Documents give deepest look yet at 1990 case
Woman shot to death by assailant dressed in a clown costume.
It was April 10, 1989, and as attorney Christopher DeSantis walked out of the Palm Beach County courthouse, the husband of a woman whose son DeSantis represented in an aggravated battery case approached him with what he thought was an odd question.
If a husband were to kill his wife, the man asked, what would happen to her estate?
“My first impression was is this guy nuts, because why would you ask that question with your wife there,” DeSantis told detectives in 1991. “Then I took a look around and his wife wasn’t there.”
The man was Michael Warren, and less than 13 months after he posed the question to DeSantis, his wife, Marlene, the mother of DeSantis’ client, was shot to death at the Warren’s Wellington home by an assailant dressed in a clown costume.
DeSantis’ revelation is just one of several in nearly 3,000 pages of documents that Palm Beach County prosecutors released Thursday in the case of Sheila Keen-Warren, who was arrested in August after a grand jury indicted her on a charge of first-degree murder in Marlene Warren’s death. Keen-Warren, now Michael Warren’s wife, was rumored to be his lover when 40-year-old Marlene Warren was killed May 26, 1990.
Although Michael Warren has never been charged in connection with his first wife’s death, his name is as much a part of interviews and investigators’ files as the alleged killer he married 12 years after Marlene’s slaying.
Prosecutors announced in October that they will seek the death
penalty against Keen-Warren if a jury convicts her of first-degree murder. The thousands of pages of documents they released Thursday provide the deepest look yet into details of the circumstantial case investigators have been building against her off and on for the past 27 years.
They include statements from co-workers who described unusual behavior by Keen-Warren and her then-business associate Michael Warren both before and after the shooting, a trove of financial records and a series of investigators’ notes that show they periodically pursued leads over more than two decades on what many have previously characterized as a cold case. Prosecutors also included more recent forensic testing that investigators used to link Keen-Warren with hairs found in the killer clown’s getaway car, as well as details from her September arrest.
Several key documents provide more detail about information investigators have already revealed, including statements from workers at a nearby costume shop who identified Keen-Warren as the woman who purchased a clown costume shortly before the murder, and from the Publix supermarket clerk who said a woman fitting Keen-Warren’s description bought the flower basket and balloons found at the crime scene.
The killer used the balloon and flowers as a ruse to get Marlene Warren to answer the door. Her son’s girlfriend at the time told investigators that Marlene saw the clown at the door with the items and said, “Oh, how sweet,” as she opened the door.
Witnesses said they then heard two pops. Marlene was shot just under her nose with a bullet investigators believe came from a .38 caliber handgun. The bullet tore through her teeth and tongue and lodged in the back of her throat, according to medical examiner reports.
Exactly 27 years and four months to the day later, a team of U.S. Marshals and police in Virginia pulled over the car that Michael Warren was driving with Keen-Warren as his passenger and took the 54-year-old woman into custody. Her first question once she was in a squad car?
“Where is my husband?” she asked Washington County Sheriff ’s Lt. Dewey Fulton, according to a report, later asking where they were going and whether she was under arrest.
Keen-Warren asked whether Michael Warren was under arrest as well and Fulton replied that he didn’t know. Investigators did try to interview Michael Warren, but let him go after he declined. Once investigators told Keen-Warren she was under arrest for Marlene Warren’s murder, she told detectives she didn’t want to speak to them and put her head down on an interrogation room table.
The next day, as investigators combed through the couple’s new life and interviewed employees at the The Purple Cow, the Tennessee restaurant they had owned until December 2016, one former employee told investigators that another co-worker claimed that Keen-Warren, known to them as Debbie, got drunk one night and confessed to buying a clown costume and murdering Marlene Warren because the woman’s existence was keeping the cheating lovers apart.
Those statements back up claims from fr i ends and co-workers who knew Keen-Warren and Michael Warren around the time of Marlene Warren’s murder.
Dozens of pages of investigative documents detailing interviews from that time reveal two recurring themes from witnesses: Keen-Warren, then Sheila Keen, was madly in love with Michael Warren. And Michael Warren wanted to see his wife dead.
Although both denied they were romantically involved when police questioned them after Marlene Warren’s death, investigator interviews showed Michael Warren’s own mother, Joyce Clayton, said Sheila Keen-Warren told her a month before Marlene Warren’s death that she was in love with her son.
Clayton said the revelation came when they were all gathered in April 1990 at the Calder Race Track in Fort Lauderdale and Clayton confronted Keen-Warren after she became upset when she couldn’t sit next to Michael Warren. It was the same horse track that, according to Michael Warren’s friends, they and he were driving to when the killer clown shot his wife.
Clayton told investigators she asked Keen-Warren if she loved her son, and the younger woman said yes. A friend of Warren’s who also attended that April gathering later told investigators that Clayton also asked her son whether he loved Keen-Warren.
“I love myself,” is how Michael Warren responded, the friend said.
Other witnesses, however, said Michael Warren made statements about wanting his wife killed.
Ten years later, the investigation was still continuing. An investigative report from that period showed that Donald Carter, a former employee of Michael Warren, called detectives in June 2000. He told detectives that shortly after Marlene Warren’s death, Michael Warren had given him several guns and told him to take them off the Bargain Motors usedcar lot that Warren owned and where Carter worked. Carter said he stashed the guns in his parents’ attic and believed one of them was the murder weapon, but a subsequent search of the attic turned up no weapons.
Carter also told police he believed the clown wig was thrown into a canal near Military Trail and Southern Boulevard, but a dive team failed to recover such a wig. Consultants told investigators that it was unlikely one would be found there after 10 years.
More investigative documents showed investigators pursued similar deadend leads, including several tipsters who named other alleged killers they claimed conspired with Michael Warren to kill his wife.
The bulk of the documents and data released Thursday, however, were financial records of Michael Warren and then-wife Marlene Warren.
The more than 1,700 pages of financial records show that although Michael Warren’s primary business was Bargain Motors, the Warrens had steadily amassed rental properties beginning in the mid-1970s. By 1983, the couple had eight properties, the records released Thursday show. Some of those properties had multiple units that the couple rented out.
The value of the couple’s properties topped $1.2 mill ion by Fe b ruary 1990, according to financial documents her husband filled out.
As Marlene Warren clung to life after the May 26, 1990, shooting, Michael Warren mentioned the properties to investigators after telling them he had no idea who could have wanted his wife dead. Warren said “they do own a lot of rental property in the Westgate area and evict people all the time but that his wife handles all the business concerning the rental property and that he doesn’t have anything to do with it,” according to a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy’s report dated June 2, 1990.
Also in the trove of financial statements are bank records from Michael Warren’s mother. Those records show that Clayton received nearly $150,000 from the sale of what appear to be municipal bonds and possibly stocks in the six months before her daughter-in-law’s murder.
The records also show that Clayton opened a savings account and a safe deposit box at Southeast Bank in Fort Lauderdale on May 17, 1990, less than two weeks before Marlene Warren was killed. Both the account and deposit box were opened in the names of Clayton, Michael Warren and Gail Roberts, who is Clayton’s daughter and Warren’s sister. A statement for the account showed that two deposits totaling nearly $60,000 had been made by May 29, 1990, three days after the shooting.
The records also show a payout from a life insurance policy where Michael Warren received more than $53,000 as a beneficiary of his wife’s estate.
Also in the records released Thursday, at least one witness told police that Marlene Warren confronted her husband about his involvement with Keen-Warren.
John Moran of Clewiston, who with his father detailed cars at Bargain Motors around the time of the slaying, told detectives in 2014 that sometime before Marlene Warren’s death, Michael Warren had told them his wife had said to him, “He was in a sinking ship and he would lose every (expletive deleted) thing he owned if he kept screwing with her.”
“Michael Warren said that he would make someone a very happy person and they would never have to work again if they got rid of the (expletive deleted),” Moran told detectives.
Keen-Warren and her husband at the time, Richard Keen, worked as car repossession agents and were often at Warren’s used car lot. A female employee at the lot said everyone there suspected Warren a nd Keen-Warren were having an affair, but she also noticed that in the days leading up to Marlene Warren’s shooting, Michael Warren stopped wanting to be seen at the office with Keen-Warren.
The two married in Las Vegas in August 2002. They were living as a couple in Abingdon, Va., and were on their way to visit Warren’s mother in Vermont when police arrested Keen-Warren.
Court records show Keen-Warren is due in court for a status check before Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Samantha Schosberg Feuer on May 9. No trial date has been set.
The Palm Beach Post tried but could not reach Michael Warren for comment.
As for DeSantis, he represented Marlene Warren’s son, Joe Ahrens, in a case where Ahrens pleaded guilty to a 1986 aggravated assault. DeSantis revealed few details of that case in his1991 interview with detectives except to say that there were other defendants involved, Ahrens was the least culpable and a judge ultimately sentenced him to six months’ house arrest.
DeSantis told investigators during that interview that he thought the Warrens were a close couple and he didn’t take Michael Warren’s question to be serious.
“What I said to him is it really isn’t an issue of whether a man kills his wife, the question is whether the man is convicted of murdering his wife because if he’s convicted of murdering his wife, he wouldn’t inherit, but if he were convicted of a lower charge, he would,” DeSantis said, according to the detectives’ report. “I said what’s particularly peculiar about the thing is not only that, but if he had a friend who did it and they couldn’t tie him as an accessory to the friend he’d get away scot-free.”
DeSantis was reinterviewed in 2017 around the time Keen-Warren was arrested. He told prosecutors then that he remembered specifically telling Michael Warren during their conversation that a killer dressed as a clown likely would “get off,” because witnesses would not be able to determine whether the assailant was male or female.