot of network locks when she was not scheduled to work that night (theorizes that she was alone and wanted to wait for her friends to finish her shifts). Or if he knew what was coming when the killer of Juergas Freddie Glenn and two others approached her as she sat along with a Volkswagen red beetle, she showed her a gun and told her to go with them. He thinks his answer reported: “For what?” – Sounds like your little sister.

Working in the book also means reviving and sometimes replace your own life choices. Grammer writes that Karen's spirit told him to forgive himself for the repentance he felt for the abortion of his university girlfriend. He says he no longer believes that Karen's death was a kind of “nonsense” of the Old Testament. “In the book, he describes his” faithful faith “towards Christianity. During our interview, he speaks of the” realization “he experienced while promoting his 2023 film” Jesus Revolution. “

“I do not come out proselling, but I will not deny my faith; I will not deny Jesus Christ,” says Grammer.

This inevitably raises Grammer's complicated thoughts on the death penalty. Glenn was sentenced to the gas chamber for Karen's murder, but two years later, Colorado, he abolished the death penalty.

“I have always had feelings found about the death penalty because I hate being the society that kills the innocent guy,” says Grammer, before adding: “This guy is not innocent.”

In his book, Grammer writes to him that he eats that Glenn's requests to the probation board is never about remorse, but used to be a “good child.”

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

(John Russo)

“I can love the young man,” writes Grammer. “The young man whose hopes became so faint, I could not think of any way to empower himself, apart from killing an innocent girl. And I am giving him a lot of credit in this characterization. He carries each fiber of my being, but my heart is with him. To that child. Only to him. He did not convert.

Grammer knows that he visits the case again gives him more advertising and is also aware that there have been special television specials (although he emphasizes that they have not always been precise). His family suffered other tragedies, such as the death of his father's shots for a hate crime and the drowned deaths of two of his media brothers. He writes in the book that his paternal grandfather's response when Grammer told him about Karen's murder was: “This family is cursed.”

It is strange not only to be famous, but also to know that the worst things that have happened to you and your family can be reduced to gossip and Wikipedia entries whispered. Grammer says he has not thought much about the public perception of these events. In addition, he says: “It is not a badge of honor to have suffered a pain like that. That is just my constant partner.” He adds: “He has never really left [Karen] Go, but it is letting some of the load on pain go. “

“Sometimes it was really overwhelming; you can still stop me in dry,” says Grammer. “The funny thing is that now it is as if something had been taken from me … when I think of Karen, I do not think about her death as much as her life. That was the bargain; that was the reward. And that has really been great. I have remembered her and she walks with me now in a way that was not in contact until I wrote the book.”