Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Karen Carpenter moved with her family to Downey, California, in 1963. Karen's older brother, Richard Carpenter, decided to put together an instrumental trio with him on the piano, Karen on the drums and their friend Wes Jacobs on the bass and tuba. In a battle of the bands at the Hollywood Bowl in 1966, the group won first place and landed a contract with RCA Records.
After cutting two albums that were never released the trio broke up, but Karen and Richard formed another band with four other students from California State University that played several gigs before disbanding. In 1970 Karen and Richard made several demo music tapes and shopped them around to different record companies; they were eventually offered a contract with A&M Records.
Their first hit was a reworking of The Beatles hit "Ticket to Ride", followed by a rerecorded version of Burt Bacharach's "Close to You", which sold a million copies. Soon Richard and Karen became one of the most successful groups of the early 1970s, with Karen on the drums and lead vocals and Richard on the piano with backup vocals. They won three Grammy Awards, embarked on a world tour, and landed their own TV variety series in 1971, titled "Make Your Own Kind of Music!" (1971). However, nobody knew that Karen was at the time suffering from anorexia nervosa, a mental illness characterized by obsessive dieting to a point of starvation.
In 1975 the story came out when The Carpenters were forced to cancel a European tour because the gaunt Karen was too weak to perform. In 1976 she moved out of her parents' house to an apartment of her own. A few years later she married real estate developer Thomas J. Burris. Shortly afterwards, she and brother Richard were back in the recording studio, where they recorded their hit single "Touch Me When We're Dancing". However, Karen was unable to shake her depression as well as her eating disorder, and after collapsing after a recording, she spent most of 1982 in a New York City hospital undergoing treatment.
Her marriage was falling apart, and she and Burris were divorced by the end of the year. By 1983 Karen was starting to take control of her life and planning to return to the recording studio and began making public appearances again. On February 4, 1983, she went to her parents' house to sort through some clothes she kept there when she collapsed in a walk-in closet from cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead on the spot. She was only 32. Doctors revealed that her long battle with anorexia nervosa had stressed her heart to the breaking point.