Dale Warner sentenced to prison for wife Dee’s murder

By DAVID PANIAN

davidp@tecumsehherald.com

ADRIAN — As Dee Warner’s sister-in-law finished giving her victim impact statement Thursday, she made a visual statement about the journey she and others have been on to have Dale Warner sentenced for her death and disappearance.

“Dee knew we would fight to the end, and we won,” Shelley Hardy said to Lenawee County Circuit Judge Michael R. Olsaver during the sentencing hearing. “And now I’m going to remove my bracelet that I’ve worn since Dee was missing because we got justice.”

She then removed her yellow “Justice for Dee” bracelet from her left wrist, held it for a moment before her, quietly said, “Thank you,” collected her written remarks and left the lectern so others from Dee Warner’s family could address the court.

Dee’s brother and Shelley’s husband, Gregg Hardy; two of her adult children, Rikkel and TJ Bock; and her nephew, Parker Hardy, also addressed the court.

Warner declined to comment and showed no emotion during the hearing. “He loved his wife, he maintains his innocence, and he did not kill his wife,” his lead attorney, Mary Chartier of Okemos, said.

Chartier also said she expects Warner will appeal the convictions.

For the second-degree murder charge of which a jury convicted Warner in March, Olsaver sentenced the 58-year-old Tipton farm business owner to serve 31 years and three months to 60 years in prison. For the evidence tampering charge, he sentenced Warner to one year and five months to 10 years in prison.

Because Olsaver ordered the sentences to be served consecutively, the maximum penalty is 70 years in prison. Warner won’t be eligible for parole for 32 years and eight months, Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse said in a text message.

Olsaver gave Warner credit for 898 days already served on the murder charge and ordered him to pay $326 in court costs. He gave no credit for time served on the tampering charge.

The sentences were at the high end of the minimum sentence guidelines calculated after Wyse and Chartier argued some of the findings in the probation department’s presentence investigation report. Wyse asked Olsaver to sentence Warner at the high end of the guidelines.

Dee Warner went missing in April 2021. Dale Warner was charged with her death and disappearance in November 2023. Her body was found in August 2024 inside an anhydrous ammonia tank in a barn on property the Warners owned.

Prosecutors argued to the jury that overnight April 24, 2021, the Warners argued about getting a divorce and selling the businesses. An autopsy showed Dee died from strangulation and blunt-force trauma. Then, prosecutors said, during most of the next day Warner worked to move Dee’s body from their home into a barn without security cameras, cut open a mostly empty anhydrous ammonia tank, put her body in it, weld it back shut, paint it, and later put decals on it so it would look like any other fertilizer tank, and eventually move it to the property where it was found.

Ordinarily in cases with more than one charge, the sentences run concurrently. In this case, Olsaver said, the tampering with evidence charge allows for consecutive sentences.

This was not a case where documents were shredded or drugs flushed down a toilet to try to conceal a crime, Olsaver said.

“Mr. Warner welded his wife’s deceased body into a fertilizer tank where it remained for more than three years,” he said. “So, in looking at that spectrum, we are at the most heinous end of what actions might constitute tampering with evidence.”

Hiding her body led to “severe emotional distress” for Dee’s family, he said.

“In this case, Ms. Warner’s loved ones and friends were deprived for more than three years of their opportunity to properly grieve and mourn her loss,” Olsaver said. “Instead, they were doing everything possible to search for her, holding on to some slim hope that she may still be alive. All the while, she was sealed into that tomb and left in the barn, the fact of which Mr. Warner was aware and had the ability to end that suffering at any time and chose not to.”

Olsaver also took into account the effort that went into finding Dee’s body during the more than three years that she was missing.

“During that time, a tremendous amount of public and private resources were deployed in an effort to find her, seemingly an endless amount of searching on various properties in different locations, all of which didn’t need to happen but for the tampering charge,” Olsaver said. “…If there weren’t a consecutive sentence imposed under these circumstances, I don’t know when it would ever be appropriate.”

In determining the length of the sentence on the murder charge, which could have been up to life in prison with the possibility of parole, Olsaver said he considered how much longer Dee might have lived if she had an average lifespan. However, along with those 29 years, he said he had to consider the effect of her death on others.

“Of particular impact are the 29 years taken from the daughter that you and Ms. Warner shared together at such a tender and impressionable age,” Olsaver said to Warner.

Another consideration was a letter from a doctor related to Warner and his young daughter, Olsaver said.

“The manipulation of that relationship that she was made to doubt her mother’s love for her is an unconscionable harm that no number on an offense variable score sheet could ever adequately represent,” he said.

In her victim impact statement, Rikkel Bock described Warner’s manipulation of her little sister.

“He cut off all communication between my little sister and the rest of our family,” Bock said. “He made her believe that her own mom had simply walked out of her life to start a new one in another country. The trauma he has caused that child is something she may never fully recover from.”

“The emotional and mental damage Dale has caused, especially to our youngest sister, is something that can never be repaired,” Bock said later in her statement. “Throughout this entire investigation and trial, he has shown no remorse and taken no accountability for his actions. He deserves no mercy now.

“My mom does not get a second chance at life, and neither should Dale. … He did not just take the life of his wife, he took the mother of five, a grandmother, and the heart of our family.”

The success the Warners’ businesses had was because of Dee’s efforts, TJ Bock said.

“When she came into his life, she built something with him,” he said. “She handled the details he ignored. She created stability. She gave him the opportunity to succeed. Everything he became was because of her. And when he killed her, he proved he could never replicate what she was. Instead, he dismantled what she built.”

He said when his mother went missing, he had to struggle with the ideas that either she left without a word or Warner killed her.

“But only one of these things was true, and I know my mother’s love,” he said.

“Dale does not hurt people out of anger. He hurts them for control,” TJ Bock said. When Dee decided she wanted a divorce, “he chose to kill her. He chose to destroy our family, and he chose to lie about it. He prolonged our pain as long as he could. Now the truth is known. His influence is gone and thankfully his freedom is now gone, too.”

Parker Hardy said he slept restlessly for the three years between Dee’s disappearance and Warner’s arrest, since he lived only about a mile away from the Warners’ home and he feared what Warner might do next. He and his father, Gregg Hardy, each accused Warner of vandalizing their farm, including causing the fire in July 2023 at Hardy’s Holsteins that killed 28 cows, most of which were pregnant, and destroyed barns and office and laboratory space.

Olsaver interrupted Gregg Hardy during his statement for not following his instructions that the remarks should not address Warner directly. Gregg Hardy had called Warner “a narcissistic, psychopathic liar and murderer” and “a spineless piece of human debris.”

“I only hope that the only way Dale Warner is able to leave prison is in a small, dark box,” Gregg Hardy said.

Chartier asked Olsaver to consider that Warner had no prior criminal convictions and that he tried to help others when he could, even donating his own clothing to other inmates when they were released from jail. 

“While the case is undoubtedly tragic and extremely serious, this court knows that we are all more than the worst things that we have ever done in our life,” she said.