Autopsy photos, farm security video shown to Warner murder trial jury
- 6 days ago
- 10 min read
By DAVID PANIAN
ADRIAN — Jurors in Lenawee County Circuit Court last week were shown images of the injuries that caused Dee Warner’s death and video of her husband with a cutting tool and welding equipment on the day she was reported missing.
Testimony in Dale Warner’s trial on open murder and evidence tampering charges was to continue this week after prosecutors last week called the Michigan State Police detective who has led the investigation since 2023, the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy, employees of the Warners who testified about their relationships with both Dee and Dale and their farming businesses’ operations, experts who testified about cellphone location data and vehicle-tracking information, and others who knew the Warners. They also played Lenawee County Sheriff’s Office interview video from the early days of the investigation.
Dale Warner, 58, is accused of killing Dee Warner by strangulation and blunt-force trauma on the night of April 24-25, 2021, at their home on Munger Road in Franklin Township. The prosecution alleges Dale then hid her body by binding it with duct tape, wrapping it in tarps, cutting open an old anhydrous ammonia tank, putting her body inside, welding the tank shut and eventually putting the tank in a barn on property the Warners owned on Paragon Road.
The tank was found in August 2024. During testimony Feb. 19, Detective/Lt. Daniel Drewyor said state police searched properties on Paragon and Carson highways for anhydrous ammonia tanks on Aug. 16, 2024. There were several tanks on the Paragon Highway property. He said the tank containing Dee’s remains was off by itself in a barn. It, like the other tanks, was painted white. On one end it had a non-factory weld, and a hand-written tag that said “Out of Service Bad Dip tube” on one side and “Do Not Fill” on the other was attached with a wire to a valve on top of the tank.
Police towed the tank to the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit where it could be X-rayed, and what looked like a body was seen in the image. The tank was then transported to the state police crime lab in Northville to be processed and then taken to the state police post in Monroe where it was stored overnight.
The next day, Drewyor said, police first cut a small, rectangular “window” into the end of the tank opposite from the weld and where the body was in the tank. That allowed them to look inside, and they could see something was wrapped in a blue tarp. They continued to open the tank and removed the tarp-enclosed item. They opened the tarp and found human remains, which they took to have an autopsy performed.
There was a half-inch to an inch of what smelled like ammonia in the tank, Drewyor said.
Autopsy report
Dr. Patrick Cho conducted the autopsy on Dee Warner’s remains on Aug. 20. At the time, her identity had not been confirmed, but she later was identified through dental records.
Cho is a deputy medical examiner in Oakland County. He said he does contract work with Lenawee County as well as other counties in Michigan.
Dee’s body was wrapped in two polyethylene tarps that were secured with duct tape, Cho said. Her legs were bound with duct tape, her arms were bound to her torso with duct tape, and there was duct tape over her nose, mouth and part of her head. It appeared she was wearing underwear and pajamas, though the clothing could have been lightweight sweats. She also had a single earring in each ear and a ring on her right, fourth finger. The jewelry featured clear stones.
There also was a brown and red, mud-like substance that Cho said might have been a mixture of dirt and fluids but he had not ever seen anything like it before.
After removing the tape, Cho said, he observed contusions to her left and right cheeks, near her left eye and on the back of her head. In the internal examination, he found blunt-force injuries on the left side and top of her head, subdural hemorrhages on the brain, bruises on the back of the tongue and petechial hemorrhages on the epiglottis, which is the flap of tissue that prevents food and liquids from going down the windpipe when swallowing.
There were no skull fractures, he said.
The petechial hemorrages — red pin-points visible in the tissue — are caused when “intense pressure” is applied and forces the blood to move along smaller vessels until it reaches an end point and the vessel bursts, he said.
Based on the injuries he observed, Cho said the causes of Dee’s death were strangulation and blunt-force trauma. He said either were enough to have caused her death. He said the manner of death was homicide.
Despite the severity of the injuries, they would not have necessarily caused external bleeding, he said, answering a question from Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse.
The date of death — on or about April 25, 2021 — was based on information from law enforcement on when Dee was last known to be alive, Cho said. Without that information, he would not have been able to determine when she died. He said that wouldn’t have been possible from the condition of the body alone.
Dee’s body was well preserved from being sealed in the tank with little to no exposure to oxygen or water, Cho said. He said oxygen in the air or water would have sped up the decomposition. Ammonia also can accelerate decomposition, but at a slower rate than oxygen.
The toxicology report showed no evidence of oxycodone, Cho said, answering a question from Dale’s lead attorney, Mary Chartier.
Dale has asserted in police interview videos played earlier in the trial that he thought Dee may have become addicted to oxycodone that she was prescribed for neck pain.
April 25 farm video
During Ivan Boyd’s testimony Friday, Wyse played video from the farm’s surveillance system that showed Dale at the farm during the day on April 25, 2021. Boyd worked for the Warners at the time. April 25 was the day Dee’s adult children reported her missing after not being able to contact or find her earlier in the day. In the video, Dale is at times seen holding an angle grinder, a length of chain and welding equipment as well as possibly adjusting the settings on a welder. Over the course of several hours, he is seen driving different vehicles on the farm property, including a front-end loader, a utility vehicle, a tractor pulling a corn planter and a field sprayer.
In the video at 6:41 p.m. April 25, Boyd identified the front-end loader with a welder in its bucket being driven away from the farm’s “spray barn.” He earlier testified that welding only took place in the farm’s old or new shops and not in the spray barn. Another Warner employee, Jim Hawkins, also told the court that welding wasn’t done in the spray barn.
In the prosecution’s opening statement on Feb. 12, Lenawee County Assistant Prosecutor Dave McCreedy told the jury that a welding expert told police that whoever sealed Dee’s body inside the tank would have needed a tool like an angle grinder to cut the tank open and something to hold the end of the tank in place while it was welded shut. The expert also said to look for what would look like a sunburn on the person’s arms because of the heat and light that the welder would give off.
Boyd identified Dale in the video based on his posture and clothing. Dale was wearing a short-sleeve work shirt.
“If you weld with a short-sleeve shirt on, what’s going to happen?” Wyse asked Boyd.
“You are going to get something called welder burn, which is kind of like sunburn,” he answered.
“OK. And how soon after you get this sunburn would that appear?” Wyse asked.
“Within hours. If you were welding in the afternoon, by the evening time, you would experience it,” he said. “Prolonged exposure — I would say you’d have to be welding for at least an hour, pretty continuously, in order to get well burned.”
In a police body camera video of an interview with Dale the day after Dee was reported missing, his forearms are reddish with his hands and wrists pale as if he had been wearing gloves while exposed to the sun or another heat and light source long enough to be burned.
Boyd said April 25 was a day off from work for him, but he was at the farm to replace radiator hoses in his pickup. He said he spoke to Dale while he was there, and Dale told him Dee was missing. He said Dale seemed concerned about what had happened.
“He said that she must have left,” Boyd said. “I can remember him telling me that she had taken some items with her. He noticed that they were missing from the house, and I would say he was visibly worried about where she might be or if she might be OK.”
Dale expressed those same concerns “several times after that,” Boyd said.
When Wyse began reviewing the surveillance video from April 25, one of the first clips was of Dale driving the front-end loader at 6:58 a.m. Boyd identified him by his name tag on his shirt, his posture and his hairline, noting that it was unusual for Dale to not be wearing a hat.
“I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen Dale out of the house without a hat,” he said.
Answering a question from Chartier after almost three hours on the witness stand, Boyd said he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary around the farm that day.
“To be fair, I wasn’t looking for anything out of the ordinary,” he said. “It was just another day.”
State police interview
One of the police interview videos was played Thursday at the beginning of Drewyor’s testimony. Drewyor and another state police detective interviewed Dale in December 2022 at the state police post in Monroe. Dale was accompanied by his attorney at the time, Lawrence Lieb.
Near the start of the almost two hours of the interview that was played in court, Drewyor asked Dale what he thought should happen to someone who did something to Dee.
“I’m not so sure that someone did anything to her,” Dale said. “I think she just left with someone. She obviously had a … good plan.”
He said he thought Dee was in Jamaica or Mexico. Drewyor asked how she would get to either place without a passport or crossing a border.
“You don’t need a passport to get into Mexico. You don’t even need one to get into Jamaica,” Dale said.
“How would you have gotten there without one? Can you describe that to me?” Drewyor asked.
“She’s going to get driven down to Florida. She’s going to get on a boat,” Dale said. He said someone can get into Jamaica for $50 or Mexico for $10. He said they had trouble bringing some migrant workers across the Mexican border two years before and were able to cross by giving an official $10.
They spent a long time talking about the Warners’ businesses and farming in general, including their financial difficulties, transferring the trucking business to Laidlaw, and a deal with Dee’s brother Gregg Hardy for some land that he said left a sour taste in his mouth and Dee bitter toward Hardy. They also talked about Dee and Dale’s arguments, including the one on the night Dee went missing. Dale denied their arguments were ever violent. Other topics included whether Dee might have had an extramarital affair; Dee’s neck pain, migraines and medication; and the diagnostic or tracking device that Dale had put in Dee’s Hummer.
Drewyor asked about how the Hummer got moved from behind the house on April 24 to over by the farm office on the morning of April 25. He had Dale mark on an overhead photo of the house and farm buildings the location of where he parked the farm’s front-end loader on the morning of April 25. Wyse asked him why he cared about where the front-end loader was parked that morning.
“There were tire tracks observed from the front-end loader, and when asked about it, Mr. Warner later explained that he returned to the house in the front-end loader. Where this X is marked and where those tracks were is also where the Hummer is typically parked and where it was parked that day,” Drewyor said. “His statements were that Dee must have moved the Hummer to the office, but he states when he returns to the house in the front-end loader and parks in this spot that she’s inside sleeping. So then it begs the question of these two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time, which means the Hummer must have already been moved when he pulled up to the house.”
Drewyor also asked Dale about accessing three smartphone apps on the morning Dee went missing: the app to view the farm’s security videos, an app to locate Dee’s iPhone and the app to remotely monitor Dee’s Escalade.
“Why are you asking these questions?” Wyse asked.
“He’s very consistent in that the first time he knows that she’s missing is when he receives a phone call at approximately 10:30,” Drewyor said. “However, he accessed all of these applications, in his words, to find her well before he knows that she’s missing.”
Wyse said she would have Drewyor back another day to continue describing the investigation. Chartier said she would save her questions for when he returns.
Tracking allegations
Some of the testimony covered allegations that Dale tracked Dee’s location through a device he had put in her Hummer and her Cadillac Escalade’s built-in navigation system.
Brian Bush, who was married to one of Dale’s daughters, talked about how he worked for Dale and being directed by Dale in 2020 to buy and use the tracking device that Dee found in the Hummer. He said Dale would have him check the Hummer’s location about 50 times a week.
Under cross-examination by one of Dale’s attorneys, Marisa Vinsky, he acknowledged that in the case’s preliminary examination he testified he tracked the Hummer once or twice a week and that he also checked the diagnostics of the Hummer.
Bush also testified that Dale asked him about placing trail cameras in their house.
“He wanted to see if there’s anybody coming in with documentation and papers in their hands,” he said.
Devin Newell, a senior manager and senior technical expert at General Motors, reviewed data from Dee’s Escalade that showed how someone had used the myCadillac app to remotely check on the Escalade.
From January 2020 to April 28, 2021, Newell said, more than 2,100 commands were sent to the Escalade by an iPhone 6, an iPad Pro and an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Of those, 1,700 were for its location. Others were for data such as tire pressure or fuel level or to unlock the doors. He said the iPhone 12 appeared to have replaced the iPhone 6 in March 2021, with the iPhone 12 being the only device that sent commands to Dee’s Escalade from March 22 to April 25, 2021. During that time, 59 commands for the SUV’s location were issued.