On April 21, 2021, Dee Warner, a 52-year-old mother of five who ran a trucking and farming business with her husband, sent her 9-year-old daughter to stay with someone else for the night. She told a friend that she’d had enough and was going to ask her husband for a divorce, and she expected it to be contentious so she didn’t want her daughter around. After she met up with him, she was never seen again. Earlier this month, her remains were found on one of her husband’s properties. So what happened?
Witnesses said Dee and her husband Dale got into a heated business dispute the day before. At around 10:20 p.m., that friend texted Dee’s asking how things were going. About 30 minutes later, the friend got a text back that only said “K.”
According to private investigator Billy Little, who was hired by the family to investigate Dee’s disappearance, that text was extremely out of character for the normally outspoken Dee.
“She was very talkative, very expressive, she texted a lot. Never once, not one single time was her response the letter ‘K.’ So after the friend says ‘how are you doing,’ no response – half an hour later, the letter K, and the phone gets turned off,” Little said.
The next morning, Dee didn’t show up for a weekly Sunday breakfast with her family. Her daughter Rikkell Bock said she was immediately suspicious.
“I texted her. She didn’t answer. I called her. Her phone went straight to voicemail, which never has happened and there was just something in my gut that told me something was really wrong,” she said on the Dateline: Missing in America podcast.
The couple was married for 15 years, but the relationship had gone sour. It had become about the couple’s business and there was no longer any romance or tenderness. When the family questioned Dale, he said yes, they’d argued but it was resolved that night.
Dee had fallen asleep on the floor while Dale massaged her, he said, and he picked her up and put her on the couch before retiring to his own bedroom. When he woke up in the morning he claimed she was already gone. Where did she go? Dale said she probably ran off with another man with more money than him and was probably out galavanting somewhere exotic.
The family smelt a rat and took a look at the surveillance video, which showed Dee entering the property but not leaving. Searches were organized but no one found any signs of anything.
The Lenawee County Sheriff’s Department asked the Michigan State Police, the FBI, and the Division of Natural Resources for help. Despite not hearing anything for a year, the family never lost hope.
“It’s important that we keep her name out in the public. It keeps pressure on authorities to never let the case go cold. We’re confident we’re never going to let the case go cold ourselves,” her nephew Parker Hardy said at the time.
By March 2022, almost a year after her disappearance, the family offered a $50,000 reward to anyone with any information to help with the search. They also made peace with the idea that she was no longer alive. By September, the reward wasn’t claimed so the family tried another tactic: ask the court to declare her legally dead so police could move the case forward.
The court didn’t declare her dead until November of 2023, but as soon as it did, police arrested Dale on charges that he murdered his wife, even though there was still no body found. On Aug. 16, everything suddenly changed.
Dee’s brother Gregg Hardy suggested authorities look inside a barn full of anhydrous tanks used for fertilizer. Dale owned a few properties, and the one she was found on was about four miles from her home. He had a feeling she was inside one of them.
“In the dark of night, in a building that had no cameras — slide her body in there, put the end cap back on it, and weld it completely shut,” Hardy said. “Then attach that to a chassis, paint it, even have the gall to put his logo on it to make it look like it was normal, and then took it and stored it with other tanks so it would like it was just another one of the fleet.”
Police indeed found her body inside one of the tanks – a “steel tomb,” Hardy said. Dale’s trial will happen sometime in 2024. It was going to move forward with or without a body.
“The pain has not gone away,” Hardy said. “The actual event that took place and not having any closure to that is haunting for the family. We have all, I believe, resigned ourselves to the fact that there’s no other option than she has been killed and her body some way hidden or destroyed by Mr. Warner.”
Warner’s lawyers said he planned to “vigorously fight” the charges.