Killer refused parole as TV star calls man ‘a butcher and a monster’

A MAN who murdered the sister of Frasier star Kelsey Grammer and two other people more than three decades ago has been denied parole after the prison board heard a written statement from Grammer calling the man a butcher and a monster.

The Colorado Parole Board also heard from other relatives of the victims and from detectives before deciding not to release 52-year-old Freddie Glenn.

“This is a butcher. This is a monster,” said the statement from Grammer. “I can never accept the notion that he can pay for the nightmare with anything less than his life.”

Grammer had planned to attend the hearing at a state prison in Limon, about 90 miles south-east of Denver, but a rain delay at Kennedy International Airport in New York caused him to miss a connecting flight.

Glenn is serving a life sentence for the first-degree murder of Karen Grammer in 1975 when she was 18. She was abducted outside a Colorado Springs restaurant, raped and stabbed on July 1.

In addition to that killing, Glenn was convicted of slaying of 28-year-old motel cook Daniel Van Lone two weeks earlier on June 19, 1975, during a botched robbery, and the June 27, 1975, killing of 19-year-old army soldier Winfred Proffitt during a drug deal.

Glenn had been given the death penalty but that sentence was commuted in 1978 to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Colorado law no longer allows parole in life sentences for first-degree murder, but Glenn was convicted before that law was changed.

During the hearing, Glenn downplayed his role in the slayings and told the board: “I apologise for my participation in something so terrible. I am sincerely and truly remorseful.”

In his statement, Kelsey Grammer said his sister had graduated from high school a year early and decided to take a year off after attending a semester of college. He said she may have moved to Colorado Springs because of a boy she liked.

“She was so smart and good and decent. She wrote poetry… We could laugh for hours together,” Grammer wrote. “I was supposed to protect her – I could not. It very nearly destroyed me… When we heard this man might be paroled, the suffering began anew.”

Glenn will be eligible for parole again in 2014.

Grammer’s personal life has been blighted by tragedy.

Less than a decade before his sister’s death, his father was murdered at his home in the US Virgin Islands, in 1968, when the actor was just 13.

In 1980, his twin half brothers, from his father’s second marriage, were killed by a shark in a diving accident.

The actor, who has struggled with drink and drugs, has been sober since 1996.

In 1997, he married his third wife, Camille Donatacchi, a former Playboy model, with whom he has two children.