Florida’s Convicted Killer Clown Released from Prison for Murdering Her Husband’s Then-Wife

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 prison 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 killed 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 sentence. 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.

Police say Sheila Keen-Warren killed someone and will always have that mark on her body for the rest of her life. Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said this in a statement on 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.” “As we’ve said from the start, she did not do this crime,” he wrote 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 testing linked her to evidence found in the getaway car. Rosenfeld has said that evidence isn’t very strong.

At the time of the shooting, Keen-Warren worked at the used car lot owned by Michael Warren, Marlene Warren’s husband. She has been married to him since 2002. They eventually moved to Abingdon, Virginia, and ran a restaurant there, just across the valley from Tennessee.

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.

Another balloon, a silver one that said “You’re the Greatest,” 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 convertible was reported stolen from Michael Warren’s lot of cars a month before the tragedy. Keen-Warren and her then-husband repossessed cars for him.

Relatives 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 might happen if she did.

She is said to have told her mom, “If anything bad happens to me, Mike did it.” He has never been charged and has denied involvement.

But Rosenfeld said last year that the state’s case was falling apart. One DNA sample somehow showed both male and female genes, he said, and the other could have come from one out of every 20 women.

And even if that hair did come 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 detectives that the car deputies found wasn’t the killer’s, though investigators insisted it was.

Aronberg last year conceded that there were holes in the case, saying they were caused by the three decades it took to get it to trial, including the death of key witnesses.

Michael Warren was convicted in 1994 of grand theft, racketeering and odometer tampering. He served almost four years in prison—a punishment his then-attorneys said was disproportionately long because of suspicions he was involved in his wife’s death.

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