FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) – A woman who pleaded guilty to dressing as a clown and in 1990 killing the wife of the man she later married was released from prison Friday, ending a case that has been strange even by Florida standards.
Sheila Keen-Warren, 61, was released 18 months after she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the shooting of Marlene Warren, Florida Department of Corrections records show. The plea deal came shortly before his trial was set to begin.
Keen-Warren, who maintained his innocence even after his plea, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. But he has served seven years since his arrest in 2017, and a 1990 Florida law allows significant credit for good behavior. It is expected that he will be released in about two years.
“Sheila Keen-Warren will always be a convicted murderer and will wear that stain every day for the rest of her life,” Palm Beach County State’s Attorney Dave Aronberg said in a statement Saturday.
Greg Rosenfeld, Keen-Warren’s attorney, said he only took the deal because he has less than two years to be released and faces up to life in prison if convicted at trial.
“We are very happy that Ms. Keen-Warren has been released from prison and returned to her family. As I have said from the beginning, she did not commit this crime,” he said Saturday in a text message.
Marlene Warren’s son, Joseph Ahrens, and friends were at home when they say someone dressed as a clown rang the doorbell. She said that when her mother answered, the clown gave her a balloon. After she replied, “Very good,” the clown pulled out a gun and shot her before running away.
Palm Beach County sheriff’s investigators have long suspected Keen-Warren in the slaying, but he was not arrested until 27 years later when they said good DNA testing was linked to the evidence found in the getaway car. Rosenfeld called the evidence weak.
At the time of the shooting, Keen-Warren was an employee of Marlene Warren’s husband, Michael, in a used car. Since 2002, he has been his wife – he eventually moved to Abingdon, Virginia, where he opened a restaurant on the Tennessee border.
Witnesses told investigators in 1990 that Sheila Keen and Michael Warren were having an affair, although both denied it.
Over the years, detectives said, costume shop employees identified Sheila Warren as the woman who had purchased a clown suit days before the killing.
And one of the two balloons — a silver one that read, “You’re the Greatest” — was sold at only one store, the Publix supermarket near Keen-Warren’s home. Employees told detectives a woman who looked like Keen-Warren had bought balloons an hour before the shooting.
The supposed getaway car was left with orange fibers like hair. A white Chrysler convertible had been reported stolen from Michael Warren’s car a month before the shooting. Keen-Warren and his wife then bought a car for him.
Her family 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 her. But the car and other property were in his name, and he feared what might happen if he did.
He allegedly told his mother, “If anything happens to me, Mike’s done.” He was never charged and denied involvement.
But Rosenfeld said last year that the state’s case fell apart. One DNA sample somehow shows male and female genes, he said, and another could come from one in every 20 women.
And even if the hair is from Keen-Warren, it may have been saved before the car was stolen. He said Marlene Warren’s son and other witnesses also told detectives that the car deputies found was not the killer, despite investigators
Aronberg last year admitted that there are holes in the case, saying they were caused by thirty years to get it to trial, including the death of a key witness.
Michael Warren was convicted in 1994 of theft, racketeering and odometer. He has been in prison for almost four years – a sentence that the then-lawyer said was disproportionately long because of the suspicion that he was involved in the death of his wife.
He did not respond to a phone message left for Saturday.
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This article corrects the spelling of the city of Abingdon, Virginia.
