Florida is home to some of the strangest criminals in the country.
But one case took the cake for the Sunshine State.
And a killer clown was set free in Florida after this awful situation.
Florida town rocked by case involving a killer clown
Marlene Warren was murdered in a shocking crime on May 26, 1990.
She answered her door that day to discover a clown delivering balloons and carnations.
The clown handed the balloons to Warren.
“How nice,” Warren said.
The clown pulled out a gun and shot her in the head before driving off in a Chrysler LeBaron.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve seen in all my 19 years in law enforcement,” a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokesman said a day after the murder.
The husband of Marlene Warren at the time she was murdered, Michael Warren, was rumored to be having an affair with Sheila Keen who worked for him.
Both individuals denied the rumors.
Michael Warren and Sheila Keen got married in 2002 and moved to Virginia.
This came after he spent three years in prison for theft, racketeering, and tampering with the odometers at his used car dealership.
Sheila Keen-Warren was a longtime suspect by police in Florida of being the killer clown but they did not have enough evidence to convict her.
Killer clown case comes back to life
Law enforcement in Palm Beach County, Florida reopened the investigation into the death of Marlene Warren after a federal grant for cold case investigations.
A DNA test found that Keen-Warren’s hair matched that found in the LeBaron that was seen driving away from the murder scene and later found abandoned.
The LeBaron had been reported stolen from the used car dealership that Michael Warren owned a month earlier
Witnesses at a grocery store where the balloons were purchased described a woman matching Keen-Warren’s description.
A costume shop employee identified a woman matching her description as the person who bought the clown costume.
Keen-Warren was arrested in 2017 and had been held in custody since then.
She accepted a deal to plead guilty to second-degree murder but maintained her innocence.
The deal was struck before she would have gone to trial for the murder.
A judge sentenced her to 12 years in prison in 2023, but she was recently released from jail after getting credit for the days she spent in custody.
Florida had a law in 1990 that allowed her to get credit for good behavior, which still applied to her.
Keen-Warren’s attorney Greg Rosenfeld was happy for his client.
“We are absolutely thrilled that Ms. Keen-Warren has been released from prison and is returning to her family,” Rosenfeld told Miami station WTVJ. “As we’ve stated from the beginning, she did not commit this crime.”
He maintained that the DNA evidence against his client was spotty and that some eyewitnesses described the killer clown as a six-foot-tall man.
Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg had a different reaction to the news.
“Sheila Keen-Warren will always be an admitted convicted murderer and will wear that stain for every day for the rest of her life,” Aronberg said.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
