FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — After spending a dismal two years in jail in South Florida’s killer clown case, Sheila Warren is optimistic about going home.
In handwritten letters, she says she is running out of patience, yet believes she’ll be cleared by a Palm Beach County jury in February.
“I just don’t understand why we can’t get this nightmare over with,” Warren, 56, wrote to her mother on April 9. “Innocent people shouldn’t be made to sit in jail this long waiting on a trail (sic) to prove their (sic) innocent.”
Page after page, Warren expresses confidence about picking up the pieces of her life interrupted, from driving a car to eating healthier food to tending her garden on her rural southwestern Virginia estate.
And why wouldn’t she think that way? After all, the last time she was a suspect in the same murder 29 years ago, things turned out pretty well for her.
Warren, then Sheila Keen, emerged from suspicion without being charged. She wound up getting remarried in Las Vegas — to clown victim Marlene Warren’s husband, Michael.
Sheila took on the name “Debbie,” the couple ran a Tennessee restaurant, and she was photographed smiling in clown makeup at work on one Halloween.
Palm Beach County detectives, meanwhile, dusted off their cold-case files in 2014, pursued new DNA leads, and teamed with prosecutors on her surprise 2017 arrest. They are seeking the death penalty in the Wellington killing.
“God knows I wouldn’t hurt anything or anyone,” Warren wrote to her husband six months ago. “That’s not me and I know the world is still full of evil and wrongdoing but that’s not me and I pray that the world could be a better place for everyone.”
This look into Warren’s life and outlook as Inmate No. 0092956 comes through nearly 150 pages of correspondence recently released to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, through a public records request.
The file also contains numerous emails and letters sent to Warren from her mom and friends. There is nothing from her husband; he has said in an interview that she calls him often. She mentioned getting visits from her son.
It is unusual for prosecutors to collect jail mail in pending cases and make it available as evidence for defense attorneys.
But Sheila Warren’s much-publicized case is unlike any other here. As the homicide investigation remains open, detectives are closely monitoring everything she speaks or writes while in solitary confinement.
Richard Lubin, Warren’s high-powered defense attorney, said he has no concerns about the scrutiny on her mail or the public reading it.
“There’s not going to be anything relevant to the case,” Lubin said.
In the same March love letter to her husband, Warren wrote, “I will be glad to get this over with and all behind us. … I’m confident that my innocence will be proven.”
After the May 1990 shooting death of 40-year-old Marlene Warren, detectives got search warrants for Sheila Keen’s residence, and they took her blood and hair samples.
Witnesses told investigators that someone who looked like her bought a clown costume, flowers and balloons within hours of the killing.
But Sheila then said she was elsewhere repossessing cars for Michael Warren’s used-car business. She never was arrested.
Warren’s anticipation of another happy outcome is buoyed this time by religion.
Last December, she was baptized behind bars, according to a certificate from a Catholic church in Belle Glade. She often quotes scripture and her beliefs.
“This has been a real test for me and everyday I (continue) to ask for Jesus to help me to keep my faith, Hope, and Love for God,” she wrote to a girlfriend in March.
She also penned a note of thanks to her priest, included a $50 donation to help other inmates, and closed with, “I look forward to seeing you for my first confession.”
While keeping her spirits up, Warren expressed concerns that her isolation in jail is affecting her mental health and her ability to connect with people.
“I know that I will be damage for this ordeal, but with your help I can overcome what I feel,” she wrote her spouse, adding that he can relate. In the 1990s, Michael Warren served about four years in a Florida prison for financial crimes.
Sheila Warren’s mail also sheds light on her:
Worries about husband. She repeatedly urges her 66-year-old husband to have a proper diet, and provides tips such as eating vegetables and recipes she hopes to use in their kitchen someday.
“I just worry about you so much that’s the hardest thing to deal with,” she wrote. “Just try real hard to take care of yourself, please.”
On May 21, Warren wrote about her desires for Michael to take her out dancing and to jazz concerts: “This is the most miserable time, the time that we are apart, but we will survive, it’s only temporay (sic).”
Entertainment interests. Warren says she sleeps a lot due to boredom and a lack of other options: “I’m so tired of just laying here sleeping my life away.”
But she has watched television shows such as “America’s Got Talent,” along with reading various books. She asked her husband to send her Danielle Steel romance novels, and two crime fiction novels, “The Reckoning” by John Grisham, and “Ambush” by James Patterson.
Warren mentions her love for reading but her regrets about bad spelling: “I hate that I didn’t pay attention in english class.”
Complaints about jail. Warren wrote that the guards are “so unkind, no compassion at all” and “they don’t even look in my room half of the time to see if I’m even alive.” She also said the food is horrible, and she had been losing weight.
“When I get home it will be so hard not to eat everything in sight, but I’m going to be strong and not do it,” she wrote several months ago.
And in what appears to be a remark about the prosecution, Warren notes: “I feel sad that they are so ready to destroy a innocent person for their own personal gain.”
