Three years ago, an English psychic named Esther came through to Kelsey Grammer with a message from his sister Karen “from the other side”.
The Frasier star recalls, “She said, ‘Karen wants you to tell her story,’ and I’m like, ‘Heavens! OK.’ And after about 20 pages of jotting down things, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to write a book!’”
Karen: A Brother Remembers tells the tale of the actor’s 18-year-old sister’s murder in 1975.
“I got to be with her alive again,” says Kelsey, 70, of writing the new memoir. “To mourn Karen with nobility and praise for her was something I was meant to do.”
The star admits Karen’s brutal kidnap , rape and murder in Colorado has haunted him, which came at the hands of serial killer Freddie Glenn and two accomplices, while Kelsey was studying acting in New York.
It eventually spilled over into self-destructive behaviour at the height of his TV fame in the ’90s.
“I cursed myself with too much drinking and drug abuse, and some fairly exotic sexual behaviour,” confesses Kelsey. “It was my way of burying myself along with Karen.
“Everything I could imagine, I probably tried. Except I wasn’t ever going to kill myself. I didn’t feel interested in that.”
Keen to stop his downward spiral, the actor – who played one of TV’s most famous therapists, Frasier Crane – sought counselling himself.
“I quit drinking for a few years,” admits Kelsey, who checked into the famous Betty Ford Center for rehab in 1996, after crashing his sports car while drunk.
“That was helpful. I never abused drugs again.
“I have a cocktail now. It’s not the same thing as it was… Somebody told me a long time ago that any kind of addiction is really just a symptom of unresolved grief, so I was able to put my grief where it belonged.”
And while putting pen to paper was cathartic for Kelsey, it also sometimes became too much.
“There were a couple of times I had to stop writing,” he says. “There were just tears spilling from me.”
He pushed on, though, for his sister’s sake. Kelsey tells, “I think Karen knew I was ready. It was like a final piece of the puzzle for me to say, ‘This happened. I am not responsible, but I am responsible to keep her memory alive.’”
The star – who endured three divorces before marrying his fourth wife Kayte Walsh in 2011 – says his late sister has looked over him when it comes to his love life too.
“I’d get this sort of nudge saying, ‘You’ve done enough here. You don’t need to do this any more.’”
Karen’s violent death isn’t the only pain lurking in Kelsey’s past.
Seven years earlier, his father Allen, who left the family when Kelsey was just two, was also murdered, by taxi driver Arthur Bevan Niles, in what was believed to be a racially motivated crime. Kelsey also lost his half-brothers Billy and Stephen to a shark attack in the Virgin Islands in 1980.
The father of seven denies there is a curse on his family, though.
“That’s what my dad’s dad thought,” he admits. “But it’s our responsibility to defuse that if such is the case. We were marked historically with a lot of premature death and it does go back generations, so I’d like to put an end to it. I’m going to live to be 160!”
Farewell to Cheers fave ‘Norm’
Kelsey suffered another loss when his Cheers co-star George Wendt died peacefully in his sleep at home on 20 May aged 76.
“I liked George a lot – he was beloved by millions,” says Kelsey of the actor, who played Norm Peterson on the hit sitcom from 1982 to 1993.
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