The Karen Grammer Story

Karen Alicia Grammer

On the night of July 1, Michael Corbett stayed on base at Fort Carson, Dunn told Smit and Heim in the New Orleans interrogation room that night. He didn't join Glenn or Dunn or Watson at the apartment at the end of the alley off South Nevada Avenue that night, though in a sense he was present in spirit. Glenn looked up to Corbett and, in a way, authorities believe, wanted to be just like him. If Corbett could kill with cold-blooded remorselessness, Glenn believed that he could too.

That night, Glenn and the others, including Watson, who would later face his own death at Corbett's hand, had decided they would rob a nearby Red Lobster to pick up a little jingle. Their plan was to storm into the place just about closing time, force the few remaining employees to clean out the register and then flee.

Perhaps it was because they lacked Corbett's menacing figure, but by all accounts, the employees, among them Karen Grammer's boyfriend, didn't take the would-be bandits particularly seriously. They simply slammed shut the walk-up window and the bandits left, in what one imagines, was a particularly foul mood.

Karen Grammer

It was just a matter of fate that Karen Grammer showed up there that night. She had planned, it was later said, to meet her boyfriend. Instead, she arrived in the parking lot just as Glenn and his crew left. It's been said that the bandits feared Grammer would have been able to identify them. Smit and Heim believe Glenn and the others were motivated by something more primal, a desire to do as they had seen Corbett do, a desire to terrorize and dominate someone. If that scenario is correct, then Karen Grammer was doomed the moment she stepped out of her car.

Black fabric used to silence Karen Grammer

According to Dunn's account, a story that even now Heim finds "sickening," Glenn and the others grabbed the 18-year-old Grammer, forced her into their car and then drove to the apartment Corbett and Glenn had rented. There, the men took turns raping the young woman, all of them, including Dunn who, because he was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony, was never prosecuted for the crime.

They held her for about four hours, Smit would later say. During that time, Glenn and Dunn "did a couple of more robberies," Smit said. "Small stuff, convenience stores."

Then, drawing a page from Corbett's book, who had, at least in the Van Lone and Profitt killings and later in the murder of Watson as well, tried to subdue his victims with promises of mercy, Glenn told Grammer that she would be released.

"They took her blindfolded into a car and told her they were going to turn her loose," Heim later recalled. "They were going to drive somewhere and turn her loose."

They drove around the block from the apartment building, into the narrow alley and then down the alley about 400 feet, Dunn told them.

Larry Dunn

Glenn dragged the young woman from the car. And then, as Smit later described, without a moment's hesitation, Glenn slaughtered her. "He just stabbed her in the neck," Smit said. "One time. He got her real bad. Cut her carotid artery."

Then they sped off, leaving Grammer to spend her last few moments of life crawling toward the light in a futile search for help. It never dawned on Glenn or the others that the trail of blood she left behind would lead right back to them and ultimately to their mentor.