Fort Lauderdale, Florida — A woman who admitted to dressing up as a clown and killing the wife of the man she later married in 1990 was freed from jail on Saturday. This ended a case that was even strange for Florida.
Records from the Florida Department of Corrections show that Sheila Keen-Warren, 61, was freed 18 months after pleading guilty to second-degree murder for killing Marlene Warren. The deal came not long before her trial was set to begin.
Even after her plea deal, Keen-Warren has said she is innocent and was given a 12-year prison term. But she had been in jail since her arrest in 2017—seven years—and Florida’s law from 1990 gave her a lot of credit for being good. It was thought that she would be free in about two years.
Sheila Keen-Warren has been found guilty of murder and will have to live with that shame for the rest of her life, said Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg in a statement Saturday.
Keen-Warren’s lawyer, Greg Rosenfeld, said she only agreed to the plea deal because it would get her out of jail in less than two years. If she had been found guilty at trial, she would have been sentenced to life in prison.
“We are overjoyed that Ms. Keen-Warren is back with her family after being freed from prison.” “She did not do this crime, as we have said from the start,” he said in a text message on Saturday.
Joseph Ahrens, Marlene Warren’s son, and his friends were at home when they said someone dressed as a clown rang the doorbell. He said the clown gave his mom some balloons when she answered. The clown pulled out a gun, shot her in the face, and ran away after she said, “How nice.”
Investigators from the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office had long thought that Keen-Warren was responsible for the murder, but she wasn’t arrested until 27 years later, when they said that better DNA tests linked her to evidence found in the getaway car. Rosenfeld has said that proof isn’t very strong.
At the time of the killing, Keen-Warren worked at the used car lot owned by Michael Warren, Marlene Warren’s husband. She has been his wife since 2002. They closed a restaurant in Abingdon, Virginia, just across the line from Tennessee, after which they moved there.
In 1990, people who saw Sheila Keen and Michael Warren having an affair told police. However, both Keen and Warren denied it.
Police said that over the years, workers at a costume shop had been able to identify Sheila Warren as the woman who bought a clown suit a few days before the murder.
As for the balloon with the words “You’re the Greatest” written in silver, it was only sold at one store—a Publix near Keen-Warren’s house. Employees told police that the balloons were bought an hour before the shooting by a woman who looked like Keen-Warren.
The thought-to-be getaway car was found abandoned and full of orange fibers that looked like hair. The white Chrysler roadster was reported stolen from Michael Warren’s lot of cars a month before the tragedy. Keen-Warren and her husband at the time took back cars for him.
A family member told The Palm Beach Post in 2000 that Marlene Warren, who was 40 years old at the time of her death, thought her husband was cheating on her and wanted to leave him. But she owned the car lot and other properties, and she was afraid of what would happen if she sold them.
She is said to have told her mom, “If anything bad happens to me, Mike did it.” He has never been charged and has said he has nothing to do with it.
But Rosenfeld said at the end of last year that the state’s case was not strong anymore. He said that one DNA sample had genes from both men and women, and the other could have come from one in twenty women.
That hair might not have come from Keen-Warren either, because it could have been left there before the car was reported stolen. He said that Marlene Warren’s son and another witness also told police that the car they found wasn’t the killer’s, even though detectives said it was.
Aronberg admitted last year that there were holes in the case. He said that these were caused by the fact that it took 30 years to get to trial, during which time key witnesses died.
Michael Warren was found guilty of grand theft, racketeering, and fiddling with an odometer in 1994. He spent almost four years in jail, which his lawyers at the time said was too long because they thought he had something to do with his wife’s death.
A message was left for him on the phone on Saturday, but he didn’t answer.
Source: Florida’s convicted killer clown released from prison for the murder of her husband’s then-wife
