Kelsey Grammer became emotional on this morning’s episode of The View as he remembered identifying his sister’s body after she was brutally murdered weeks before her 19th birthday.

The actor, who was promoting his new book Karen: A Brother Remembers, was only 20 when his 18-year-old sister Karen was kidnapped by men in a Colorado Springs parking lot, brutally raped, and stabbed 42 times. For the first time since that fateful night in 1975, Grammer recently went back and read the full police report.

“To tell her story, it was important to know the details,” he told the ladies on The View. “I felt like I was kind of a sleuth searching for Karen.”

“The real purpose of reading the police report was to find out if there was somebody who might know something nobody else knew, that I didn’t know,” he continued. “And, of course, I did discover several friends that she had had that I never knew about. I was able to speak to a few of them and that was the greatest thing.”

Grammer looked back on the “barbarity and the cruelty” of the night Karen was murdered, revealing how he hopes his book will help someone who has gone through something similar.

“Part of my mission, or my hope, is that someone who has been grieving in their lives over something similar would find a way through my own course with this and maybe find a way to have their grief, which is forever, square up a little more with the joy you had. At least be able to face each other on a 50/50,” he said. “Because that’s what I didn’t have.”

According to Grammer, he always referred back to his final memory of his sister, which was when he had to identify her body.

“I spent my whole life putting Karen in that horrible night, in that place, where I..,” he said as his voice trailed off and his eyes filled with tears, “where I saw her and identified her body.”

“I couldn’t let that image go. The book helped me do that,” he continued. “And now she lives again. And she’s vibrant and alive and that’s what I want to give to other people, that they can bring those people back to their lives. Because they are with you always and they are alive.”

The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.

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