Sheila Keen Warren, the shooter in Palm Beach County’s infamous 1990 “killer clown” case, 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 up in a head-to-toe clown costume on the morning of May 26, 1990, and shot Marlene Warren, a Wellington mother and wife, in the face. Since her arrest in 2017, Keen Warren consistently contended she was innocent and continued to do so even after pleading guilty.
The killing in broad daylight and in front of multiple witnesses at Marlene Warren’s home was a “crime of passion,” State 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 be having an affair with in 1990. Both Michael Warren and Keen Warren denied the rumors. They got married in 2002 and started a new life together in Virginia.
Defense attorney Greg Rosenfeld’s position was that prosecutors latched onto Keen Warren as a suspect after hearing of an affair and focused only on evidence that could suggest she was the killer, despite discrepancies including that some witnesses said the clown was a 6-foot-tall man.
Concerns over whether a judge would allow what prosecutors considered their strongest pieces of evidence at trial largely led to the plea agreement, only two weeks before the trial was set to begin. After the last-minute plea agreement in 2023, Rosenfeld told the Sun Sentinel that Keen Warren could be free within 16 months, while prosecutors said she would be in prison for another two years at least.
Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer sentenced Keen Warren to 12 years for one count of second-degree murder, with credit for more than five years of time served in Palm Beach County jail since her arrest. She served her sentence at Gadsden Correctional Facility in Quincy, the seat of Gadsden County in the Panhandle.