27 years later, suspected killer clown faces justice

Just hours after Marlene Warren was shot in the face by a clown on her doorstep, police had a tip about who might have killed her.

And before long, they had much more, according to court files.

The records, many never before revealed, show:

■ Even before Warren died, an anonymous caller suggested police look into her husband, Michael, and the woman he was having an affair with, Sheila Keen.

■ Police also learned quickly about a woman who had bought a clown outfit, flowers and balloons just before the murder.

■ The clerks who sold the clown suit and flowers picked Keen’s photo out of a lineup.

■ Investigators tracked down a stolen car they thought the clown drove off in — a car tied to Michael Warren’s car lot.

■ They found fibers similar to a clown wig inside the car, and they later collected the same sort of fibers from Keen’s apartment.

■ A lawyer admitted that he once told Warren a person could get away with murder if they wore a disguise. Not just any disguise, but a clown suit, he said.

■ Keen later married the dead woman’s husband.

Despite all of that, police did not arrest anyone at the time. Or in the next year. Or

10 years. Or 20.

It was 27 years later, after new DNA testing had been developed, that prosecutors finally thought there was enough evidence to prove the former Sheila Keen was the clown who murdered Marlene Warren.

Michael Warren was never charged. By the time of his new wife’s arrest, the couple had retired to the mountains of Virginia, where they started a new life and no one even knew they were from Florida.

In September 2017, as they drove through the hills on the way home, a sheriff ’s deputy pulled over their Cadillac SUV and arrested Sheila Warren on a murder charge.

Today, police won’t talk in detail about the mountain of evidence they collected early on and why it took so long to make an arrest.

Authorities generally

won’t comment while a criminal case is pending. Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw will say only that police had to be certain before arresting Sheila Warren.

“There’s one thing to think someone did something and there’s another thing to know that they did it and be able to prove it in court,” he said during a news conference.

A surprise at the door

The South Florida Sun Sentinel pored over the court files to prepare its latest episode of Felonious Florida, a podcast that takes a deep look into some of Florida’s most notorious cases.

Records show that investigators suspected Sheila Keen immediately. They claim she put on a clown outfit on May 26, 1990, and hopped into a stolen white Chrysler LeBaron. She drove to the Warrens’ home in the 15000 block of Take Off Place in the exclusive Aero Club development in Wellington, and rang the doorbell.

“How sweet!” Marlene Warren said when she saw the clown at her doorway, delivering balloons with a bouquet of carnations arranged in a white basket. “You’re the greatest!” was written on one balloon.

Warren, 40, answered the door.

The clown pulled out a gun — police said it was either a .38- or .357-caliber pistol — and fired a single shot at point-blank range into Warren’s face. Her son, who was home at the time, tried to save her and chase after the clown, to no avail.

Marlene Warren never had a chance. Machines kept her alive for two days.

The investigation seemed to go quickly at first.

According to police reports, investigators heard rumors that Warren’s husband, Michael, owner of Bargain Motors in West Palm Beach, was having an affair with Sheila Keen, the estranged wife of one of the men who worked for Warren repossessing cars from people who failed to make payments.

With Marlene Warren on life support at nearby Palms West Hospital, a detective approached her husband and asked him questions about the shooting.

He was quick to say he had “no idea who would do this” to his wife. He told police he was on his way to watch a horse race in Miami as the bullet was being fired.

He suggested to the detective that perhaps it was a grudge shooting committed by an evicted tenant. Michael and Marlene owned 17 rental properties in a rough part of Palm Beach County, and Marlene managed them.

That meant having to collect rent — and evict tenants who couldn’t pay.

The getaway vehicle

Bargain Motors didn’t deal with Chryslers, Warren told police.

But a neighboring business did. A couple visiting from out of town had rented a LeBaron from Payless Rent A Car, a lot in West Palm Beach not far from Michael Warren’s business.

They called a number they found on an ad in a telephone book to get instructions for how to return the car — but they unknowingly called Bargain Motors instead, police said.

The person who answered the call told the couple to leave the car outside the gate to Payless, with the keys in the sun visor.

Employees at a Publix less than a mile from Keen’s home called police after the shooting to report that a woman matching her description bought flowers and balloons less than 90 minutes before the shooting, according to police reports.

Employees of a nearby costume shop also said a woman purchased a clown suit from them two days earlier.

Within days of the murder, the Publix clerks who sold the flowers and balloons — and the costume store employees who sold the clown suit — all picked Sheila Keen’s picture out of a photo lineup, records show.

Police even found the Chrysler, parked in outside a supermarket eight miles from the Warren home. A later search of the vehicle turned up orange fibers from a wig and several strands of long brown hair.

In May 1991, on the anniversary of the shooting, a detective working the murder case declared there was enough evidence to make an arrest. But state attorneys were concerned there was not enough physical evidence for a successful prosecution.

Jeff Marcus, chief assistant state attorney in neighboring Broward County, said prosecutors need a lot more evidence than police when it comes to deciding to ask a jury to send someone to prison for the rest of her life — or to death row.

“If police think they have probable cause, they can make an arrest,” said Marcus, who is not connected to the case. “We’re thinking of a lot more than probable cause. We have to prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Prosecutors get only one chance at a jury. If they fail, a killer could go free.

Legal advice

In the summer of 1991, investigators talked to Christopher DeSantis, an attorney who represented the victim’s son in an attempted murder case two years earlier. According to the lawyer’s sworn statement, DeSantis said Michael Warren asked him what would happen to a woman’s estate if her husband killed her.

It was an odd question, DeSantis said, but he answered as though it were hypothetical. He said if someone else committed the murder and it could not be traced back to the husband, the husband would inherit her assets.

Years later, reviewing his statement after Sheila Keen’s arrest, DeSantis remembered something else he told Michael Warren in 1989.

One way to get away with murder, DeSantis said he told Michael, would be to wear a disguise so nobody would be able identify the killer, even whether it was a man or a woman.

A disguise such as a clown suit, DeSantis told him.

Around the same time as the initial police interview with DeSantis, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance company paid out the claim on Marlene Warren’s death policy. Michael was the sole beneficiary and was given a check for $53,357.37.

The payout was another piece of circumstantial evidence that raised suspicion but, in prosecutors’ opinion, was not enough to charge anyone with murder.

‘Get on with it’

A few months later, prosecutors went after Michael Warren for business-related felonies — racketeering, odometer fraud and grand theft.

“We have strong information that links the defendant as a possible suspect in the murder of his wife, Marlene Warren,” Prosecutor Allen Geesey told the court during a hearing in October 1991.

Still, no charges, and the judge on the racketeering case noticed.

Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Walter Colbath Jr. initially refused to send Warren to prison after he was convicted of the financial crime charges in 1992.

If Michael Warren’s wife had not been the victim of the so-called “clown murder,” he never would have been tried for racketeering, the judge said. If you have evidence to charge Michael with killing his wife, Judge Colbath told prosecutors, then “get on with it.”

An appeals court intervened, and Warren was later sentenced to nine years in prison.

The murder case grew cold. The pile of circumstantial evidence wasn’t enough to persuade prosecutors to go forward, and no new information was coming in.

New life

Good behavior got Michael Warren out of prison in 1997. In 2002, he married Sheila Keen in Las Vegas. They moved to Tennessee, where their friends knew her as “Debbie.”

They later moved to Virginia but continued to run a restaurant, The Purple Cow, on the other side of the Tennessee border on Lee Highway. They eventually sold the restaurant and lived as a wealthy retired couple in Abingdon, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Their friends were unaware of their connection to Florida, their previous marriages or Michael Warren’s time in prison.

Then a federal grant of $125,000 breathed new life into the murder investigation. The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office formed a task force to re-investigate the killer clown case in late 2013.

DNA tests conducted decades earlier were not conclusive, but with improved DNA technology, lead detective Paige McCann ordered new tests by an FBI lab.

The new tests connected the hair found in the Chrysler LeBaron to Keen, who had provided DNA samples earlier in the investigation.

Meanwhile a former employee of Michael Warren’s gave investigators more information connecting him and Keen to the stolen LeBaron.

The orange fibers tied the stolen car to the crime scene.