Warner Trial Updates – Week of March 2

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.”