Dee Warner disappeared on a Sunday morning in spring, just when the first crops were planted in the Lenawee County farm, Michigan. Warner, 52, lived on a farm with her second husband, Dale Warner, and her only son together, then 9. The Warners directed three main businesses of her farm, and Dee Warner had four adult children of her first marriage, everything living on your own.
Dee Warner’s daughter, Rikkell Bock, lived halfway from her mother’s farm, close enough to see her mother’s house from her own front courtyard.
Parker Hardy
It was Bock who noticed for the first time that Dee Warner was missing, on April 25, 2021, when he came for his weekly breakfast on Sunday and did not find signs of his mother at home. The two Dee Warner cars were on the property, and she was not responding to calls or text messages, which Bock says she was very unusual. As she tells him, the correspondent of “48 hours”, Erin Moriarty, in “The ‘No Body’ case of Dee Warner”, “If my mother could hit her phone at hand, he would.”
Dee and Dale Warner had a truck business with about 15 employees. They also had an agricultural business, breeding crops and a chemical company that sold fertilizers and seeds, all based on its rural properties. Dee Warner is described by friends and family as a good businessman: hard, generous and hardworking.
Bock says she and her adult brothers had seen her mother the day before she disappeared and says that Dee Warner told them that she had been in a fight with two employees of the truck business that Saturday. Bock says that his mother was very upset that day, which is part of the reason they made the decision to call the Sheriff’s office and inform his disappearance that Sunday.
After the police received that call, the Sheriff’s office of Lenawee’s County sent a deputy to Warner’s house. Dale Warner met the deputy and told him about his wife’s fight with his employees the previous day. He said that Dee had been upset, but that he was not so alarmed because he noticed that his makeup bag, the hair dryer and curly iron had gone. He also said his wife had been known before when he was upset. Dale Warner told the Police that he thought his wife would cool and return home.
Dee Warner’s brother, Gregg Hardy and his wife Shelley Hardy, say they were worried that Dee Warner would have been so annoying that he could have damaged, and wondered if that was the reason why no one could find her. Greg Hardy says she organized about 50 people to do a search in the foot of the farmland around her sister’s farm on the weekend after she was reported as missing, to see if they could find any trace of it . His search was empty.
Greg Hardy says that on the day of that search, Dale Warner appeared in a four -wheeled vehicle and “it really doesn’t participate.” Gregg Hardy says that he began to fear that Da Warner has damaged his sister, telling Moriarty: “I was receiving it, I called him a feeling of instinct if he wishes, as you would call him, but he suspected a lot of his gestures,”
With the passage of time, Gregg Hardy says that his suspicion only grew. Hardy says they spent about six weeks after Dee Warner had disappeared when he asked Dale Warner how she thought the investigation was going. He says Dale Warner told him that he thought his wife’s search was a bit slow, but it’s fine, and Hardy says he accused Warner of lying about what happened to his wife and promised to get it.
The police had repeatedly sought any trace of Dee Warner, but did not find signs of her dead or alive, and there are no signs of violence. Dale Warner spoke with the police many times voluntarily about his wife and allowed them to search their properties several times. He would later affirm, through a lawyer, that he had not damaged Dee and that he had repeatedly denied damaging her in his conversations with the police.
Greg Hardy organized a public vigil on his farm in the autumn of 2021 to publicly ask for justice and draw attention to his sister’s case. In that vigil, Hardy accused Dale Warner of telling an invented story that her sister had left alone. Hardy told “48 hours” that he was impatient for the police to make a movement. But the now former County prosecutor says he emphasized Hardy at that time how important it was to find a similar body or physical evidence and was aware of the risks of making an arrest too fast.
Three months after that vigil, Shelley Hardy was seeing a Episode of “48 Hours” On a case where the victim’s family suspected dirty play, but there was no body. The episode presented Billy Little’s lawyer and researcher, who said about that other case: “You don’t have a body. And what? You can’t go out with the murder because you are good to get rid of the bodies.”
Gregg and Shelley Hardy say they were both moved by that statement, and wanted to find little and see if he could help them with Dee Warner’s case. Lenawee came little next month to do what he could to help.
Part of Little’s help, says Gregg Hardy, was strategic: he gave resistant advice on how to use the press to run his voice on Dee Warner’s case. And Little says he made a lot of feet game, speaking with potential witnesses, the walking properties where Hardy thought they could find evidence and fly drones on the earth to look for clues.
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Part of that effort, both say, was to make Dale Warner felt the pressure of his research. Shortly after Little came to help, Hardy says he paid for a billboard that said: “Help to find Dee”, and put it at a great intersection near Warner’s house, where, says Hardy, the truck drivers You would surely see it from your truck company.
The billboard was destined for sarcastically, says Little and Hardy, since both did not believe that Warner acted as a worried husband. Little also said that the advertising fence had the intention almost as a form of psychological pressure on Warner, and to publicly embarrass him because of his belief that he was not doing enough to find his wife.
With a community of friends and followers of Dee, Little and Hardy continued to celebrate more demonstrations and vigils, and pressed for the State Police to take over the case of the County Sheriff. The Michigan State Police took over the case of Dee Warner in August 2022, but had been helping in the investigation before that, just like the FBI. In November 2023, the State Police arrested Dale Warner and accused him of the murder of Dee Warner. Dale Warner declared himself innocent.
At the time of that arrest, the police had not yet found any trace of Dee Warner. Dale Warner was aimed at trial in June 2024 and his judgment for murder is scheduled to begin on September 2, 2025.
Dale Warner and his lawyer refused to speak with “48 hours” about the case prior to the case of the case, as well as the state police and the county prosecutor. Warner’s lawyer told “48 hours” in an email that “Warner maintains his innocence, and we are prepared to fight vigorously for him in court and present his defense.”
In August 2024, shortly after Dale Warner was tied to trial, the police found great physical evidence in the case.
To obtain details of that discovery and more about the case, look “the non -Warner Body Body case” Saturday, February 1, 2025, at 10/9c in CBS and the transmission in Paramount +.
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