A woman convicted of dressing up as a clown in 1990 and murdering the wife of a man she later married has been released from prison, putting to rest one of the more bizarre cold cases Florida has ever seen.
Sheila Keen-Warren, 61, was released from prison Saturday, about 17 months after pleading guilty to the second-degree murder of Marlene Warren, her current husband’s previous wife, according to online records from the Florida Department of Corrections.
Keen-Warren was arrested in 2017 in Washington County, Virginia, in connection with Warren’s 1990 murder. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty, but had been in custody for seven years since her arrest in 2017.
Her release from prison comes after she took a plea deal that came shortly before her trial would have started, The Associated Press reported. Florida’s law in 1990 allowed significant credit for good behavior, and Keen-Warren was expected to be released in about two years. She has maintained her innocence, even after pleading guilty.
In May 1990, Marlene Warren was shot in the face when she answered the front door of her home in Wellington, near West Palm Beach, and was confronted by a brown-eyed woman carrying balloons and wearing a clown costume and an orange clown wig, authorities said.
One of the balloons said, “You’re the greatest!” and the other had Snow White painted on it, according to news coverage at the time.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve seen in all my 19 years in law enforcement,” Bob Ferrell, then a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel newspaper the day after the murder.
Keen-Warren had been a suspect in the murder almost from the beginning, but prosecutors never had enough evidence to charge her until new technology allowed them to retest DNA evidence after the cold case was reopened in 2014.
Initially, suspicion quickly focused on Michael Warren, the victim’s husband, as friends and family said the couple was having marital problems.
Then the murder investigation led police to unrelated evidence of wrongdoing at Michael Warren’s car rental agency, and in 1992 he was sentenced to prison on 43 counts of odometer tampering, grand theft and racketeering, The Palm Beach Post reported at the time.
Michael Warren served three years in prison, and in 1997 he vanished. But he re-emerged in 2002, marrying Sheila Keen — the same Sheila Keen-Warren who’s now charged with his ex-wife’s murder. Sheila had worked for Michael repossessing cars.
Detectives said they were told as early as four months after the murder that Michael and Sheila had been having an affair and that Warren had paid rent for Keen-Warren’s apartment after she separated from her first husband.
It’s not clear if Keen-Warren has an attorney at this time.
