Hearing moves Warner murder case closer to trial
- news655
- Dec 11, 2025
- 5 min read
By DAVID PANIAN
ADRIAN — Prosecutors will be able to use some text messages sent by Dee Warner but not others as they try to prove the charges that her husband, Dale, murdered her and hid her body.
Lenawee County Circuit Judge Michael R. Olsaver ruled on evidentiary questions during a hearing Dec. 4. Along with inquiries about text messages, emails and phone records, he also heard arguments from Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse and Dale Warner’s lead attorney, Mary Chartier, about whether a jury would be shown photos of Dee’s remains and various injuries identified during the autopsy. Olsaver said because he had just seen the photos that he would take the arguments under advisement and issue a written order.
Wyse said the photos show the premeditated nature of the crime and would explain why investigators were unable to find a crime scene, while Chartier said they only served to upset jurors who could be told about the injuries by the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy.
The photos were not shown in the courtroom. Instead, Olsaver and the attorneys reviewed them in the judge’s chambers. When they returned to the courtroom, Olsaver issued a protective order to prevent the images from being shown to the public. Wyse then described about 20 images that she wants to show the jury.
Olsaver also said he needed to review a case Wyse cited before issuing a ruling on whether text messages Dee Warner sent about buying a lake house to use as a safe haven from Dale would be admissible in a trial.
Text messages that can be used during a trial include messages between Dee and Dale related to the state of their marriage and her feelings toward the defendant. Olsaver said those and other similar texts are not hearsay and could show motive. However, he said he will not allow the prosecution to use texts Dee sent to a friend the day after an alleged domestic violence incident between Dee and Dale because they did not meet the legal standard for an “excited utterance.” He said there was not enough evidence to determine whether Dee was still experiencing the stress of the incident with Dale.
Dale Warner, 57, is charged with open murder and tampering with evidence in Dee Warner’s death in April 2021, and a six-week trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 27. Dee initially was reported missing after her adult children found she was not at her home in Franklin Township on a Sunday morning when her adult daughter went to have breakfast with her. Dee did not answer phone calls or text messages and she could not be found at the lake house or anywhere else they looked.
Dee’s remains were found in August 2024 inside a tank that had been used to hold anhydrous ammonia, a common farm fertilizer. The tank was on property the Warners owned near their home.
When the hearing began, Dale watched by video from the Lenawee County Jail, where he has been held on $15 million in bonds since he was arrested in November 2023. Partway through the hearing, the courtroom’s video conferencing system failed, and Warner was brought to the courtroom for the remainder of the hearing.
Olsaver also heard arguments over a motion by Chartier to compel the prosecution to turn over all evidence it has in the case. She questioned two Michigan State Police detectives about records retention policies and practices, particularly regarding text messages between the detectives and members of Dee’s family. She also asked about when they would record interviews and phone calls and how they decided what they considered relevant information or evidence.
Chartier was interested in what happened to text messages sent between two state police detectives and Dee’s relatives and others before May 15, 2024. State police Detective Lt. Dan Drewyor and retired Detective Sgt. Scott Singleton testified that they turned over all evidence they had to the prosecutor’s office and any other information was in their written reports. Drewyor said texts from before May 15, 2024, were lost when he got a new phone or when older data was systemically purged from the device’s memory. He said he searched other devices and cloud storage to find the texts, but he could not locate them. Chartier asked if he asked the state police’s data analysts to try to retrieve the texts, and he said he did not because his understanding is if the texts are not on a device they cannot be retrieved. He said he couldn’t recall any relevant evidence being in those lost text messages.
Some of Chartier’s questions focused on the detectives’ interactions with Dee Warner’s brother, Gregg Hardy, particularly Hardy’s statements about the anhydrous ammonia tank. She asked Drewyor whether he talked with Hardy about how his public statements about the tank didn’t match what he told police.
“We had a phone conversation about it,” Drewyor said.
Hardy has said he had a conversation with police in the summer of 2024 where they said they had security video showing Dale moving welding equipment into the sprayer barn at the Warner’s home. That reminded him that he saw Dale sanding and painting a tank shortly after Dee disappeared, which he thought was odd because the tank was worthless, Dale usually had one of his workers do tasks like that, and it would be unusual to do welding in the sprayer barn because chemicals in there would be corrosive to the welding equipment. He then recalled that he had seen a tank on the Warners’ property on Paragon Road.
Police checked the property and found the tank that contained Dee’s remains.
What Hardy told police and when he told them is relevant, Chartier said.
“If Mr. Hardy is telling the truth, we need to know that,” she said. “If Mr. Hardy is lying, we need to know that.”
She told the court that she was seeking the number of phone calls police had with Hardy, Drewyor’s and Singleton’s phone records, any unreleased emails from Drewyor and Singleton related to their investigation, and the preservation of Hardy’s phone to examine it for text messages to the detectives.
Lenawee County Assistant Prosecutor Dave McCreedy said the prosecutor’s office within two weeks would share any emails that had not already been provided to the defense but that the detective’s phone records were not relevant to the proceedings and they were outside the prosecution’s ability to acquire.
Olsaver agreed that the state police’s phone records were not relevant and he said he was unaware of any legal authority he had to preserve a private individual’s phone. He said Chartier could file a brief on that question, and she said she would research the caselaw.