Sheila Keen Warren, the shooter in the infamous 1990 “killer clown” case in Palm Beach County, was released from prison Saturday after spending about 17 months in a prison near Tallahassee.
Keen Warren, 61, pleaded guilty in April 2023 to being the person who dressed from head to toe in a clown costume and shot Marlene Warren, a Wellington mother and wife, in the face on the morning of May 26, 1990. Since her arrest in 2017, Keen Warren has consistently maintained her innocence and continued to do so even after pleading guilty.
The murder in broad daylight and in front of multiple witnesses at Marlene Warren’s home was a “crime of passion,” State’s Attorney Dave Aronberg previously told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Marlene Warren was married to Michael Warren at the time of the murder – a man Keen Warren worked for and was rumored to have had an affair in 1990. Both Michael Warren and Keen Warren denied the rumors. They married in 2002 and started a new life together in Virginia.
Defense attorney Greg Rosenfeld’s position was that prosecutors retained Keen Warren as a suspect after hearing about an affair and focused only on evidence that could point to her being the killer, despite discrepancies, including that some witnesses said the clown was a man was 1.80 meters tall. .
Concerns about whether a judge would allow what prosecutors considered their strongest evidence at trial largely led to the settlement just two weeks before the trial was set to begin. After the last-minute plea deal in 2023, Rosenfeld told the Sun Sentinel that Keen Warren could be out of prison in 16 months, while prosecutors said she would spend at least two more years in prison.
Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer sentenced Keen Warren to 12 years for first-degree murder, crediting more than five years in Palm Beach County prison since her arrest. She served her sentence at the Gadsden Correctional Facility in Quincy, the Gadsden County seat in the Panhandle.
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