FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — A woman who pleaded guilty to dressing as a clown and killing the wife of a man she later married in 1990 was released from prison Saturday, ending a case that was strange even by Florida standards.
Sheila Keen-Warren, 61, was released 18 months after pleading guilty to manslaughter for the shooting death of Marlene Warren, Florida Department of Corrections records show. The plea deal came shortly before her trial would have started.
Keen-Warren, who maintained her innocence even after her plea, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. But she had been in custody for seven years since her 2017 arrest, and Florida law from 1990 allowed extensive credit for good behavior. She was expected to be released in about two years.
“Sheila Keen-Warren will always be a convicted murderer and will carry that stain every day for the rest of her life,” Palm Beach County Attorney Dave Aronberg said in a statement Saturday.
Greg Rosenfeld, Keen-Warren's attorney, has said she only took the plea deal because she was due to be released in less than two years and faced a life sentence if convicted at trial.
“We are absolutely delighted that Ms Keen-Warren has been released from prison and is returning to her family. As we have stated from the beginning, she did not commit this crime,” he said in a text message on Saturday.
Marlene Warren's son, Joseph Ahrens, and his friends were at home when they said a person dressed as a clown rang the doorbell. He said that when his mother answered, the clown handed her some balloons. After she replied, “How nice,” the clown pulled out a gun and shot her in the face before fleeing.
Palm Beach County sheriff's investigators had long suspected Keen-Warren of the murder, but she was not arrested until 27 years later when they said enhanced DNA testing linked her to evidence found in the getaway car. Rosenfeld has called that evidence weak.
At the time of the shooting, Keen-Warren was an employee of Marlene Warren's husband, Michael, at his used car lot. She has been his wife since 2002. They eventually moved to Abington, Virginia, where they ran a restaurant just across the border from Tennessee.
Witnesses told investigators in 1990 that then-Sheila Keen and Michael Warren were having an affair, although both denied it.
Detectives said costume store employees over the years had identified Sheila Warren as the woman who bought a clown suit a few days before the murder.
And one of the two balloons — a silver one that read “You're the Greatest” — was sold at just one store: a Publix supermarket near Keen-Warren's home. Employees told investigators that a woman resembling Keen-Warren had purchased the balloons an hour before the shooting.
The suspected getaway car was found abandoned with orange, hair-like fibers in it. The white Chrysler convertible had been stolen from Michael Warren's parking lot a month before the shooting. Keen-Warren and her then-husband seized cars for him.
Family members told The Palm Beach Post in 2000 that Marlene Warren, who was 40 when she died, suspected her husband was having an affair and wanted to leave him. But the car lot and other properties were in her name, and she feared what would happen if she did.
She reportedly told her mother, “If anything happens to me, Mike did it.” He has never been charged and has denied any involvement.
But Rosenfeld said last year that the state's case fell apart. One DNA sample somehow showed both male and female genes, he said, and the other could have come from one in 20 women.
And even if that hair came from Keen-Warren, it could have been deposited before the car was reported stolen. He said Marlene Warren's son and another witness also told investigators the car found did not belong to the killer, although investigators insisted it did.
Aronberg admitted last year that there were holes in the case, saying they were caused by the 30 years it took to bring the case to trial, including the deaths of key witnesses.
Michael Warren was convicted in 1994 of theft, extortion and odometer tampering. He served almost four years in prison – a sentence that his lawyers at the time said was disproportionately long because of the suspicion that he was involved in his wife's death.
He did not respond to a telephone message left for him on Saturday.
