Dale Warner’s loader sat in the frigid early-morning darkness, its bucket pointed at the front door of his own house, so close to the entrance that investigators struggled to explain it. Tire tracks pressed deep into the earth showed the heavy machine had been driven right up to the doorway sometime around half past six, and for the investigators who found them, the placement made no sense at all. It was one more strange detail in a case that had been full of them since the moment Dee Ann Hardy vanished from her own home in the middle of the night—a case that would take more than three years to resolve, and even then only after researchers returned to a piece of evidence that had been sitting in plain sight all along. Dee Ann Hardy was born on July 29, 1968 in Michigan, and grew up in a well-known local farming family that had worked the land for generations.
From an early age, she was strong-willed and determined to succeed. She was extroverted, energetic, and fun to be around. She loved spending time with her friends and generally got along well with people, but she was also always very direct, never afraid to give her opinion, defend her position, or stand up for herself. After school, Dee worked in real estate for a while, but shortly afterward she married and had four children.
She spent the next years raising them and later took a job at a fertilizer company, where she met a man named Dale Warner. Dale had also grown up in a farming family and had worked in agriculture his entire life. At the time, both of them were married, though Dee’s relationship with her husband was already falling apart. Eventually, she and Dale began a relationship and both left their spouses.
In 2005, the couple started their first joint business, and a year later they married. Dale also had four children from his previous marriage, and some time later, he and Dee had a daughter together, which made Dee the mother of five. Together, she and Dale had a blended family of nine children. In the years that followed, the couple focused on building their businesses.
They ran a farm, sold fertilizer and seed, and started a trucking company. Dale handled the farm while Dee managed the truck drivers, the employees, and most of the office work. The trucking company alone had fifteen employees and brought in millions of dollars. Even with such a large family and a demanding work schedule, Dee remained very close with her children.
By then, her four oldest children were adults and she had become a grandmother. She still loved spending time with her friends and made a point of seeing them whenever she could, even when work kept her busy. In the spring of 2021, Dee was fifty-two years old. She, Dale, and their nine-year-old daughter lived on a large farm where all of their businesses were also based.
Dee still ran the trucking company and managed other parts of the family business, while her older children lived nearby and visited her constantly. On April 25, 2021, one of Dee’s daughters came by the house. The two had something of a Sunday tradition and usually met for breakfast. But this time, Dee was nowhere to be found.
Her daughter tried calling her and sent several messages, but Dee didn’t respond. That immediately seemed strange, because Dee was almost never without her phone, and whenever one of her children tried to reach her, she usually picked up right away. What made it even stranger was that both of Dee’s vehicles were still on the property. Her Cadillac was parked by the house, while her Hummer stood by the office.
Somehow, Dee seemed to have disappeared without using either one. Her daughter contacted other family members, who also started calling, but no one could reach her. Several relatives drove around the area looking for her, while one of her sons reviewed the security camera footage at the office. There was nothing on the footage showing Dee getting into a vehicle or even appearing in that part of the farm.
The family also searched the house and realized that some of her personal belongings were missing. They couldn’t find her purse, phone, makeup bag, or the small backpack she sometimes used for travel. Her passport was nowhere to be found either. At the same time, there was another reason the family was growing increasingly worried.
The evening before, Dee and Dale’s nine-year-old daughter had stayed overnight with relatives, and Dee was supposed to pick her up that morning. By midday, however, she still hadn’t shown up or even called. Eventually, Dee’s family members gathered at the house, and after hours of searching on their own, they decided to contact the police. A missing person report was filed, and later that day, a deputy sheriff arrived at the farm.
One of the first things he did was speak with Dale and ask when he had last seen his wife. According to Dale, Dee had been very upset the night before after an argument with several employees of their company, which had even led to her firing one of them. She got a headache and eventually fell asleep on the couch. Dale said he woke up the next morning around six o’clock and saw that she was still lying there asleep.
Then he went to work in the field, and that was the last time he saw her. Later, Dale sent Dee several messages but never received a reply. At first, however, he said he wasn’t particularly worried. When he came back to the house and noticed that some things were missing, he assumed she had simply gone away for a while to be alone.
According to Dale, she had done something like that before when she was upset, sometimes spending the night elsewhere, so he expected her to come back on her own. Dale also mentioned another detail that stood out. He had found Dee’s fifty-thousand-dollar wedding ring on a desk in the office. Dale admitted that there were many problems in their marriage and said he thought it was possible that Dee had decided to leave him.
He gave the police permission to search the house and the rest of the farm. Officers looked for anything that might suggest a crime had taken place. They found no signs of a break-in or a struggle inside the house. And some of Dee’s personal belongings were indeed missing.
So the police couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that she had left of her own accord. Still, they decided not to simply wait for her to come back and began investigating her disappearance. In the following days, officers searched the farm repeatedly and spoke with everyone who might have been among the last to see Dee. They also began examining her phone activity and bank accounts.
But nothing gave them any clue about where she might have gone. Dee hadn’t used her bank cards, hadn’t contacted friends or family, and hadn’t been seen anywhere since the evening of April 24. Without a clear trail to follow, investigators began looking much more closely at the days leading up to her disappearance, hoping to understand what might have happened to her. After speaking with Dee’s children and other close relatives, detectives soon learned that her marriage had indeed been troubled for a long time.
In the beginning, things went well between Dee and Dale. They raised their children together and built several successful businesses, but over time, the two gradually grew apart. Their relationship revolved more and more around work. They still lived together and continued to run their businesses side by side, but arguments about money and work became increasingly frequent.
According to one of Dee’s sons, those arguments had become almost daily in recent years and had grown much more serious. Dee had been unhappy in the marriage for a long time and had repeatedly told people around her that she wanted a divorce. One of her best friends said that Dee had first talked about leaving Dale about three years before she disappeared. Eventually, the two had grown so far apart that Dee complained they barely spoke and lived more like housemates than a married couple.
She was very social and loved spending time with friends, while Dale preferred to spend his time at home or at work. At one point, Dee also began seeing another man. The relationship lasted quite a while, and although she tried to keep it private, Dale eventually began to suspect she was having an affair, even though their own marriage had already largely fallen apart. By the time Dee disappeared, however, that relationship had been over for more than a year.
Investigators also learned something else that had happened in early 2020. Dale had asked one of his relatives to buy a small GPS tracker, which they then placed on Dee’s vehicle. He specifically instructed the relative not to talk to anyone about it and used the device to occasionally check where Dee’s car was. Several months later, Dee accidentally found the tracker when she brought her car to the garage for maintenance.
At first, she didn’t even know what it was, but eventually she figured out it was a GPS device. According to family members, she was furious when she realized Dale was monitoring her movements. There had been other concerning incidents as well. Some people close to Dee noticed that she seemed very tense whenever Dale was around, and he sometimes made insulting comments about her appearance or her behavior.
Dee had also been seen with bruises on several occasions. At one point, she told a friend that Dale had pushed her against a piece of furniture during an argument, and she admitted she was starting to worry about how far he might go during one of their fights. But despite all of this, the couple continued to live together. Their nine-year-old daughter and the businesses they shared kept their lives largely connected, and Dee still hadn’t taken the final step of leaving.
In April 2021, however, things suddenly became much worse. A few days before she disappeared, Dee got into a serious dispute with employees of the trucking company over money. What upset her even more was that Dale didn’t take her side. And afterward, she told people around her that this had been the last straw.
The next day, several people saw Dee in an extremely emotional state. She was crying and repeatedly said she’d had enough. She told them she planned to sell the trucking company, speak with a lawyer, and finally divorce Dale. On the evening of April 24, Dee asked a relative to take their nine-year-old daughter for the night.
She explained that she wanted to talk to Dale about the divorce and didn’t want the girl there in case they got into an argument. When the relative came to pick her up, Dee looked like she had been crying and said once more that she had finally decided to leave Dale. That meant Dee was alone with her husband when she planned to tell him she had decided to go. Dale later admitted to the police that the two had had a serious argument that evening about money and Dee’s past affair.
According to him, however, she eventually calmed down and fell asleep on the couch. The next morning, she had vanished without a trace. Everything the detectives had learned from Dee’s family and friends made the original idea that she had left of her own accord much less likely. That naturally brought Dale under much closer scrutiny.
But the police still had absolutely no evidence against him. There were no signs of a struggle or blood in the house, and searches had given the detectives no real clue about what could have happened to Dee. Given what they now knew about the marriage, detectives kept investigating more closely whether Dale could be involved. At the same time, they returned repeatedly to the farm and searched the property with drones and dogs.
Not long afterward, officers noticed something unusual outside the house. There were deep tire tracks from some kind of heavy equipment, and they soon realized they came from Dale’s loader, which he admitted he had used that morning. Dale said he had gone out to the field to spray, but realized he had left some work notes at home. Instead of leaving the loader somewhere else, he drove it all the way up to the house, went inside to get the notes, and then went back to work.
He said this happened around 6:30 that morning while Dee was still asleep on the couch. What caught the investigators’ attention, however, was how close the loader seemed to have come to the house. Based on the tire tracks, the loader had stood with its bucket facing the house, almost right up to the front door, which the detectives found hard to explain. Nevertheless, Dale continued to cooperate with the police and answered all their questions without a lawyer.
He stuck to his original story. After their argument, Dee fell asleep on the couch, and some time later, while he was working, she apparently left on her own. He also repeated that Dee had gone elsewhere after arguments in the past and sometimes stayed away for a while, which was why he said he hadn’t found her absence unusual at first. The problem was that investigators still couldn’t find any trace of where Dee might have gone.
There was no activity on her phone, bank accounts, or passport. Detectives also collected footage from the security cameras around the farm and began interviewing employees of the family businesses. Because Dee had had a serious conflict with some of them shortly before her disappearance, the police investigated whether that conflict could be connected to the case. But just as with Dale, they found no evidence linking any of the employees to her disappearance.
The police also investigated the man Dee had previously dated, but they ruled him out fairly quickly after confirming he was elsewhere when she disappeared and finding nothing else connecting him to the case. Dee’s family refused to believe she had simply left on her own and were convinced that Dale had something to do with her disappearance. They kept pressing the police for answers, brought in volunteers, and took an active role in searching the sprawling farm. Over time, the police began using heavy equipment to dig up parts of the property, but those searches also turned up nothing.
Before long, the investigation had essentially stalled. Months passed, and by then the family had nearly lost all hope that Dee would be found alive. About six months after her disappearance, the authorities made one more major attempt to search the farm and the surrounding area. The state police, the FBI, and several other agencies took part, spending two days combing through fields and outbuildings.
They used search dogs and ground-penetrating radar to look for places where the ground might have been disturbed. But again, nothing was found. As the months went by, Dee’s family grew increasingly doubtful that the police would make any real progress. Eventually, they hired a private detective and a lawyer who began digging into the case on their own.
They spoke with dozens of Dee’s friends, acquaintances, and employees, traced the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, and organized additional searches. The private detective soon reached the same conclusion as Dee’s family. It was highly unlikely she had left the farm voluntarily. And Dale seemed the most likely person to be involved.
But the problem remained the same: there was still no direct evidence against him. The police kept following new tips, but none of them brought the detectives any closer to the truth about what had happened to Dee. They had no body, no clear crime scene, and Dale continued to deny any involvement in his wife’s disappearance. This went on for more than a year, until August 2022, when the local sheriff handed the case over to the Michigan State Police.
The new investigators received everything that had been gathered up to that point and began reconstructing the last hours before Dee’s disappearance from scratch, hoping to find something that had been missed. By then, the idea that Dee had simply gone off on her own seemed extremely unlikely. In the fifteen months since she had disappeared, she hadn’t touched her bank accounts, hadn’t contacted friends or family, and hadn’t been seen anywhere. At the same time, her body had never been found, and repeated searches of the farm and the surrounding area had turned up nothing.
The new detectives dove back into the camera footage, phone records, and other digital evidence. They also looked more closely at Dale’s statements and the testimony of everyone on the farm about that morning. Going through the data, detectives discovered that in the two years before Dee’s disappearance, Dale had checked the location of her car through the tracking system more than two thousand times. But what he did on the morning of April 25 raised even more questions.
Between about seven o’clock in the morning, Dale had tried to access the farm’s security camera system from his phone. He had also tried to locate Dee’s phone using the Find My iPhone app. When investigators asked why he did this, Dale said he was trying to find his wife. The problem was that this didn’t really align with what he had told the police earlier.
According to Dale, he had seen Dee sleeping on the couch that morning and had then gone to work. And he said he only realized much later that something might be wrong, when her children told him they couldn’t find her. But all of this had happened before that conversation with her children. In other words, Dale appeared to be searching for Dee before, by his own account, he had any reason to think she was missing.
For the detectives, this was another indication that he might not be telling them the truth. They also looked much more closely at what Dale did shortly after he claimed to have last seen Dee. Camera footage showed him early that morning driving heavy equipment around the property and picking up metal-cutting and welding tools from the workshop. None of that was unusual in itself, since this kind of work was common on the farm, but given Dee’s disappearance, detectives wanted to know exactly what he had done.
They then discovered that Dee’s Cadillac had been remotely unlocked that morning at 7:08 through a smartphone app. But investigators determined that the command had come from Dale’s phone, not Dee’s. When the police asked him about it, Dale gave essentially the same explanation he had given for checking the cameras and trying to locate Dee’s phone. He said he had been looking for his wife.
But that again contradicted his earlier statement, because at 7:08, by his own account, he had no reason yet to assume she had gone anywhere. Investigators also returned to a statement from one of the employees on the farm. The employee said he had seen Dee’s Hummer outside the house at four o’clock in the morning with its lights still on. Later that morning, however, the Hummer was parked by the office, where Dale would later say he had found Dee’s wedding ring.
Dale believed Dee could have driven the Hummer to the office, avoided the security cameras, left her ring there, and then been picked up by someone at the farm to go somewhere else. He also suggested that before leaving, she might have taken one hundred thousand dollars in cash from a safe where they kept money. Investigators, however, found that scenario difficult to believe. On the contrary, everything they discovered only strengthened their suspicions of Dale.
But it left them with the same major problem: they had no idea where Dee was. The police kept searching for her remains, and in the spring of 2023, they obtained search warrants for several more properties connected to the family. Over the following days, detectives searched farmland and other properties, brought in heavy equipment, and checked once more the places where a body might have been hidden. But just as before, the searches turned up nothing.
That put the police in a very difficult position. Almost everything indicated that Dee was no longer alive, and Dale seemed the most obvious suspect, especially given what detectives had learned about his actions in the hours and days after she disappeared. The problem was that they still had no body, no crime scene, and no witnesses. Everything they had against Dale was circumstantial evidence, and detectives weren’t sure they had enough to actually hold him responsible.
Dee’s family grew increasingly frustrated as they watched the case go nowhere for so long. They were convinced Dale had killed her somehow and managed to dispose of her body while continuing his life as a free man. There was, however, one thing the family had managed to accomplish. After Dee disappeared, a court appointed a guardian to oversee her property and her share of the family businesses until it became clear what had happened to her.
The judge ordered Dale to hand over the necessary financial records and barred him from making certain decisions about their shared assets without court permission. In the months that followed, however, he was repeatedly accused of ignoring these orders and transferring Dee’s assets to other companies he controlled. During that time, the trucking company Dee had largely been responsible for was also sold. As a result, on September 13, 2023, Dale was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to cooperate with the guardian of Dee’s assets.
He was sentenced to ninety-three days in jail, along with six months of probation and a fine of seventy-five hundred dollars. Meanwhile, detectives were still trying to find new evidence linking Dale to Dee’s disappearance. But they kept coming up empty-handed. So the prosecutor eventually made the difficult decision to move forward with the case based on the circumstantial evidence they already had.
On November 21, 2023, about two and a half years after Dee had disappeared, the police went to Dale’s house and arrested him on suspicion of murder. This happened only two weeks after he had been released early from jail, and he was put behind bars again. After his arrest, Dale continued to deny any involvement in his wife’s disappearance and pleaded not guilty. The biggest problem for the prosecutors remained the fact that Dee’s body had never been found.
But as early as 2022, her children had asked the court to declare their mother legally dead. And after a process that lasted nearly two years, a judge finally did so in March 2024. That gave the prosecutors an important legal confirmation that Dee was no longer alive, even though her body was still missing. By then, Dale was still in jail awaiting trial.
Several months after Dee was declared legally dead, a preliminary hearing was held, and the judge ruled there was enough evidence to send the case to trial, which was expected to begin several months later. The prosecutors still had to prove that Dee had been murdered without ever finding her body, and that remained a major challenge. But soon, everything changed. While trial preparations continued, investigators kept reviewing the case files looking for anything that might help.
As we know, the disappearance had initially been investigated by local authorities before the case was eventually handed over to a different team. That meant the new detectives had to partly rely on reports and interviews gathered by the original investigators. And one detail in those files caught their attention. Dee’s brother had told the police that shortly after her disappearance, he had seen Dale working on an old rusty tank and painting it, instead of helping with the search for his wife.
Sometimes even in the middle of the night. Dale explained that he couldn’t sleep because Dee was missing and said that working on the tank helped him find a distraction. At one point, he even moved the tank with a loader, right where the police and Dee’s family members were standing. Investigators also found earlier reports mentioning that Dale had been seen with welding equipment.
At the time, all of this hadn’t seemed very important, but detectives now decided to look at it much more closely. By then, they had seized Dale’s electronic devices, which contained a huge amount of data that was still being examined. Investigators asked digital forensics experts to specifically search for anything related to the tank Dee’s brother had talked about, and this time they found something. In Dale’s browser history, they discovered searches made after Dee’s disappearance about how to get rid of a four-thousand-liter tank.
There were also searches related to so-called chemical cremation, a process that uses chemicals to break down human remains. Detectives found this extremely suspicious and decided to take another look at the large metal fertilizer tanks around the farm. In August 2024, the police obtained a search warrant for one of Dale’s properties. In one of the farm buildings, they found an old metal tank that was no longer being used, with a sign on it saying it was broken and couldn’t be filled.
Detectives also noticed a strange weld seam on one side that didn’t look like it had been made in the factory. Instead of cutting the tank open, the police moved it to another location for examination and used powerful X-ray equipment to see what was inside. The results left no doubt. There was a human body in the tank.
The police then cut the tank open and found the remains wrapped in two tarps, secured with duct tape. Dee was still wearing her pajamas, and there was also tape around her face and neck. A few days later, experts confirmed through dental records that the body was hers. The autopsy also revealed how Dee had died.
She had suffered several blunt-force injuries to her head and face, and the cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation combined with those injuries. More than three years after Dee disappeared, the police finally had confirmation that she was not only dead, but that she had definitely been murdered. After the body was found, investigators examined the tank itself much more closely. An expert determined that one side had been cut open and then welded shut again.
Dale’s fingerprint was also found on the tank. The paint and the type of welding matched the materials and equipment used on the farm. The police also reviewed camera footage recorded shortly after the disappearance. One video showed Dale operating a loader and moving a similar tank while police, Dee’s family members, and volunteers were searching the property.
Other footage showed him picking up welding equipment. And body camera footage from one of the officers showed spots on his hands that the prosecution would later describe as possible welding burns. Now that Dee’s body had finally been found, the trial had to be postponed for more than a year. It didn’t begin until February 2026.
The prosecution argued that the motive was Dee’s decision to finally divorce Dale and divide their assets. According to them, Dale knew that if she left, he could lose a significant share of the businesses and property the couple had built together over the years. The prosecution alleged that Dale attacked his wife sometime after their argument on the night of April 24-25. They believed he struck Dee several times on the head and then suffocated her.
The prosecutors also pointed to the duct tape around her face and argued that Dale had deliberately covered her mouth and nose to make sure she couldn’t breathe. He then had to hide the body somewhere on the farm, where employees and family members were constantly coming and going, even at night. The prosecution believed that Dale drove the loader to the house early that morning, placed the bucket at the doorway, put Dee’s body in it, and carried it to one of the outbuildings. There, they believed he temporarily hid her in a large metal safe.
According to the prosecution, Dale then chose an old manure tank, cut open one side, placed Dee’s body inside, and welded the tank completely shut again. Later, he painted the tank and marked it as damaged so no one would try to use it. That allowed him to leave Dee’s body right on his own property, surrounded by countless farm machines, without drawing attention. That, according to the prosecution, explained why the police had searched for years and still found nothing.
They had searched vast areas, brought in dogs, and used equipment to scan the ground because they thought they were looking for a grave, when in reality Dee had never been buried. Her body had been above ground the whole time, sealed so tightly in a metal tank that even the search dogs couldn’t pick up a scent while standing right next to it. Dale’s lawyers tried to challenge the prosecution’s case by pointing out that there was still no direct evidence linking him to Dee’s murder. No one had witnessed the murder, and Dee’s blood was never found in the house, on the loader, or in any other place the prosecutors believed her body had been moved.
There were other people present on the farm during those hours, but no one had heard or seen anything suspicious. As for the metal tank, Dale’s fingerprint was indeed found on it, but the tank belonged to his business and stood on property where he worked every day. Based on this, his lawyers argued that finding his fingerprint there proved nothing by itself. They also had problems with the claim that Dale had temporarily hidden Dee’s body in a safe after killing her.
The police had never collected DNA samples from it, and by the time of the trial, investigators didn’t even know where that safe was anymore. The defense argued that this entire part of the prosecution’s reconstruction was based on speculation. Dale’s lawyers also emphasized that the farm was a busy place. Employees and family members were present that day and regularly moved between the different buildings, and Dale was not the only person who did welding work.
One employee even testified that Dale rarely carried out large welding jobs himself. And despite the large number of security cameras around the property, none of them captured Dale moving a body, putting Dee in the tank, or doing anything else with her remains. The footage only showed him doing what looked like normal work around the farm. The defense also sharply criticized the investigation itself.
For years, the police had focused on the idea that Dee’s body was buried somewhere on the property. They repeatedly searched enormous tracts of land but paid hardly any attention to the tank that was sitting above ground. Dale’s lawyers also reminded the jury that from the beginning, he had repeatedly spoken voluntarily with investigators and given the police permission to examine parts of his property and even some of his electronic devices. They also challenged the motive presented by the prosecution.
The defense called Dale’s ex-wife as a witness, and she testified that her own divorce years earlier had gone completely peacefully. They had arranged the division of their assets themselves, used the same lawyer, and even went out to lunch together after the divorce was finalized. According to the defense, the prosecutors had taken a series of suspicious circumstances that weren’t actually connected and stitched them together into one complete story. It’s also worth noting that shortly before the trial began, the prosecutors offered Dale a plea deal that would have allowed him to plead guilty to second-degree murder, but he refused and continued to insist he was innocent.
The trial lasted several weeks, and on March 10, 2026, the jury found Dale guilty of second-degree murder and concealing evidence. They did not convict him on the more serious charge of first-degree murder, which meant they weren’t convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Dale had planned Dee’s murder in advance. Dee’s family was relieved that Dale was convicted, although some of them admitted they had hoped for a murder conviction. Dale, meanwhile, did not change his position after the verdict and continued to deny any involvement in his wife’s death.
Before the sentencing, several of Dee’s family members addressed the court. They said Dale had shown no remorse for what he had done, and also revealed that he had convinced his daughter, who was nine when Dee disappeared, that her mother had simply left her and moved to another country. On May 7, Dale was sentenced to thirty-one to sixty years in prison for the murder, plus an additional seventeen months to ten years for concealing evidence. Since the two sentences must be served consecutively, he could spend up to seventy years behind bars.
He won’t be eligible for parole for about thirty-three years, at which point he will already be in his nineties. That essentially brought the criminal case to an end, but the legal disputes surrounding the family are still ongoing. Even before the criminal trial began, Dee’s children filed a one-hundred-million-dollar civil lawsuit against Dale, accusing him not only of causing their mother’s death but also of taking control of the family assets. To this day, that lawsuit is still making its way through the courts.
Dale remains in prison and continues to insist he is innocent. He still has the right to appeal his conviction, although no significant steps in that direction have been taken so far.
