Judge scolds state over failure to disclose ‘killer clown’ evidence, waits to set new trial date due to repeated delays

WEST PALM BEACH — A Palm Beach County judge scolded prosecutors and the Sheriff’s Office for failing to notice missing evidence until shortly before the so-called “killer clown” case was scheduled to begin, evidence that could be helpful to the defense.

Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer didn’t play favorites in court Friday, saving some of his ire for defense lawyer Greg Rosenfeld for stating in his court filings that the missing documents were located in the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office. They were actually at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

The trial of Sheila Keen Warren, accused of dressing as a clown 32 years ago and shooting Marlene Warren to death, was supposed to get underway with jury selection on Friday. Instead, the frustrated judge on the case won’t schedule a trial until early next year.

Suskauer said it was “ridiculous” at this late stage, more than five years after the defendant’s arrest, for delays to keep cropping up, depriving the defendant and the victim’s family of justice and possibly closure. The prosecution’s job should be to seek justice, the judge said, not convictions.

[ PAST COVERAGE: It’s been 32 years since a clown shot Marlene Warren to death. Her accused killer still hasn’t gone to trial. ]

Still, Suskauer appeared reluctant to accept the idea that lead prosecutor Reid Scott intentionally withheld evidence, despite the defense insistence that the failure to turn over the evidence before last week was deliberate.

Rosenfeld asked the judge to financially sanction the prosecutor’s office, but Suskauer wondered aloud whether he had the authority to do so even if he wanted to.

The defendant ended up marrying the victim’s husband 12 years after the killing and now goes by Sheila Keen Warren. She remains in custody, though the judge is considering a motion by the defense to acknowledge the repeated delays by granting bail.

The mystery surrounding the case lasted decades, and defense lawyers insist their client is wrongly accused.

What’s known is that the killer dressed as a clown stood at Marlene Warren’s door in Wellington on May 26, 1990, and shot the 40-year-old woman in the face. Flowers and two balloons — a heart-shaped one that said “You’re the Greatest” and one with a picture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves — were left behind.

The case went cold until Keen Warren was arrested in 2017 in Virginia, where she had made a new life under a new name with her husband and the victim’s former husband, Michael Warren.

People told police during their investigation that Keen Warren had been seen in clown garb before. But right after Warren’s murder, the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office got dozens of tips from people who said they’d seen a clown, and all were placed in a “clown sighting file,” court records say.

There are 40 different leads in the 25-page clown sighting file that have yet to be investigated, Keen Warren’s defense attorneys wrote in an Oct. 13 motion, prompting the latest delay in her trial. It has now been delayed seven times.

Defense attorneys wrote in the motion that they had been seeking the clown-sighting file since June 2019, but prosecutors said they did not find it until last week.

It will take defense attorneys “considerable time and resources,” they wrote, to look into the clown-sighting leads. One of the tips “points to a suspect who PBSO previously investigated,” the motion says.

Scott admitted that the clown-sighting file hadn’t been turned over to the defense but insisted it was not intentional. The file had been found at the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office “misplaced” inside a box with documents relating to Michael Warren’s past criminal case on odometer fraud, Scott wrote.

[ RELATED: Joseph Ahrens found his mother in a pool of blood; saw clown escape ]

Scott wrote in his response that after reviewing, the clown-sighting file “clearly does not contain 40 ‘credible’ leads” as the defense attorneys said. Eleven people who submitted a tip are now dead, 18 are anonymous or did not leave contact information, and of the remaining tips, only a few “provide information that could be considered a ‘lead,’” Scott wrote.

The file “would appear at first glance to be of major consequence, once it was carefully evaluated, it is clearly a minor issue with very little information of value,” he wrote. “Given the totality of the circumstances, its oversight is not willful and its impact is trivial.”

But that’s not his call to make, Rosenfeld said, and the judge appeared sympathetic to the argument.

“The State Attorney was ready to testify in court today if asked. Contrary to the false allegations made by the defense, the record shows that the missing file was not in the possession of the State Attorney’s Office. It was found by law enforcement at their office,” said Marc Freeman, spokesman for the State Attorney’s Office. “As soon as this was discovered, the file was immediately turned over. Although this file likely has little evidentiary value, the State agreed with the defense’s request to continue the case.”

Whether the clown who killed Warren was even a woman is one of several discrepancies in the case that defense attorneys have pointed to throughout the pre-trial proceedings.

Four people at the home in Wellington saw the clown that day before it calmly walked away, and three of them said the clown was a man over 6 feet tall, defense attorneys wrote in a filing last year. Keen Warren’s driver’s license issued in 1990 says she stands at 5-feet-6-inches tall, they wrote.

Marlene Warren’s son Joseph Ahrens, who was 21 at the time, watched the clown in the colorful costume and wig with a white face and red nose kill his mother. The 2021 court filing cites a radio interview from 1991 where Ahrens said he thought the killer was a man because of the big hands and body size he saw.

Jean Pratt, another witness to the murder, told detectives that “he was real tall” and looked “a little bit built,” the court record says.

“I saw his beady eyes,” she told detectives in her interview. “I saw him.”

A year after the murder, Pratt still said she believed the person underneath the clown costume was a man, the court filing says.

Descriptions of the clown’s costume, wig, shoes, eye color, weight and whether the clown’s face was painted or if the person was wearing a mask vary among the witnesses, the defense wrote in 2021, and all add up to circumstantial evidence with “substantial inconsistencies.”

“Even if the witnesses were unable to identify the clown’s gender, one fact remains: applying makeup does not cause a person to grow six to eight inches,” the defense attorneys wrote. “Both on the day of the shooting and one year later, all four witnesses expressed no doubt about the clown’s height. The State wants the Court to turn a blind eye to four eyewitnesses giving the same description of the clown’s height — a description that does not match Sheila Keen Warren.”

[ RELATED: New details in notorious 1990 ‘killer clown’ case show why prosecutors are so sure who was under the wig ]

Prosecutors have said in court filings that the amount of evidence that points to Keen Warren as the person underneath the costume is “overwhelming.”

Keen Warren was identified in a photo lineup by two employees of a costume store as the woman who hurriedly bought a clown costume, orange wig and white makeup two days before the murder, prosecutors wrote in a court filing in 2021. A Publix employee recalled a woman matching Keen Warren’s description who purchased the exact balloons found at the crime scene.

Several people who knew Michael Warren knew that he and Keen Warren were romantically involved, prosecutors wrote. Michael Warren ran a used car lot, A Bargain Motors, and Keen Warren worked for him repossessing cars.

She was considered a suspect early on in the case, but her arrest 27 years later was a result of advancements in DNA technology. Evidence found inside a white Chrysler LeBaron led to Keen Warren.

Four days after the murder, detectives found an abandoned white Chrysler LeBaron in the parking lot of a grocery store. The LeBaron had been stolen 45 days before the killing by Michael Warren and Keen Warren, the filing written by prosecutors in 2021 said, and it was “identical” to the LeBaron witnesses said they saw the clown drive away.

Inside the car, investigators found fake orange-yellow acrylic hairs and long brown human hairs. The root of one of the human hairs matched Keen Warren’s DNA, the prosecutors’ filing said.

Acrylic hairs found in the car, orange-yellow acrylic hairs found on shoes inside Keen Warren’s home and on a ribbon from the balloons all matched a clown wig that detectives bought from the Spotlight Capezio — the costume store where the two employees identified Keen Warren as the woman who purchase a clown costume, prosecutors wrote in the 2021 court filing.

One of the employees told detectives the woman was skinny and had long brown hair and “manlike features,” the document says. The second employee said the woman was as tall as 5-feet-9-inches with “chocolate” colored hair and that she was “mannish” in her walk, clothes, figure and frame.

[ RELATED: Suspected killer clown went free for 27 years. What took so long? ]

Investigators also talked to Regina Albaro, a Publix employee who was working the day of the shooting at the store less than a mile from Keen Warren’s home, the document says. The employee remembered that about 10 a.m. on May 26, a few hours before Warren was killed, a woman who she initially thought was a boy or man came in and purchased a wicker basket of red and white flowers and two helium balloons. She recalled the pictures on the balloons: “You’re the Greatest” and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

“These are the exact balloons that were left at the crime scene,” Assistant State Attorney Scott wrote. “Albaro gave her statement prior to viewing photos of the crime scene. There would have been no way for her to have known the specifics of the balloons left at the crime scene.”