For years, Joe Ahrens chewed over what he might say to his mother's killer. Something cutting, he thought. Something smart. Something that would stick with her forever, the way the memory of his mother's murder has stuck with him.
In the end, he said little. May God be with her.
Ahrens was 21 in 1990 when an assailant disguised as a clown shot his mother to death on the doorstep of their Wellington home. He rose from the couch and staggered after her killer, slowed by the cast on his leg from a recent car crash. The shooter walked to the driveway, turned once to lock eyes with Ahrens, then drove away in a white Chrysler LeBaron.
The decades-old anger that haunted Marlene Warren's son cooled by the time Sheila Keen-Warren pleaded guilty to the murder almost 33 years later. Her plea conference, held quickly and quietly April 25, was a stunning end to a murder mystery on the eve of its trial.
True-crime junkies continue to debate whether justice was served by Keen-Warren's 12-year prison sentence. Ahrens, now 54 and with two sons of his own, is at the receiving end of all of it — batting away congratulations and condolences online from people who can't agree whether the punishment fit the crime.
"We never get what we want, you know," the Texas resident said Wednesday. "So we have to settle for what we get."
Ahrens watched the plea conference unfold over Zoom, Keen-Warren's brown hair just as long then as it was in 1990. Years of drug and alcohol abuse have dulled Ahrens' memories from that time, but some, like the first night he saw Keen-Warren, are clear as day.
She was Sheila Keen then, a Glades girl a few years older than Ahrens and not yet married to his stepfather. She stood beside Michael Warren in the kitchen of the Warrens' home during a late-night party, Ahrens' grandmother watching with a frown.
"Keep an eye on that one," she told Marlene. "She's pretty."
Keen-Warren and Michael Warren worked together repossessing cars and were rumored to be having an affair in the time leading to Warren's murder. Ahrens said his mother knew about their relationship and was preparing to end her marriage — a decision that could have plunged Michael Warren into financial ruin.
"We made plans," Ahrens said. "She said, 'In two weeks, we're going to leave. If anything happens to me, he did it. He had something to do with it.' "
The next time Ahrens saw Keen-Warren was at his mother's funeral about one week later. She stood beside her first husband, Richard Keen, and acted bizarrely, Ahrens said. Distraught, "whacked out."
"She was by the truck acting like a wild animal. I remember Richard kicking her and saying, 'Get in the back seat. Shut up,' " Ahrens said. "I didn't know what to think of it at the time."
Even with Marlene's warning, Ahrens said he didn't think Michael Warren conspired to kill his mother. He was a shady businessman; Ahrens knew that from his own time working for him as a teenager. He hated each time Michael Warren broke a promise, and knew he probably wasn't the only one.
"Someone might have killed her to punish him," Ahrens said. "That's what I thought. I was gullible."
It took Ahrens two years to reach the same conclusion an anonymous tipster told detectives within hours of Marlene Warren's death: Her husband probably had something to do with it.
Michael Warren’s alibi was airtight and kept him from ever being charged with the murder. Keen-Warren’s was not. Her rumored affair with Marlene's husband made her a suspect almost immediately, bolstered by the testimony of two costume shop employees who said they sold Keen-Warren a clown suit days before the shooting.
Keen-Warren denied the rumors that she was dating Michael Warren but later married him in a ceremony in Las Vegas. They lived together in Virginia until 2017, when investigators arrested her for the murder of his former wife.
By then, Ahrens had cut ties with his stepfather and spiraled through decades of substance abuse and suicide attempts. He wanted payback. Keen-Warren was guilty, he knew — almost everyone seemed to know — but the legal proceedings that followed were anything but simple.
The age of the crime made it difficult for attorneys to track down witnesses, and the alcohol made it difficult for Ahrens to follow along. He checked himself into a Port St. Lucie rehab in 2020 and found there what he hadn't in Keen-Warren's arrest three years earlier or in her conviction three years later: closure.
"The anger that I carried for so long for these two individuals was destroying me. For 33 years of my life, I suffered because of it," said Ahrens. "I had to forgive them."
He did. Keen-Warren could be released from prison in under two years thanks to a plea deal negotiated by her lawyers, who even now maintain that she's innocent. Lead defense attorney Greg Rosenfeld played a game of "whodunnit" in the courthouse hallway just minutes after Keen-Warren told the judge she did it. Nowhere on Rosenfeld's list of suspects is Keen-Warren or her husband, Michael.
Ahrens is certain it was both.