Dee Warner Vanished Without a Trace. Did Her Husband Kill Her and Hide Her Body on the Family’s Michigan Farm

As a businesswoman who helped run farming, fertilizer, and trucking operations with her husband in rural Michigan, Dee Warner was known for being tough. “She had a tough personality,” says her older brother, Gregg Hardy.

But at home, the 52-year-old mother and stepmother of nine could be warm, witty, and deeply affectionate.

“She was never not sarcastic and laughing and giving me a hard time,” her nephew, Parker Hardy, remembers.

On April 23, 2021, Parker stopped by the 1,500-acre farm in Tipton, Michigan, where Dee lived with her husband, Dale, 57, and their then-9-year-old daughter, Angalena. What struck him wasn’t his aunt’s usual edge—it was how down she seemed. “She was just very different that day,” he says. “’Defeated,’ I think, would be the best terminology.”

It was the last time he saw her alive.

Two days later, Dee Warner disappeared. Her daughter from her first marriage, Rikkell Bock, grew worried when she arrived at her mother’s home for their usual Sunday breakfast and Dee wasn’t there. Dee’s Hummer and Cadillac Escalade were still on the property, but an overnight bag—along with a curling iron, a makeup bag, her phone, and her purse—was missing.

Dale told investigators he had last seen Dee early that morning, asleep on a couch, and said the couple had argued the night before. Bock and other relatives say Dale told them he believed Dee had left on her own, even leaving her $40,000 wedding ring on his desk in the farm office—yet he also insisted she would come back, as she always had. This time, she didn’t.

The case—Dee’s disappearance, the years-long investigation, the arrest of her husband, and the discovery of her body hidden in a fertilizer tank on the family’s land—is covered in “Vanished in the Heartland,” the season premiere of People Magazine Investigates, airing Jan. 12 at 9/8c on Investigation Discovery and streaming on Max.

On Nov. 22, 2023, Dale was charged with murder and tampering with evidence in connection with Dee’s death by strangulation and blunt-force injuries. He pleaded not guilty and is being held in Lenawee County Jail while awaiting a trial scheduled to begin on Jan. 27.

During pretrial hearings, Dale’s attorneys have argued that he did not kill his wife and that he was not the only person on the property when Dee disappeared. Prosecutors are expected to argue that he planned carefully how to dispose of her body.

“He had a well-thought-out plan of creating the perfect crime, and he came very close to doing that,” says Gregg, who worked with authorities and private investigators while trying to uncover what happened to his sister.

Dee came from deep agricultural roots. Her family had farmed southeastern Michigan since 1831, raising dairy cattle and growing wheat, corn, and soy. Gregg says Dee learned early what hard work looked like. “She wanted to be successful,” he says. “She wanted people to respect her.”

After high school, Dee spent some time in real estate before—by then married and raising four children—taking a sales job at a fertilizer and agricultural-supply company in Blissfield, Michigan. That’s where she met Dale, who was also married at the time and raising four children. Despite a long-running rivalry between their farming families, they connected quickly. “He was an empire builder, and she was attracted to that,” Gregg says.

The relationship began as an affair. Eventually, both divorced their spouses, and Dee and Dale married in 2006. While the early years brought a period of calm, relatives say tension soon surfaced. Dale, Gregg says, preferred staying in and focusing on work, while Dee thrived socially. “Dee was a social butterfly.”

Financial pressure added strain. Dee’s trucking company performed well, but the couple’s farming and fertilizer operations struggled. Dee’s family later learned that on April 23, 2021—the same day Parker noticed her unusually bleak mood—Dee had a heated confrontation about money with two trucking-company employees. Bock later claimed in a pretrial hearing that Dee was furious Dale didn’t support her and that she was preparing to divorce him and liquidate shared assets.

After Dee vanished, Gregg says he organized about 40 people to search the property, but nothing turned up. According to her relatives, Dale appeared calm and resigned in the days that followed. Family members say he floated the idea that Dee had left with another man, while some in Dee’s circle feared she may have died by suicide.

Over time, suspicion hardened. Gregg came to believe Dale had moved assets from Dee’s trucking business into a new company formed after she went missing—allegedly by forging Dee’s signature on legal documents.

About six months after Dale’s arrest, Gregg says a detective called with a critical detail: electronic data placed Dee’s last known location at a barn on the property. That immediately brought Gregg back to something he’d noticed years earlier—Dale painting a rusted fertilizer tank in that same barn, days after Dee disappeared.

Gregg says he shared a theory with his wife: “He could have cut a hole in that tank, stuffed her body in there and welded it shut. And that’s why he painted it.”

Weeks after Gregg relayed that suspicion to authorities, a detective returned with shocking news—an X-ray image showing a well-preserved body inside the tank. Dental records later identified the remains as Dee Warner’s.

After three and a half years, Dee’s family finally laid her to rest on Aug. 30, 2024. They say their fight now is for accountability and justice.

“She’d burn this entire town down if it was one of us,” Parker says. “She wouldn’t stop. That’s just the woman she was.”