All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Kelsey Grammer: A Brother’s Love and Loss

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

In 1975 Kelsey Grammer’s 18-year-old sister, Karen, was murdered. For fifty years his loving memories of her were colored by questions about her death. In this moving conversation, Kelsey tells Anderson how he finally found answers and, in doing so, the beloved sister he lost so long ago. This conversation contains some graphic descriptions of violence.   Join the community to share your story and watch Anderson's weekly streaming show All There Is Live at cnn.com/allthereis.  Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last night, I sat on the anchor desk and read the news about Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, murdered in their home. There is no shortage of sadness tonight, not to mention almost unimaginable shock and horror. I didn't know Rob personally, but his work touched me. Are you okay? When I first saw a stand by me, I remember crying in the theater. It was a coming-of-age film about childhood friendships, and it made me reflect on my own painful coming-of-age. after my dad died. Why don't you just make 10 louder

and make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder? I also loved his mockumentary. This is Spinal Tap. It remains one of my favorite movies of all time. In September, I interviewed Rob about a Spinal Tap sequel he had made, and I'm so glad I did.

When we started talking, I think he was surprised and definitely amused it how much I love Spinal Tap and how many of the lines I knew by heart. When we first did it, people came up to me and they said, I don't understand this. Why would you make a movie about a band nobody's ever heard of?

And one, you know, why wouldn't you make it about the Beatles? They thought it was a real band. I mean, they thought it was a real documentary. Anybody in the world who does this hand gesture, I mean, you know, it's from spinal tap. Like, I, you know, it's like the puppet shown spinal tap and someone's just sitting there like this. You know everything from it.

You know every line from the film, more than I do. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I got to have that conversation with him, not just because he seemed to have a good time, but because at the end of it, I got to tell him directly just how much his work had meant to me. You have brought me so much joy through this

and so much work that you've done. And also, I mean, you are also a very committed patriot and citizen of this country and concerned about this country. Yeah, I just think you're awesome. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for talking with me. Wow, it's my pleasure.

Yeah. I hope I didn't just fall into the trafficist, roughing, giving you spinal top lines. Like a fan boy? Yeah. It's all right. I don't mind it. Okay. Rob Reiner, thank you so much. Thank you. I realize I don't say those kind of things to people enough.

It's something my mom used to do, and I could see the impact it can have on someone. So now it's something I'm trying to do more. I've been listening to your voicemails, and you can always call and leave one at 1-404-827-1805. many of you have called in to talk about your loved ones who were murdered or died violent deaths. My name is Barbara, and my older son, Nicholas, was murdered at 17. The one thing I have learned is to keep their memory alive, to remember my beautiful son, who will forever be young. So with grief, also come some kind of comfort their own in my heart and be able to enjoy. Joy, my son, but still here.

My grandchildren, oh, I see so much of the ones that I've lost to. There is no day that magically it goes away, but there are days that you can see the brightness in life. My name is Massouda Lutfi, and I just wanted to remind everyone the grief hits and waves. And sometimes it's on a random Monday afternoon sitting here in front of the round table picking up our Monday night pizza. we just have to sit with it and remind ourselves that grief and love go hand in hand I lost my brother said no he'd let me

he tried to stop a man with a gun on the freeway he got shot five times in the head as he was giving the 911 operator the man's license plate My brother was an Air Force veteran of 14 years, a California boy that served his country. Over a year later in the courtroom, I used 11 minutes to look my brother's murderer in the eye and tell him what a beautiful human being my brother was. and I see signs every single day.

I see little messages from my brother. Our connection with the afterlife is just a thinly veiled curtain, and he's there, and he's helping us become better human beings on the other side. And I'll continue to ride this wave, even in a round table parking lot on a random Monday night while I'm picking up my kids' pizza. My name is Kim. I wanted to tell you Anderson that, um, something you said today so profound about your dad. You said that you can feel him now and you feel like you knew him better than when he was alive.

I lost my dad when I was 18. He was murdered. And that's how I feel about him, but I know him now. I didn't know him then because he had spent my entire life in another jail. And then came home and was murdered. within a year. And I want to get to a place where you said you can feel him. I don't feel him.

And I haven't in a very long time. Now I realize now that I have to let this all pour out of me so that I can be happy because I think for so long I was afraid to be happy because it would be that I didn't feel the true sadness of the weight of him being gone. My guest today has experienced that same kind of violent loss. Kelsey Grammer was 20 when his sister Karen was murdered. She was 18. We'll be right back with my conversation with Kelsey.

My guest today is Kelsey Grammer. His sister Karen was murdered in 1975 when she was 18 years old. Kelsey was 20. And though he went on to star in hugely successful series like Cheers and Frasier, his sister's kidnapping and brutal slaying and the unresolved questions and emotions he's had surrounding it were never far from his mind.

He finally set out to answer those questions which he writes about in a recently published memoir, Karen, a brother remembers. Kelsey, thank you so much for doing this. I don't think a lot of people knew the extent to which loss was such an early part of your life. Your grandfather, who deeply loved,

Gordon, died of cancer, when you were 12 years old. Your dad was shot and killed when you were 13. Your sister was murdered when she was 18. You were 20. Five years later, your two

half-brothers, Stephen and Billy, were killed in a shark attack. Did you know the impact that loss and grief had on your life? Did you realize it early on? I don't know if I actually ever let it become a presence in my life.

I think it was always sort of sneaking around in the background a little bit. There were decisions I had made as a young man, probably as a result of it. One was always that I think I was going to die young. And I thought that I should live as though I might die the next day. There's so many things you write in the book, which I think are so powerful and I relate to. You write, no event in my lifetime since Karen's death has gone untouched by some measure of grief, filtered. Every joy filtered by a touch of grief. Yeah.

A lot of my living had been attenuated, diminished just a little bit by the fact that this grief was sort of just an abiding presence in my life, that always just took a little bit away from the present. And I did try to apologize to all the people that maybe they felt there were some distance, a sense of a golf maybe that couldn't be breached. But I live in life now in a way that I had never allowed myself. It is something you said toward the ends of the book. You write, grief kept me from living. I apologize with the regret of a half century lived part way. I've always described to myself as I've lived half a life that by not allowing me to really acknowledge grief, to never have grieved, I've sort of lived never fully present.

And I actually think the process you've undergone is one I'm sort of trying to undergo, which is accepting grief to some degree in my life and so that I can experience full joy because I don't think you can have joy without having felt loss. I agree with that. I do agree. I applaud your courage.

It is a courageous step to try to live that way to get into the mix of your own life and find that way out, that doorway to joy. I live in amazing joy now. I mean, I sit in the room with my kids. We're sitting in the screening room right now. night, this is where I will all gather. And we watched, we watched the awful last installment of Jaws last night. That's a family. Even a bad installment is fun with families.

More fun for the family. So we're all just sitting here, just talking. And, you know, the movie was kind of just down in the background. And it's, there's just this joy surrounding me. And I can kind of feel this. I'm lifted. I'm lighter than I used to be. Much lighter. and what was fascinating when I finally finished the book I was writing in upstate New York and I typed out the last line of it and I suddenly thought

wow that's it I turned to Kate and I said I'm finished I'm finished and she said I've missed you which was just just an amazing thing so she spent really two and a half years with me

I was kind of disappearing a lot. You know, I'd be, I'd be down a hole. But her remark at that point, I mean, to think of that kind of patience and love being where, you know, where I, where I ended up, I ended up with the right person, which is kind of fascinating. But not until I was ready to allow that, you know. When you were younger and had kids, you didn't talk about your sister. I would mention that, Yeah, Karen had died when she was, you know, 18 or had it was a tragic death, but I didn't, I didn't discuss it much. It was honestly, it was after the last two alive started to come up for parole that I had to re-engage the loss of my sister. I had to relive it every time I went in, going to parole hearings and begging for my sister's life to be honored still.

At parole hearings, do you actually see the killers? A couple of times I have, yeah. I sat right next to one of them at one point. He loomed large as a sort of a figure of enormous power and hate in my life. And then he seemed kind of feeble and weak, but the last of them is still alive. And tries to get out every year, you know. So I got more used to it. I'm more used to the fact that I have to be in that moment still, even though it's 50 years ago.

This last July, it was 50 years ago. But it's still an active part of my life. do you feel her? Yeah, I do. I do. And that's what's, it's been remarkable. I guess I always have. Sometimes I didn't really want to pay attention, but always had her there in my head, in my heart. I think sometimes, you know, bringing me a warning, saying you don't need to go down this road or this one, you don't need to go out with her. She was giving you dating advice. It's a little dating advice sometimes I don't think you don't need that for too much longer I told you so sometimes yeah exactly there were there been a couple of moments like that

because I didn't grieve I have not felt the people I've lost for much of my life and it's only in the last year or two that I've you know felt my dad and I've actually feel like I have a closer relationship with him now than certainly that I have most of my life and and I've come to know him in a different way because I'm a dad now and I the way I look at my kids I realize I remembers the way he must have looked at me yeah that's the gift of it isn't it we're living in our in our ancestors footsteps as well as our own as we sort of carve through the life we've we've been given and the one we make and our children will be visited with us you've really noticed in your life the cycles that repeat in families and through the generations. I think there's something beautiful and there's

something comforting about that to realize, like, we are not the first to suffer whatever it is we are suffering, to go through what we are going through. Yeah, we are doing what's been done throughout history. We carry it with us, and we always will. It is part of the human thing. It's part of being here in this strange plane that we're on and whatever it's meant to do. It's also meant to teach us grief. It was important for you to actually go back to Colorado and, and walk through her final day. That was something I'd always thought was important. I didn't know a lot of the intricacies of her last year of life,

and I really wanted to become familiar with that. We weren't communicating so well back then. Of course, we didn't have cell phones. We didn't have all sorts of stuff. But we were discovering a lot of the same things at the same time, but weren't aware of it. We weren't communicating about it. And so my desire to go for this trip to be with her in her final days

and in her final steps was just to be intimate with her again, to know her again like I knew her once before. This love that I had for my sister was some of the greatest meaningful connection with another human being that I've ever had. I mean, we lived and breathed at the same pace, you know, rise and swell. We lived everything together, and that last year we didn't. And she was off on her own, and I was off on my own.

But she was coming home. I was going to see her in like four or five days. And we were really looking forward to being together again. You did something which I thought about a lot. You got the police report for your sister. I thought about getting the police report. My brother jumped off at the balcony of her apartment building in front of my mom. And I thought about getting the police report for a while,

even though there's nothing really, certainly in my case, to learn from it. But you requested the police file, and they sent, it to you, and they warned you at the beginning of it, about whether or not you should read it and whether you really wanted to read it. Yeah, it was important. For me, it was just to be with Karen, to be with her in that last moment. How were you able to do that? It just seemed like I had to do it. It just seemed like I had to go. Kate came with me, and that was really helpful. And I also, I also wanted to know what she was doing there. Did she have a nice life there? And she did. She had started to construct a life for herself there with this young man that she'd met.

And John, I got to know John. Only through the police report did I find out John's name. So that was helpful. And so it was almost like I was sort of taking the trip with them. And it was heartbreaking at the same time and hard to read because, you know, for a long time, Karen was just a Jane Doe, you know, a girl whose body had been desecrated and who was left to die somewhere. Some of the things you discover in the police report were different than you had initially

thought she had managed to get to somebody's door to try to get help mortally wounded. And you'd said, in my imaginings, the man who found Karen at his doorstep was a good Samaritan of sorts. I stand correct 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 an outstretched arm, smeared blood along a wall, a path of suffering, an enormous pool of blood, and from there the uneasy steps of 100 yards, her last steps, then the final crawl of her life.

It's really heartbreaking. Yeah, it was. That broke my heart when I read it. When I first realized that the trail of her blood, her hands, was at crawl level rather than standing height, the people that heard her scream. and just went to bed, didn't even look out the window. Yeah, and that house is right there still, right where it was, the same place where Karen was stabbed just across the street. And then she made her way, you know, another 100 yards or so.

Extraordinary that there was such callousness, non-caring. I don't know, I hesitate to even bring up, but you write about the last words that Karen heard, which you hadn't known until you read this police report. Yeah. Tilt your head back. That was... Tilt your head back.

That's what the killer said to. The last thing she heard. Extraordinary. Malevolence. Evil. That discovery, it was beyond any horror I could have imagined. It did actually go beyond my imagination to a place that was real. And that she had to deal with.

It made me incredibly sad that in her final seconds there was not. kindness yeah yeah yeah me too thank you anderson you know i've had sort of a diminishing resolve at times you know or at least in and out to keep this guy in jail and i actually read that part of the police report the day before he was up from parole again and i was calling in to testify at that point from a job I was doing in the Caribbean. And I realized that this is what she heard from this man who says he didn't do anything. So it ended up being ammunition, which was helpful. We're going to take a short break.

We'll have more with Kelsey in a moment. And a reminder, I'll be discussing this podcast and others on our new live interactive show, All There is Live, on Thursday night on our grief community page. CNN.com slash all there is. You can watch the show live at 9.15 p.m. Thursday or in the days that follow along with past episodes of the podcast. We'll be right back with more from Kelsey Grammer. Welcome back to my conversation with Kelsey Grammer. Kelsey writes in his book, Karen, a brother remembers that he has on several occasions done what he calls ceremonial meditations at home using plant medicine or psychedelics. He also writes about consulting with mediums,

throughout his life. I have some very, very devoted Christian friends who aren't on the, you know, you don't, you don't consult with mediums, you know, that's sort of dangerous territory. And I accept that you should be very cautious, but there are those who are good. And I do think it's a gift from God, mediumship. I think it's meant to help people resolve grief. I think it is meant to help people release some things. And it is a continuing gift of God that we can access our loved ones, especially for those of us who've had loss that has been so violent and so devastating and premature in many ways. There's some grief you'll never let go of, but there is

an obligation to get on with your life. And if one is disrupting the other for too long a time, I think the gift of mediumship maybe helps people resolve that. You mentioned that you and your wife do ceremonial meditations at home. You also talked about meditating on hearing Karen, focus on hearing her, seek a dialogue with her. What is that? Meditating on hearing Karen, focus on hearing her. Plant medicine is being experimented with to access whatever your issue might be. So you focus on a certain thing.

And we've done a few of them. I find it sort of comical and yet discovered some things deeply troubling within me that I thought, well, I'm glad I did this. I'm glad I had this experience where I got to release some things that I didn't know. We're still sort of stirring around in there. I think all these things are possible, even through prayer, honestly, whatever meditative state you get into. I got close the night when I was just sort of recouping from the surgeries. I had, you know, four or five hours who was just kind of just being wiped out from the anesthesia.

In a moment of just deep reflection and quiet, there was this discovery of, oh, I didn't get the chance to hold you. I didn't get a chance to really say goodbye to you. And that was a big thing, that last moment when she took her final breath, that her brother wasn't there to hold her, that I couldn't be there to just, you know, send her off to love her. And Karen, where she came and told me you were a good brother, forgive yourself. You know, you just stood up for other kids. Said, you got to just, you know, talk it off. get back to your life

and love it and love the fact that we had a life together and it was an amazing moment for me just amazing seems like you're still a pretty good brother yeah yeah thank you

weeks after your grandfather Gordon died who was really your dad who was the person you deeply deeply loved you said I finally dissolved in tears unable to speak I was convulsed with grief and lost in it. Sob after sob shook my body until finally it stopped.

I sat with my head and my hands silent. After a time a voice came, my voice. It said, you will always be alone. And the oddest thing happened, it gave me comfort. Do you remember the little boy you were? It sounds cheesy, but I've sort of woken up recently to how I stunted myself very early on after my dad died and it's so terrified me at age 10 that I didn't grieve. and that little boy, I've sort of woken up

to the idea that he is still very much alive in me. Do you feel that little boy's doing? Yeah, I think so, yeah. I feel them all the time. It's interesting. He's the one that actually had so much fun in life. And he's the one that actually still has sort of preserved my ability to have fun, even through the grief sometimes.

But I was a really good kid. I wanted to please my parents. I wanted to please my granddad more than anything in the world. I loved my grandmother The places that I didn't sense my loss was when I was acting When I had the mask of acting on I could just be honest and open in that moment And sort of lend my own life to whatever character I was trying to play

Those moments who have been free Completely free of any sense of guilt or shame or anything else Until then of course maybe if there's a moment When I'm playing a guy who's grieving a loved one Or a sister even or whatever then it comes flooding in, and my own story kind of comes along for the ride. And that's what I find rewarding about the work, still find rewarding about the work. So it's been a refuge for the little boy in a lot of places, in my imagination,

but also in my life's work, my career, I chose a place where my little boy was safe. He's been fully at the helm in many, many sort of parts of my life, yeah. that's an incredible thing to have figured out an outlet for I don't know I feel like a lot of this language is cheesy but I've come to kind of believe in it so I've always been skeptical my entire life but it hasn't really served me that well and suddenly here I am at 58 like weeping so maybe there's something to this little child thing but I do think this voice I developed in my head which is the voice that has gotten me through everything is this protector of this little child and I've kept him buried and and sequestered and I think having kids my own I want that

child to get out there and you know live and stuff and I love the idea that you were able to do that through acting yeah that's what a what a great circumstance it was that I fell into the acting thing I never wanted to be an actor I just I was just a kid who was surfing I used to love that And then the guy comes along and says, can you smoke a cigar? I said, yeah. And he says, well, then you used to play Ben Hubbard and the little foxes. And I did it and thought, this is great. I can do this the rest of my life.

So that's where it all sort of started. And that's the one that keeps it alive. You said that boy was soul sick and felt unwanted. Later on, you write about memories that you have to come back to you. You say, to find them now has been a pure delight. Well, some are painful, of course, but so many others are joys I'd forgotten or had remained hidden because of trauma. They are peeking their heads out now, hoping it is safe to come out into the open and shine as they once did.

I did not realize how many there were. People speak of the inner child. I don't really know much about it, except I presume we all have one and most of them are in hiding. I would say that that's been true for me and probably true for Karen after we were hurt by life and nothing hurts in life more than the death of someone precious when we are children. We do a voicemail at the end of every season of this podcast. And I think it's amazing to me the amount of people who experienced childhood loss

and the impact it's had on them their entire life. I mean, it's extraordinary. And so few people are able to talk about it and give voice to it. I don't know if it's repressed grief or unrecognized grief or childhood grief out there. And what you're doing here with this show, with this podcast?

And what I was trying to do with the book was say, you know, you've got company. You've got company. And it's and whatever yours is is yours is all yours but it's something with you you write about rage rage of the people who murdered your sister do you still feel that rage yeah yeah that's uh so i'm glad you pointed that out because it's uh i think there's a part of me that for a while was was quite happy to let it take over and uh just just to be angry and and not settled on anything and to kind of the only the only target in sight but it was myself so i i took

some time to you know beat myself down for a while but that rage is righteous it comes from the fact that i couldn't stop them that i couldn't help her that i couldn't save my sister's life so i raged it myself raged to god raged it them but uh the circumstances of it all led me to a a kind of peace in the end but that that that guy I'm still in there. He's still around. Has retracing Karen's last hours and last day? Has that ameliorated some of the rage? Has that lessened? Yeah, it has. Yeah.

It's for a long time in this place where I couldn't forgive myself for what had happened to Karen. And, of course, that probably made no real sense. It just had emotional sense and it had emotional weight that felt true. And I think, yeah, maybe that has helped save me quite of it. I certainly don't blame myself anymore, and I did for a while. You say in the book, I'm sorry, Karen, that has been so hard for me. This last image of you was impossible to shake for years and years. It haunted me in quiet moments and down dark streets, ambushing the joy of a cherry blossom day, crushing it without warning.

And today, even to this very day, it has the power to make me shake with grief. But it will not be, as I remember you, I promise. That was a big healing thing. The lingering image of Karen was always her corpse, and she didn't deserve that. That's why I apologized to her, because she was such a glorious girl, such a wonderful girl. And to have allowed myself to remember her any other way than that was I did myself a disservice. And I didn't really honor her life that way. I honored them more, and they didn't deserve it.

so we got there and we did get there in the end that we Karen is with me and so how do you get we're both happy you just got to go through the process uh find out what the truth is the truth is her life is what identified her not her death is there something you've learned in your grief that would help others and theirs because there's a lot of people listening right now who are grieving yeah and in all sorts of different ways the only real gift i would hope experience could offer would be to allow yourself to spend more time in the life they lived in the good that you knew from them and the joy that they brought you and the smiles that you knew from them and the happy accidents you shared and and to let them be remembered to let them

live again to breathe again to be in that life again instead of that the horror of their taking off thank you so much I really appreciate I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time. And for all you've known and lost and loved, obviously. And congratulations on your family and your children.

Thanks. You're wonderful. I wish you the best. Thanks, Anderson. Kelsey Grammer's new memoir is titled Karen A Brother Remembers. This conversation is our final podcast episode of this year. We're going to take a break for the holidays, and we'll be back with all new episodes in January,

starting with a conversation with singer and songwriter, Patty Smith. There's no rules. There's, and there shouldn't be any rules. I mean, people can, in all of these phrases, like time heals all wounds, it doesn't. Don't look to be healed. You know, it's like you have a sacred wound. Just, you know, take care of it. Don't let it get infected.

But it's not necessarily going to heal. You just learn to live with it. There's no rules and grief. No, I don't. think there should be. This week is also the final episode of the year for our new weekly companion show All There Is Live. It'll be back in the new year. The last episode is this Thursday night, 915 p.m. You can watch it live at cnan.com slash all there is, and you can join in the conversation by sending us voicemails and comments in our comments section. Also, you can record a video

for us on whatever topic you'd like and just email it to us at all there is at cennan.com. I hope you join us Thursday for the live show 915 p.m. at cnn.com slash all there is wherever you are in the world and in your grief thanks for being here i'm glad we're together now streaming on cnn candid conversations between hollywood's hottest actors new episodes of varieties acclaimed series actors on actors premiere exclusively on cnn go to cnn.com slash watch to subscribe or log in with your tv provider