NEWSKelsey Grammer's Spiral Into Drug and Alcohol Addiction Was Caused by His Sister's Brutal Murder: 'I Couldn’t Access Happiness'
Kelsey Grammer's sister was murdered by a serial killer.
Kelsey Grammer found that writing about his sister Karen Grammer's shocking murder helped him deal with his decades-long grief.
In Karen: A Brother Remembers — out Tuesday, May 6 — the actor touches on their relationship, her death and how the unthinkable tragedy led him down a dangerous path to addiction.
Kelsey Grammer revealed he developed a drug and alcohol addiction after his sister Karen was murdered.
"For a long time, the grief was so dominant that I couldn’t access happiness. The book helped me get to a new place with that," he spilled to People of the tome.
Karen was just 18 when she died: at the time, two men held her at gunpoint after she got off her night shift at Reb Lobster, took her back to one of their homes and raped her.
She was then driven to an abandoned alley, where one of the men horrifically stabbed her a total of 42 times.
Her killer, Freddie Glenn, was eventually captured and charged with her murder and several others. The 68-year-old has been consistently denied parole since his 1976 conviction.
'Karen: A Brother Remembers' is out on Tuesday, May 6.
The ordeal put the Frasier lead, 70, in a bad place mentally, which led to him being arrested and charged with drunk driving and cocaine possession on multiple occasions from the late '80s to the mid-'90s.
"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,'" he recalled to the magazine of abusing substances. "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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The actor went to rehab in 1996 after multiple DUIs.
The TV star eventually went to rehab in 1996 for 30 days after he crashed his car while drunk.
As he got sober and tried to move forward, the Cheers alum was finally able to forgive Karen's killer — something he did for his own peace of mind.
"You don’t want to eat yourself to pieces because you can’t forgive somebody. But it’s hard to forgive a person who consciously decided they wanted to murder somebody you love," the father-of-seven explained. "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."
'I wanted to breathe life into her and welcome her into the world,' the TV star explained of why he wrote the memoir.
Kelsey — who is currently married to fourth wife Kayte Walsh, 46, — is excited for people to learn more about his sibling when the book hits shelves.
"I wanted to breathe life into her and welcome her into the world," he shared. "We were Kelsey and Karen, brother and sister."
