Warner Trial Updates – Week of March 2

3/6 – No deliberations Friday in Warner trial due to juror emergency

ADRIAN — Jurors in the Warner murder trial were sent home Friday morning after one of them had an emergency.

The nature of the emergency was not known, Lenawee County Circuit Court Administrator Ciara Magrane said, but the court decided to send the other jurors home and resume deliberations on Tuesday, March 10. The court has a full docket of civil cases scheduled for Monday.

Three of the alternate jurors also will be called back to court on Tuesday in case any of them are needed, Magrane said. There were 16 empaneled for the trial with four excused before deliberations began Thursday to reach the typical 12 who decide the verdict.

One of the four was excused by agreement of the prosecution and defense, Magrane said. No reason was given. The others were selected through a blind draw by chief deputy county clerk Phyllis Escott.

Having to call back alternate jurors once deliberations have begun has not happened in recent memory, Magrane said. 

A possible concern is how much news or social media coverage of the case the alternates consumed or conversations they had with others about the case after being excused. Before breaks for lunch and at the end of the day during the trial, Judge Michael R. Olsaver would read the jury an instruction to not follow any coverage of the trial because it could be incomplete or unfairly favor one side or the other. However, when the alternates were excused, they were no longer subject to that instruction because they were not expected to be called back.

The three alternates were questioned Friday by Olsaver and defendant Dale Warner’s lead attorney, Mary Chartier, about their interactions with others and media reports on the case. Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse declined to ask questions.

Two said they had seen some news reports and had conversations with family members about the case since being excused Thursday. One said he tried to pull up a video of the trial but all he saw was a logo. They said they had shared their opinions about the case and some of their relatives had shared their thoughts back to them. They all said they could continue to be fair and impartial.

On Thursday, the jurors heard the closing arguments from Wyse and Chartier. Warner, 58, is charged with open murder and evidence tampering in the death and disappearance of his 52-year-old wife, Dee Warner, in April 2021. He was charged and arrested in November 2023. Dee Warner’s body was found in August 2024, welded into an anhydrous ammonia tank that was found on property the Warners owned about two miles south of their home on Munger Road in Franklin Township.

The Warners ran farming and trucking businesses from their home and farm, including selling anhydrous ammonia, a common crop fertilizer, to other farmers.

The prosecution’s theory of the case is that Dee and Dale had a rocky marriage for several years and on April 24, 2021, she was particularly upset with Dale and that evening was going to tell him that she wanted a divorce and to sell the businesses. They suspect the Warners argued that night and Dale killed Dee through strangulation and blunt-force trauma to the face and head. Throughout the day on April 25, which was a Sunday, the prosecution argues that Dale bound Dee’s limbs with duct tape and also covered her nose and mouth with tape, then he hid her body by cutting off one end of an anhydrous ammonia tank, wrapping her in tarps, putting her in the tank and welding the end back on the tank. He then painted the tank and put it in an area of their farm where they put trash to be burned. When police searched the property on April 27, the prosecution argues, he then moved the into a barn where field sprayers would be filled with liquid fertilizers or other chemicals, and sometime later marked it to look like any other anhydrous tank and stored it in a barn on Paragon Road, according to the prosecution’s theory.

His defense argues the prosecution’s timeline for when he would have cut open the tank and welded it together doesn’t fit what was captured by the farm’s video security system and that his actions afterward were not those of a husband who had killed his wife.

With the open murder charge, the jury has the options to convict Dale of first- or second-degree murder or to find him not guilty. First-degree murder involves premeditation and has a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. Second-degree murder does not involve premeditation and is punishable by up to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Wyse asked the jury to convict Dale of first-degree murder, arguing that he had time to think about what he was doing and could have stopped the alleged assault before Dee died.

3/5 – Jurors in Warner trial start deliberations after closing arguments

ADRIAN — Jurors began deliberating Dale Warner’s fate Thursday afternoon after his and the government’s attorneys gave their final arguments in Lenawee County Circuit Court.

Warner, 58, is charged with open murder and evidence tampering in the death and disappearance of his wife, Dee Warner, in April 2021. Jurors heard 12 days of testimony about the injuries the 52-year-old woman sustained that caused her death, how in August 2024 police discovered her pajama-clad body welded inside an anhydrous ammonia tank, and the rocky marriage between the couple who owned farming and trucking businesses.

Dee Warner died from strangulation and blunt-force trauma to the face and head, according to the autopsy conducted by forensic pathologist Dr. Patrick Cho.

Under the open murder charge, the jurors can consider either first-degree or second-degree murder. First-degree murder involves premeditation. Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse asked jurors to find Warner guilty of first-degree murder.

“He had multiple chances to think about what he was doing,” she said in her closing argument.

In her rebuttal of defense attorney Mary Chartier’s closing argument, Wyse said Warner could have made a different decision, even after the alleged physical confrontation.

After recounting the four blows to the head and how Dee Warner was strangled, Wyse asked, “How many chances did he get to think about what he was doing?”

Picking up a cellphone, Wyse continued, “Let’s assume three or four knocks her out, five, she’s unconscious. What do you do? Call for help, right? ‘I screwed up. I hurt my wife. Come help.’

“This defendant,” Wyse said, reaching for a roll of black duct tape like what was used to bind Dee Warner’s body and then pulling out a length, “duct taped her mouth and her nose so that she could not breathe again. Those were all conscious decisions.”

Wyse took jurors back to 2019 to show how the Warners’ relationship deteriorated to the point on the weekend of April 24-25, 2021, that Dee told multiple people that she wanted to divorce Divorce and sell the businesses. Her adult children and friends said they had never seen her so distraught.

Dale used technology to track Dee’s vehicles and took 90 photos of text messages on Dee’s phone with her son Zack, Wyse said. He enlisted his son-in-law to help with keeping tabs on Dee.

However, Wyse asked, why did General Motors’ records not show any attempts by Dale to track her Escalade on the dates and times in his journals where he wrote that Dee had snuck out in the middle of the night?

Chartier countered that if Dee didn’t take the Escalade, Dale would have no reason to try tracking her. She also said if he was trying to track her, he would have regained access to the farm cameras through his phone before she went missing.

Dale was only allowing Dee to drive the Hummer to bring him food in the fields because it used too much gas, Wyse responded.

Wyse showed text messages that Dee sent to Dale in 2020 and 2021 where she told him she knew he was tracking and stalking her.

“I'm ready to move out and be done with this. You treat me as if I'm not worthy of anything. If you love something, you want everything for them. You do not,” Dee wrote Feb. 23, 2021, in a message to Dale.

Dee’s massage therapist, Stacey Brodie, testified about seeing bruises on Dee, including a hand-shaped bruise on one of Dee’s arms. During her appointment in the week before she disappeared, Dee was upset and talked about wanting to get a divorce.

On April 24, 2021, Dee received an angry text from the wife or girlfriend of one of her employees. In it, the woman mentioned Dee’s use of the anti-anxiety medication Xanax. This in particular upset Dee and led to her telling her daughters that she was going to confront Dale about getting a divorce and selling the businesses.

Wyse then set the stage for what investigators believe happened that night and the next day, April 25, by describing the layout of the farm, including the house, the old and new shops, the office, the spray or load barn, and the burn pile.

At 3:45 a.m., when trucking company employee Todd Neyrinck left the farm with a delivery, he saw the Hummer and Dale’s pickup parked behind the house. At 7 a.m., Warner is seen on the farm’s security video driving the front-end loader. Wyse said it was then that he drove up to the house and loaded Dee’s body into the front-end loader’s bucket, but that isn’t captured on the security video. The farm’s cameras are aimed toward the barns, fuel tanks and truck scale, not the house.

At 7:08 a.m., data from General Motors showed the myCadillac app on Dale’s iPhone was used to unlock Dee’s Escalade where she kept her purse, Wyse said. At 7:14 a.m., Dee’s phone stopped communicating with cellphone towers.

A Michigan State Police cellphone specialist testified she used the signals recorded between Dee’s phone and two towers to the north and south of the Warner residence to determine where it was when it last connected to a tower. She said the data showed the phone was on the Warner farm and home property. Chartier said the analyst mistakenly used the north tower when the number of the tower that the phone connected to was to the east, implying the phone last connected somewhere to the east of the farm.

Wyse showed the jury a photo of the gun safe that was in the spray barn.

“He places her body inside there,” she said. “because he knows she's not going to be found in there.

“Now this photograph, you look at that and that doesn't do it justice.”

She then showed photos that Michigan State Police Detective/Lt. Daniel Drewyor took of himself sitting in a different safe, since the one that was in the spray barn has itself gone missing.

“What did Detective Drewyor do? He found a similar safe. At the store. 30 seconds to remove the inserts. Six-foot-seven. That photograph shows you exactly how much room is inside that safe.”

Wyse listed inconsistencies in Dale’s statements, such as where Dee’s Hummer was parked and when it was moved from its usual parking spot behind the house over to the farm office. In an interview with Lenawee County Sheriff’s Detective Kevin Greca, Dale says Dee must have moved the Hummer. However, he also had said Dee was asleep on the living room couch at 7 a.m. when he returned to the house in the front-end loader, which he said he parked where the Hummer was. Wyse asked if the Hummer was parked there but Dee was sleeping, how could Dee have moved the Hummer so that Dale could park the front-end loader there.

“Those two things cannot be true at the same time,” she said.

Dale also had to get Dee’s body out of the house early, Wyse said, because he knew Bock, Lolley and their kids would be coming over for breakfast.

Once police found Dee’s body and talked to an expert welder, they knew what to look for on the farm’s security video, Wyse said, providing a timeline of Dale’s activities on April 25 at the farm.

Chartier took issue with the prosecution’s timeline, going through a list of 110 points of what she said were reasonable doubt. She said the health data from his Apple Watch and iPhone showed no movement overnight on April 24-25, and the police found through GPS data and talking with another farmer that Dale could have sprayed the fields he said he sprayed on April 25.

While Dale was seen with the angle grinder and at least one cutting or grinding disc, she said, there was no indicate he took more than that and the prosecution’s welding expert said six to eight discs would’ve been needed to cut open the tank.

Dale also didn’t try to hide his activities on April 25, Chartier said. He knew that his employee, Ivan Boyd, and Boyd’s brother were in the old shop and that Dee’s adult children and other relatives were at the farm looking for her. He also knew there were cameras.

One of those cameras captured one of the fields being tilled, which Chartier said belied the notion about part of the time when the police said Dale wasn’t on camera.

Wyse, in her rebuttal, said Dale’s son Jaron Warner was on the farm that day and one of the Warners’ employees, Todd Neyrinck, testified that he spoke to Dale at the spray barn at about that time.

Dale returning to the farm to move a tank “that is similar to the tank that her body is found in, again, a very unique tank” during the police search on the evening of April 27 also was suspicious, she said.

The cover over the relief valve of the tank Dee’s body was in was different from others the Warners used, employees testified.

Neyrinck also testified that Dale would do small welding jobs if no one else was available. Chartier suggested that this was possibly why he was seen with welding items, since it was a Sunday and he had been out tilling.

“So if there's a piece of equipment, a tilling tool, he said frequently broke down, it's a Sunday, there aren't many people there to do the welding, he wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Warner did it,” Chartier said.

There was no physical evidence anything had been painted in the spray barn, such as drop of paint or paint brushes, she said. And no one reported any ammonia smell in the spray barn despite those who opened the tank after it was found and Cho saying there was a strong odor of ammonia from the tank and Dee’s remains.

A point of contention has been how Dale recommended against the police taking tracking dogs into to the spray barn because of the chemicals on the floor. However, Chartier noted, Dale also asked if the police had boots for the dogs.

“If he's trying to prevent them from going into the load barn, he's not going to give them a solution as to how they can actually take the dogs in by putting boots on their feet,” she said.

There were other times in the investigation where Dale could have taken the investigators’ suggestions about what might have happened and used those to misdirect them but he didn’t, Chartier said.

Wyse said putting the two anhydrous tanks — the rusty Tank 8 and later Tank 34 that was used to entomb Dee’s body — in the spray barn was suspicious.

“There's been an argument that the defendant takes no action to hide what he's doing on the farm that day,” Wyse said. “He is welding in the spray barn where you don't weld. Well, he could have been fixing this or he could have been doing that. Then why not weld where the welders are? He was absolutely hiding what he was welding when he took that to the spray barn.”

Regarding accusations that Dale didn’t do enough to try to find Dee, Chartier said he was “not trying to make a splash in the public.”

“The government wants to present Mr. Warner as someone who did nothing, but that's not true. He tried to offer assistance in the background,” she said, adding that he made suggestions to police about who to contact, asks Dee’s friend and assistant if she knew of anyone who might have picked up Dee, and wrote ideas of where she might be and aliases she might be using in a journal. “And he tried to keep his daughter's life as stable as possible because her mother was missing.”

“These are the private actions of a man who wants his wife to come home,” she said.

If Dale was trying to hide anything, Chartier said, he would not have allowed Greca to spend time alone with his and Dee’s young daughter who could have shared what she saw of their relationship.

Descriptions of physical violence were also inconsistent, Chartier said. 

“You are not here to judge Mr. Warner as a husband,” she said. “You may think he was a bad husband, a not very attentive husband, whatever you may think of him. Your oath requires that you only assess the government's case to determine if it has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Warner killed his wife and tampered with evidence.”

Chartier also suggested that some of the witnesses may have sought to present the case in a certain way.

“And it makes sense because they all loved Ms. Warner,” she said. “There's no doubt about that. And, of course, they want to present her in the most favorable light and Mr. Warner in the least favorable light, but the facts matter, not assumptions.”

3/3 – Defense rests after calling three witnesses; Dale Warner does not testify

ADRIAN — After calling three witnesses Tuesday, Dale Warner’s defense rested in his trial on open murder and evidence tampering charges in Lenawee County Circuit Court. 

Warner did not testify in his own defense. Instead, his attorneys called his ex-wife, an employee of the Warners’ trucking company, and Dee’s older brother, Gregg Hardy, to the witness stand. Warner is accused of killing his wife, Dee Warner, during an argument overnight April 24, 2021, and then hiding her body by welding it into an anhydrous ammonia tank.

Dale has asserted to police that Dee must have left him, their daughter and her adult children. He was charged in November 2023 with open murder and evidence tampering. Her body was found inside the tank in August 2024 after Michigan State Police detectives developed a “welding theory” and decided to look at the many fertilizer tanks that were stored on Warner property.

Dee was last seen or heard from by friends and her adult children on April 24, 2021. Her children reported her missing on April 25, 2021, after they could not contact or find her, which they said was unusual because she almost always replied to text messages or answered phone calls right away.

Before testimony began Tuesday, Judge Michael R. Olsaver denied a motion from Dale’s defense for a directed verdict, which is where the judge is asked to find that the prosecution has not presented enough evidence to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt. The defense usually asks for a directed verdict after the prosecution rests in a criminal case.

“There is ample evidence from which fair inferences can be drawn that all of the elements of the crimes charged have been proven beyond reasonable doubt,” Olsaver said in denying the motion.

Julie Bock testified about her relationship with Dale. They started dating as teenagers, then were married for about 15 years, she said. They divorced in 2003. The divorce was amicable, she said. They even shared an attorney.

They did have a legal battle over custody of their children, she said. She ultimately was awarded custody and Dale was ordered to pay $1,200 a month in child support. That was later increased to $1,600 per month.

One of Dale’s attorneys, Marisa Vinsky, asked about a cough that Dale developed during their marriage. She described it as a throat clearing and said it started within the last five years of their marriage. She said noticed he still had it in 2017 while at a school function for one of their daughters.

Todd Neyrinck worked for the Warners’ trucking company. He said he managed the trucks and drivers but would drive, too. He said he had a good relationship with Dale and Dee and was closer to Dee. He said the last time he saw her was at about 3:30 p.m. April 24, 2021, which was a Saturday. He said she was agitated and not herself, wearing sweatpants and a loose-fitting top. Answering a question from Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse, he said Dee was “always dressed up and ready to take on the world every day.”

He was at the farm at 3:25 a.m. April 25 to take a delivery to Burns Harbor, Indiana, he said. He was at the farm for 10-12 minutes. In that time, he said, he noticed that the light over the kitchen sink in the Warners’ home was on and the TVs in the living room and a bedroom were on. He said Dee’s Hummer and Dale’s pickup were parked behind the house.

When he returned a about 3:30 p.m., Dee’s nephew Parker Hardy, her daughter Rikkel and son Zack were in the office looking at security video. He said Gregg Hardy had called him about half an hour before he arrived back at the farm.

He later saw Dale at the spray barn where he was loading a sprayer, he said. They talked, but Neyrinck said he did not go in the spray barn. He said Dale was not welding then. Neyrinck said Dale did not do much welding at the farm, but he would weld things if they needed fixing and no one else was available to do it.

Gregg Hardy became emotional at times as he discussed his efforts to find out what happened to his sister, and Olsaver told him to directly answer questions from Dale’s lead attorney, Mary Chartier, after he did not give direct answers to a couple of questions. He denied having said in media interviews that he had directed police to look for a particular anhydrous ammonia tank. After being shown a clip of a recent TV documentary about the case, he said he had given police direction but not to the tank in which Dee’s body was found.

Under cross-examination by Lenawee County Assistant Prosecutor Dave McCreedy, Hardy said the tank he was referring to was the rusty tank he saw in the spray barn in the week after Dee went missing.

Hardy owns a dairy farm that has been in his family for five generations. He said his farm’s property is adjacent two and around the Warners’ property. During Dale and Dee’s marriage, he said he had a good relationship with Dale.

“We worked back and forth in business,” he said. “It wasn't until a month or two after my sister went missing that that deteriorated rapidly.”

Hardy admitted under questioning by Chartier that he had written a text message that he had potential liability if Dale was not convicted of Dee’s murder because of public statements he had made about the case.

Hardy described how he and others tried to figure out what happened to Dee, from offering a cash reward to putting up billboards to reviewing her phone records to going on podcasts to doing news interviews to talking to anyone he could think of to ask if they knew where she might be. 

“You depend on your friends to pass the word, and that's how I did it,” he said.

He described how a search party of about 30 people walked 500 to 1,000 acres of property in the vicinity of the farm to try to find a sign of her, but Dale didn’t participate.

Chartier asked Hardy if he remembered Dale telling him that he would be with his and Dee’s daughter during the search. He said he did not.

During that first week after Dee disappeared, Hardy said, he communicated frequently with Dale, even more than they ordinarily would during late April, which is the planting season.

“I was concentrating on the situation at hand, and communicating with Dale for me was critical,” he said.

During those many conversations Dale never described any efforts to try to find her, Hardy said. When Hardy suggested using the OnStar location data for Dee’s Escalade that Dale had said he had to try to figure out if she might’ve been meeting with someone, Dale wasn’t interested.

“We'd been working, my family and I and everyone I that I knew are friends with Dee's, had been working heavily to try to find her and it just wasn't adding up,” Hardy said. “And so I requested Dale to come to my office on a Sunday morning, which he did do, and I by this time was getting pretty stern about this. … I told him that I thought he should offer a cash reward for the public to find his wife.”

“And did he agree to that?” McCreedy asked.

“No.”

“Did you end up doing it?”

“I did.”

Court schedule

Attorneys in the case were expected to take Wednesday to prepare for making their closing arguments on Thursday after which the jury will begin deliberations.

3/2 –Photos of large safe punctuate prosecution’s theory of Warner murder case

ADRIAN — Photos of a tall Michigan State Police detective inside a gun safe illustrated where prosecutors suspect Dee Warner’s body was hidden before being put in an anhydrous ammonia tank.

The photos were part of Detective/Lt. Daniel Drewyor’s testimony Monday in Lenawee County Circuit Court as the trial of Dale Warner, 58, on open murder and evidence tampering charges continues. Dale is accused of killing his 52-year-old wife overnight April 24-25, 2021, in their Franklin Township home and hiding her body. He was charged in November 2023. Dee’s body was found in the tank in August 2024. The tank was on property the Warners owned on Paragon Road. Several anhydrous ammonia tanks from the Warners’ farming businesses were stored there.

Drewyor is expected to be the prosecution’s last witness. He was the only witness who testified Monday. He testified earlier in the trial about the discovery of Dee’s body in the tank and an interview he and another detective conducted with Dale in December 2022. He returned to the witness stand Monday to further discuss the investigation under questioning by Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse and Dale’s lead attorney, Mary Chartier.

A few times earlier in the trial, Wyse and Assistant Prosecutor Dave McCreedy have noted the presence of a large safe in the Warner farm’s “spray barn.” The Warners would load field sprayers will liquid fertilizer or other chemicals in that barn. On Monday, Wyse further explored what role the safe might have played in Dee’s disappearance.

Before Drewyor’s testimony, McCreedy and Chartier argued before Judge Michael R. Olsaver for and against showing the photos of the detective inside a similar gun safe to the jury as demonstrative evidence. Drewyor had to find a similar safe at a store because the safe that was seen in the spray barn in the days after Dee was reported missing by her adult children has not been found by police.

McCreedy said the defense made an issue in their opening of how could Dale have hidden Dee’s body on April 25 when others were on the farm property and he was doing farming chores and allegedly cutting open an anhydrous ammonia tank. He said the prosecution’s theory is that Dale used the farm’s front-end loader to move her body to the spray barn at about 7 a.m. then welded her inside the tank that afternoon.

“And so our answer for the time in between is that she's locked in the safe,” McCreedy said.

Chartier countered that the photos were irrelevant because they are based on an assumption and would be unfairly prejudicial against Dale. She said there was no “bodily fluids, blood, DNA, hair found, fingerprints” to support the prosecution’s theory, and the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy didn’t indicate her body had been in a particular position.

“It is entirely an assumption that she was placed in the safe,” she said. “Nobody saw Mr. Warner use the safe, try to hide the safe. Nothing about that. There's literally nothing to support this theory.”

Olsaver ruled that the photos could be shown to the jury. He said demonstrative evidence is admissible when it is relevant and may aid the jury in reaching a conclusion on a matter that's material to the case.

“The demonstrative evidence of a photograph of Detective Drewyor in a similarly sized, same brand safe would be relevant to the people refuting the defense argument that has been made that he could not have concealed the body for that length of time,” he said.

The jurors will be able to see that the safe Drewyor is in is in a store, Olsaver said, and the defense can make the same arguments to the jury as it made in arguing against their use.

The photos were presented during Drewyor’s testimony about a search warrant the state police executed at the Warners’ property a few days after her body was found. Among the items they were looking for were safes, he said. He had seen the gun safe in May 2022, a couple of months after her joined the investigation. He described at as being about 5 feet wide and coming up to his chest. He’s 6 feet 7 inches tall. A photo of the safe that was taken during a search was shown on the courtroom’s large monitor.

He said the reason he was interested in finding that safe was it was one of the few objects within the spray barn where someone could hide a body.

“So I was in search of the safe to see for myself how easily you could remove the shelves that were inside of it, and how likely or possible it would be to fit a person inside of it also,” Drewyor told the jury.

When he couldn’t find the exact safe, he said, he went looking for one like it. Once he found one in a store, he tried taking out the shelves, which he was able to do in 30 seconds.

“I also got into the safe to see how much room there was,” Drewyor said.

Wyse showed three photos that showed Drewyor in the safe in different positions. In one, his head and back are on the safe’s floor with his head in a back corner and his feet are about halfway up the side. In another, his head is up on one wall, his back along the floor, and his feet one the other side but lower than in the first image. In the third, he is sitting upright in the safe.

Along with being 6 feet 7 inches tall, Drewyor said he weighs 230 pounds.

Dee was about 5 feet 3 inches tall and 145 pounds, he said.

Investigative efforts

Much of Drewyor’s testimony was about the various methods he and the state police used to try to find Dee after taking over the case in August 2022. About 3,000 acres of farmland were searched with a variety of technologies by scores of police personnel, electronic devices were seized and their data downloaded, Dee’s finances and prescription drug use were examined, and the use of certain farming equipment was studied.

There have been questions about whether missteps very early in the investigation led to Dee’s body not being found for more than three years. 

“Based on your training and experience and the condition that you found Ms. Warner's body in, would you have expected to find her even on April 26, 2021?” Wyse asked Drewyor toward the end of his testimony.

“No,” he replied.

For almost two years after developing their theory that Dale had welded Dee’s body into a tank, he and his partner, Detective Sgt. Scott Singleton, had primarily looked for where a tank could have been buried. Drewyor said Monday that from an internet search Dale did for what to do with a 1,000-gallon propane tank they could tell that he clicked on a link that went to a webpage that was about burying a tank.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2024 that they determined they had exhausted their searches of possible burial locations. They started to think about what from a farm could have been used to hide Dee’s body and what wouldn’t be missed. That led them to start asking questions about anhydrous ammonia tanks. They talked to state police personnel with knowledge of anhydrous, as the crop fertilizer is called, and they talked with Dee Warner’s brother, Gregg Hardy, who has his own farming business and had knowledge of the Warners’ farm operations. They also talked to someone who had rented several anhydrous tanks from Dale.

Those conversations led them to search Warner properties on Carson Highway and Paragon Road. They found the tank with Dee’s body in it in a barn on the parcel on the south side of Paragon Road.

After Dee’s body was recovered, Drewyor said, the duct tape that was used to bind her limbs, cover her face and wrap the tarps was collected in hopes of processing it for fingerprints or DNA evidence. However, it was wet from being in the tank which had a small amount of anhydrous ammonia in it, and it needed to be dried before the crime lab could process it. It was hung to dry in a shipping container at the state police headquarters, but it has yet to completely dry out. He said it was still moist when he placed it on a sheet of cardboard and placed it in a large, plastic evidence envelope to bring to court. He noted there was evidence of mold inside the envelope.

Knowing how Dee’s body was hidden helped them do another search of the Warners’ farm buildings in August 2024. Drewyor said the found black duct tape like what was found on Dee, decals like those on the tank her body was in, and welding machines, tarps, and white paint.

Finding her body also gave him and Singleton a better idea of what to look for in videos and photos from the farm, Drewyor said. For example, they noticed tire tracks through grass that led to where the tank had been placed at the back of the area where the Warners burned trash.

Some items they were looking for — Dee’s “go bag” along with her phone, passport and driver’s license — have never been found. Drewyor said her curling iron was found where it apparently fell in her bedroom between the bed and a bench.

Communications

Drewyor discussed his contacts with Dale and Dee’s family during the investigation. He said the only time Dale called him was to ask about getting his iPhone and iPad back after the state police seized them to extract data from them. It just so happened that when Dale called him, he used a phone he bought after Dee went missing to which he had loaded Dee’s iCloud backup data for her missing phone and transferred her phone number. When Dale called him, Dee’s number displayed on Drewyor’s phone. Drewyor had tried to obtain the phone through a search warrant for all devices at the Warner home, so he and Singleton went to the home, talked to Dale and Chartier and eventually got the phone.

The primary contacts for providing updates about the case were Dale’s son Jaron and Dee’s son TJ, Drewyor said. 

After finding the tank with Dee’s body in it, Drewyor contacted Jaron. Instead of telling him they had already X-rayed the tank and found a body inside, he only told him about finding the tank and he intended to X-ray it and cut it open. He said he wanted to be able to listen to Jaron tell Dale about that through a recorded jail phone call. Dale had been arrested by then and was being held in the Lenawee County Jail on a $15 million bond.

On Aug. 17, the day after the tank was found, Jaron called Dale at the jail and relayed what Drewyor had told him.

Dale chuckled and said, “Great.”

Jaron told Dale is was Tank 34 and said the invetsigation was a waste of time.

“Is that the one we painted up and put the new decals on?” Dale asks.

“I don’t know which one that is,” Jaron said.

Dale later in the call asked if the police also searched at their home. Jaron said the search warrant was for the outbuildings and fields but not the house. He said “Jim” told him they were only there for about five minutes.

Drewyor said he also spoke several times with Hardy, who would provide him tips about places to excavate or where her wedding ring might be. It has been missing since Dale claimed to have found it on his office desk on the morning of April 25, 2021.

“Typically his tips would be a gut feeling or something he heard from someone or in some cases he would hear a piece of information and perhaps was interpreting it a certain way that wasn't always the most accurate,” Drewyor said.

He also elaborated on a family meeting that Kevin Greca, the Lenawee County Sheriff’s Office detective who was the case’s first lead investigator, described when he testified Feb. 27. The meeting was in March 2022 just after the task force was formed between the sheriff’s office,  state police and FBI. Drewyor said he was there, but he was brand new to the case and knew little about it.

During that meeting, Greca testified, they wanted the family members to allow state police analysts to extract data from their phones. Hardy and investigators he had hired, Billy Little and Chris McDonough, pulled him aside and expressed that they wanted to make it look like Hardy had consented to have his phone searched but to not really have it searched. Greca did not agree to do that, and Hardy’s phone was not searched.

“His recollection is accurate,” Drewyor said. “We wanted to get consent for as many phones as we could of people that could be involved or have any information on those devices.”

Others at that meeting also did not consent to having their phones searched, he said.

The reason Hardy didn’t want his phone searched was because he did not want to expose a federal law enforcement officer who had been providing him information about the case, Greca said.

Drewyor said it was revealed “much later” that Hardy’s contact was a United States marshal.

After the task force was formed, Drewyor said, and he and Singleton developed the “welding theory,” they did not share that theory with Greca, who was still leading the investigation. He said it was an awkward situation where they could make recommendations but also were aware that information was being leaked by someone in law enforcement.

“In every homicide investigation I've worked, there are certain facts that only the culprit would know about,” Drewyor said. “And so you want to keep those pieces of information very close to your chest because once you say it, then everybody could know it. So welding specifically, if it was involved, that wasn't something we were comfortable with confronting Mr. Warner with based on the limited information we had at the time.”