FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida. — A woman who pleaded guilty to dressing up as a clown and murdering the wife of a man she later married in 1990 was released from prison Saturday, ending a case strange even by Florida Standards.

Sheila Keen-Warren, 61, was released 18 months later she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the shooting of Marlene Warren, according to Florida Department of Corrections records. The plea deal came shortly before his trial was set to begin.

Keen-Warren, who maintained her innocence even after her plea, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. But she had been in custody for seven years since her arrest in 2017, and Florida’s 1990 law provided significant credit for good behavior. She was expected to be released in about two years.

“Sheila Keen-Warren will always be a convicted murderer and will carry that stain every day for the rest of her life,” Palm Beach County State’s Attorney Dave Aronberg said in a statement Saturday.

Greg Rosenfeld, Keen-Warren’s attorney, said she agreed to the plea deal only because she would be released in less than two years and faced a possible life sentence if she were found guilty at trial.

“We are absolutely delighted that Ms Keen-Warren will be released from prison and returned to her family. As we have stated from the beginning, she did not commit this crime,” he said in a text message Saturday.

Marlene Warren’s son, Joseph Ahrens, and his friends were at home when they said a person dressed as a clown rang the doorbell. He said when his mother answered, the clown handed him balloons. After she responded, “How nice,” the clown pulled out a gun and shot her in the face before running away.

Palm Beach County sheriff’s investigators had long suspected Keen-Warren of being responsible for the murder, but she wasn’t arrested until 27 years later when they said enhanced DNA testing linked her to evidence found in the getaway car. Rosenfeld called the evidence weak.

At the time of the shooting, Keen-Warren was an employee of Marlene Warren’s husband, Michael, at his used car lot. Since 2002, she has been his wife – they eventually moved to Abingdon, Virginia, where they ran a restaurant just across the border in Tennessee.

Witnesses told investigators in 1990 that Sheila Keen and Michael Warren were having an affair, although both denied it.

Over the years, detectives say, costume store employees identified Sheila Warren as the woman who had purchased a clown costume days before the murder.

And one of the two balloons — a silver balloon with “You’re the Greatest” written on it — was sold at only one store, a Publix supermarket near Keen-Warren’s home. The employees told detectives that a woman who looked like Keen-Warren purchased the balloons an hour before the shooting.

The suspected getaway car was found abandoned with orange hair-like fibers inside. The white Chrysler convertible had been reported stolen from Michael Warren’s parking lot a month before the shooting. Keen-Warren and her then-husband repossessed cars for him.

Relatives told the Palm Beach Post in 2000 that Marlene Warren, who was 40 when she died, suspected her husband of having an affair and wanted to leave him. But the parking lot and other properties were in her name, and she feared what might happen if she did.

She reportedly told her mother, “If anything happens to me, Mike did it.” » He was never charged and denied any involvement.

But Rosenfeld said last year that the state’s case was collapsing. One DNA sample somehow showed both male and female genes, he said, and the other could come from as many as 1 in 20 women.

And even if that hair came from Keen-Warren, it could have been deposited before the car was reported stolen. He said Marlene Warren’s son and another witness also told detectives that the car police found was not the killer’s, although investigators insisted it was.

Aronberg acknowledged last year that there were flaws in the case, saying they were caused by the three decades it took for the case to come to trial, including the deaths of key witnesses.

Michael Warren was convicted in 1994 of robbery, racketeering and odometer tampering. He served nearly four years in prison — a sentence his lawyers at the time said was disproportionately long due to suspicions that he was involved in his wife’s death.

He did not respond to a telephone message left for him Saturday.

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This article corrects the spelling of the town of Abingdon, Virginia.