Transcript of The Day Dee Disappeared

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Tonight on Dateline.

Got a knock on my door that changed my whole life that morning. You don't know what to do when somebody goes missing. They didn't want to believe it.

Dee has just disappeared.

Just disappeared. Drone team, infrared cameras, canines, zero physical evidence.

She owned a farming company, a strong independent businesswoman.

They definitely both really wanted to build this big empire. You always have to look at the Right.

I hear your wife is missing. I don't know if she's missing or if she just left.

It was not uncommon for her to leave the home.

Both her vehicles were still there. Did somebody come and pick her up?

There was this rumor of somebody that she might have been having an affair with.

An employee is seen on the farm in the middle of the night.

Mm-hmm. Very suspicious.

You get word that an X-ray has been done.

Yes.

It was starting to become terrifying.

What the hell is going on here? It's a wholesome farm life in a safe little community where this is not supposed to happen, right?

Mystery on the farm. A frightening disappearance and fertile ground for secrets. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Andrea Canning with the day Dee disappeared.

There's a certain rhythm to farm life in Lenawee County, Michigan. Tilling the soil, planting the crops, tractors crisscrossing the fields at sunrise. Dee Warner knew that cadence by heart.

She really cared about the farm.

She did. It was in her blood.

A 6th-generation farmer, 52-year-old Dee ran the sprawling farming enterprise with her husband Dale. She was hard-charging. Fiery. Dee drives a Hummer.

I mean, do we need to say anything else?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you know, she drove a Hummer and an Escalade, so you can see her personality would go either ritzy or rugged, right?

Dee's brother, Greg Hardy, and his wife, Shelley, say she was reliable too, especially when it came to her 5 children. So when Dee missed a standing breakfast with her daughter, Raquel, on a Sunday morning in April 2021, the kids were alarmed.

Raquel came and said, have you seen my mom? And I said, no, she hasn't come down. And they said, well, we can't find her anywhere.

Dee's husband said he was at a loss as well.

Raquel had called Dale, okay, and asked him if he knew where Dee was, and he said no, no idea. No, he said she was sleeping on the couch snoring like a baby when he saw her in the morning.

Greg and Shelley didn't panic at first. Dee would often get away for a day or two when she needed time to think. But when their calls calls went straight to voicemail.

I knew something was wrong because she would always answer me. We weren't the people, brother and sister, who chatted about the weather every day or anything like that. There was a purpose, always a purpose. And I'm sure she thought sometimes when I called, oh, it's Greg. But we would always answer or immediately call back.

Greg and Shelley offered to help look for her.

We started searching everywhere, every place we could possibly think of. We searched at our offices, we came to the barns, we went back to Dee's, went through her farm.

At Dee's farmhouse, a couple of things caught Shelly's eye. She didn't see Dee's purse anywhere. And strewn across the furniture, tissues.

Tissues like she had—

Like for a nose?

Like you blow your nose?

Yeah, for her nose was running. And— but they weren't rumpled up. They were just like maybe wiped her nose and put it down, wiped her— it was just an unusual thing. That's odd. It was very odd.

And outside, both of Dee's vehicles were still there.

So she didn't leave in her car.

Mm-mm.

She wouldn't go anywhere without driving her car, the Hummer or the Escalade.

Early that evening, Dee's kids called the police. Deputy Austin Hall arrived at the farmhouse, body cam rolling.

When I got there, you know, I knocked on the door, didn't get an answer. I saw Dale out in one of the barns. Are you Dale?

Yes, ma'am.

Excellent.

I am Deputy Hall from the Lowndes County Sheriff's Office.

How are you, sir? Good. So I hear your wife is missing? Well, I don't know if she's missing or if she just left.

Dale told the deputy his wife was stressed over a recent argument with two employees. Still upset Saturday night, she picked a fight with him before going to bed with a migraine.

She's got some migraine pills in there that she takes.

Okay.

She took quite a few of those, and then she finally basically passed out on the couch. Went to sleep. I got her calmed down.

The next morning, that Sunday, Dale said she was asleep on the couch when he got up to spray the fields. By the time he returned, he said Dee was gone, along with an overnight bag and some beauty products.

Does Dale seem concerned?

No, no, not really.

I mean, I would think something was off, but she took her stuff. So I mean, she's— it's not like somebody forced her to go anywhere.

Sure.

He explained it that, you know, she does this all the time. This is something that is a routine thing where she gets mad and goes off.

I don't want to get everybody all fired up. The kids are all fired up. I'm going to call the police and get her. This isn't the first time she's done this, guys.

Was there any sign of foul play? Did you see blood anywhere? Did you see a struggle anywhere?

No, didn't see anything that remotely made me say, you know, something nefarious had occurred there.

Even so, he took a close look at Dale's hands.

One of the first things you do and are taught as a deputy is you look at somebody's hands, you know. And if somebody—

I didn't know that—

was in a domestic situation, they're going to have some kind of self-defense marks that would be left on their hands.

Did you see anything on Dale?

Nothing. Yep, nothing.

Deputy Hall wasn't sure what to make of the situation.

I called my supervisor and I said, hey, this is what I got. This is weird, but I don't have really anything to go off of. So they said, you know, file your report. Somebody will follow up at some later point.

You got a card?

Yes. I'll give you that.

Did you think she was going to be found?

I thought there was a good chance for sure.

The deputy was right. Dee would be found, but not for a very long time.

This was consuming you.

Oh, he was very consumed.

This image from the X-ray was going to change everything.

It changed everything.

I couldn't even breathe. It was like 5 years of emotion just burst out.

Shelly, what was it like for you as the sun is coming up? The next day, and still no one has heard from Dee.

Just difficult because you don't know what to do. You just keep thinking, where in the world would she have gone? What can we do to find her?

Dee Warner's family couldn't imagine why she would walk away from her life, but her brother Greg says she did have that rebellious streak.

She was a feisty girl. And so she was a lot of work.

I've heard.

Yeah, yeah, it's true.

Yeah, she had a mind of her own too.

Dee was fun, loud, and just as likely to show up in full makeup as she was in work boots.

That woman would not go to the gas station without being made up.

Parker Hardy is Dee's nephew.

I love the thought of her in the middle of farm country, made up at all times.

All times.

Delivering lunches to the tractors, working in the fields.

And her fashion sense was kind of matched her personality?

Very much so. Very blingy, very lots of cheetah print, very flashy, very professional too.

Like to shop?

Oh yeah, she loved to shop, but she worked to earn the money, so it was more work the more shopping.

Making money was important to Dee. After raising 4 kids with her first husband, she fell for Dale, a fellow farmer who shared her ambition.

She and Dale both were what I call empire builders.

And they both wanted that. Yeah.

So it's something they could build.

He's a very hard worker, and they worked together very well.

Dale, who was also married with 4 kids, came from another farming family in town.

So when they left their spouses and married each other, Oh, that was a huge deal.

Catherine Adams is Dee's lifelong friend.

That was a very big deal because they were, you know, competitive farm families, and, you know, they didn't get along.

And then the real thing that iced the cake was that Dale's ex-wife married Dee's ex-husband.

Stop it!

Yes, it was—

it was very messy, uh, and it was messy for a long time.

Despite the drama, Dee and Dale's partnership paid off. They pooled their resources and built a multimillion-dollar farming empire. It included growing crops, seed and fertilizer sales, and a fleet of 18-wheelers. Dale was in charge of farm operations. Dee managed the money, the employees, and her brainchild, the trucking business.

Dee had to really fit in with men, you know, because like in business, you know, where she's the boss, I— men don't always love that, especially maybe in this business.

I think that's where she got her real tough shell and her real fiery personality.

She wasn't afraid to tell it like it is. She made it happen and by any means necessary, and she didn't care whose toes she stepped on.

At work and at home, there was one person who was rarely far from Dee's side— her 9-year-old daughter Angelina, the only child she shared with Dale.

She was a little mini Dee, just a total diva. Loved makeup, glitter, Cheetah print was a— it—

yeah, it was, it was both of their signature.

Yes, definitely.

Angelina became the love of her life as a little girl, and she drug her everywhere. She's in the office, she's in the car, she's in the truck, she's in whatever.

Which made Dee's sudden disappearance all the more perplexing. Angelina wasn't home when Dee went missing. She was at a sleepover, and she would never leave Angelina.

We couldn't understand.

Dee's relatives expanded their search of the family properties.

It must have been so daunting.

I mean, we're talking about thousands and thousands of acres of land.

Yeah, we just keep looking, and that's all we could do.

They began to wonder about Dee's mental health.

Was she upset enough? Because we knew— we'd heard that she was upset the days before, arguing over some employees, et cetera, that that maybe she just had enough, and maybe she did decide to do some self-harm.

As successful as the Warners were, running the business was a lot for Dee. She told her kids she was worn out and wanted a break from it all. Could Dee have taken her own life? As they searched, Parker was afraid of what they might find.

I thought for sure that I was probably going to see her propped up against a tree. That was what I was bracing myself for.

Wow.

But, um, we saw nothing.

On that second day, another investigator followed up with Dale at the farm.

I'm Detective Greca from the Sheriff's Department. Can we step inside?

Dale still didn't seem to share the family's anxieties.

What do you think? What's your take? I think she'll be back another day or two.

But by midweek, after a couple more visits from detectives, even Dale seemed worried.

And then it started sinking in, like, hey, uh, something's off. I mean, I was concerned because she's never left Angelina, ever.

Something else Dee had never done, he said, leave her wedding ring behind.

And when I walked through the office, her ring is on my desk. That's what just— something is wrong.

Did you think that was a sign of trouble in the marriage?

Absolutely.

That was her message, right? You always have to look at the spouse.

Right.

And at this point, he had been cooperative with us. He was willing to sit down and have an interview with us, more than welcome to invite us inside.

Investigators looked into Dale's story, and the farm's security cameras seemed to back it up. Footage showed Dale heading out to spray the fields the morning Dee disappeared, just like he said. Employees and friends also told them Dale was a loving husband.

He's the nicest guy. He wouldn't harm her. She was the hothead.

I was gonna say, he was the calm, cool, collected—

she was like the bad cop. Yes, the good cop, right?

He's just not capable of it.

Here with Dale right now.

Dale occupied himself with farm chores while investigators worked around him. They searched the property with cadaver dogs and drones with infrared cameras. They watched hours of that security camera footage frame by frame, and that's when they spotted something. A middle-of-the-night visitor who would soon become a key focus of the investigation.

3 in the morning.

3 in the— that's an odd time. Very odd to be showing up to a farm.

Yes. Lenawee County investigators had a mystery on their hands. Nearly a week had passed, and they were no closer to finding mother of 5 Dee Warner.

There's different kind of theories that were running, right?

Because you have possible suicide.

Absolutely possible.

Just wants to get away, right? Because she can't handle the situation.

Yep.

Or was there the thought she met with foul play?

Absolutely.

There definitely was the thought that there would be foul play.

Dee's cell phone data didn't help narrow it down. Her phone went off the grid around 7:00 AM the morning she disappeared. She hadn't used her credit cards or made a withdrawal at a bank either. But Dale said she might not have needed to. The couple routinely kept a lot of money around the house.

He says, well, she's got cash on her. I was like, oh, well, look, how much cash are you talking? You know, is it enough to go out to eat a few times, get your nails done? He goes, probably $50,000 to $100,000.

What?

I was like, $50,000 to $100,000?

Who walks around with—

cash like that, right?

Right.

So, um, later Dale explains that, you know, they had a shared safe.

With money like that, they thought Dee could be anywhere.

Maybe she's out of the country. Maybe she went to her favorite vacation destination. At this point, we had started contacting the FAA and finding out if there was any sight of her going through an airport, because, I mean, they have records of all that. Yeah, nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

What about international?

International?

Passport run through the system?

He had a passport, but it had not been used at all.

Since both of Dee's SUVs were at the farm, investigators wondered if someone picked her up. Maybe another man. Greg says Dee had no shortage of admirers.

Dee is an attractive woman. She has a flirtatious type personality.

I—

for everybody.

I asked Dale, is there a history of affairs?

What does Dale say?

Dale says, no, I'm not concerned at all that she'd be having an affair.

Okay.

Okay. Well, I, I would be far from the first gentleman to have no idea that his wife is having an affair.

He might not know.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Sure enough, through their interviews, investigators discovered that Dee had been seeing someone, a married builder from town.

So that goes back to, okay, if she either ran away with him or maybe she wouldn't run away with him and he came in and did something bad.

When you have a married lover, it could be the lover. It could be the lover's wife.

Right.

So we chased that lead down as well and contacted him.

Did he have any reason to be angry with Dee?

No.

She'd broken up with him and he was resentful.

He said it was more just a fling kind of a thing.

So just a casual fling or something more complicated? Well, investigators pursued that lead. They were also hearing about Dee's tell-it-like-it-is personality. Had she angered someone to the point of wanting revenge? There were a lot of people who did not like Dee.

Yeah, definitely. Everybody knew Dee, you know? And they all either hated her or loved her, or they hated her but still said she was a nice lady.

Maybe someone had come to the farm looking for her. Investigators took a close look at that security footage. That's when they noticed something. Someone driving onto the property in the middle of the night, shortly before Dee disappeared.

How early?

Like 3:00 in the morning.

3:00 in the—

that's an odd time.

Very odd.

To be showing up to a farm.

Yeah.

So that immediately, red flags were going off everywhere.

Turned out it was Dee's right-hand man from her trucking company, Todd Nurick. He was one of the employees Dee fought with right before she went missing. Now, here he was in the predawn hours, picking up a truck and driving it off Dee's farm.

Not only that, he signed in on the electronic truck log with a different person's name and driver ID number.

This is very suspicious.

It's very suspicious.

Was he interviewed, I'm assuming?

Absolutely.

And what does he say he's doing there in the middle of the night?

On the first interview, it was very, very cold. He didn't want to give out a whole lot of information. He explained, you know, I had nothing to do with this. I didn't hurt her. I, I don't know where she is.

Detectives talked to Todd again, pressed him harder. This time, Deputy Hall says he admitted to lying but said it had nothing to do with Dee's disappearance.

He was just taking a load out of state somewhere, and he was driving longer than he was supposed to. And so that's why he was kind of being cold about it, okay? Because he, he was bending the rules to take a load further than he should.

Deputy Hall says Todd told detectives if he'd been evasive, it was because of that and nothing else. But Dee's friend Catherine wasn't so sure.

I thought Dee might have been in that truck.

Despite those leads, there were no immediate arrests. Weeks turned into months. Dee's story went national. Dateline featured it in our Missing in America series. Catherine organized rallies put up billboards, and formed a Facebook group called Justice for Dee.

We had Justice for Dee bracelets we would hand out. We had flyers that went up.

Shelley put a bracelet on her wrist too and made a vow.

You were never gonna take it off until— Never gonna take it off.

—until I got justice. Dale told Parker he was struggling, so he threw himself into mundane tasks around the farm.

He said, I'm worried about my kids. Where Dee Dee's at. So I told the guys to bring in some tanks, and I would paint them at night when I can't sleep.

The lack of progress with the investigation was driving Dee's brother crazy.

This was consuming you.

Oh, he was very consumed, I can tell you. Every day. There wasn't a day that Greg didn't work on it.

Luckily, help would soon be on the way, but it came with a warning.

I said, hey, I'll go wherever the evidence leads me. So if it leads me to you, be careful.

Almost a year after Dee's disappearance, investigators had no answers or suspects. Dale had been cooperative. Sitting through interviews and searches of his property. But he'd grown tired of people poking around the farm. By now, police had cleared that employee Todd, who took the truck. And as for the married man Dee was seeing, he was out of the state on a family vacation.

Was this a rock-solid alibi? Rock solid.

Shelly and Greg had lost hope of ever seeing Dee again.

Greg said, Shelly, you've got to come to reality that Dee's gone. And that was really hard for me that day because it was such a final— like, I knew he was right, but I didn't want to believe it.

Now convinced Dee met with foul play, one night something caught Shelly's attention.

You're up in the middle of the night watching some type of true crime show, and you see a private investigator.

Right. All the time, we had been told, you know, no body homicides are never proven. You can never prove them without a body. And I saw this guy on there, and all I can remember is him saying, just because you're good at hiding a body doesn't mean you're not a murderer.

Shelly tracked the PI down, Billy Little Jr. Did you think that this was something that you could help with? I did.

And so after talking it through with them, I gave them the standard warning. I said, hey, you know, I'll go wherever the evidence leads me, so if it leads me to you, be careful.

Billy, also a successful attorney, occasionally took on cases pro bono. This would be one of them. He drove 10 hours from Missouri with his sleeping bag and a whiteboard and moved on to Greg and Shelly's farm.

I'm old school, so I'd start laying out the steps Some of the people I need to interview, some of the places I need to look.

He sent up drones looking for Dee, spoke with dozens of people in her circle, and walked acres of the family property with Greg. One day, Dale pulled up. He wasn't happy.

So now you're face to face with Dale. Yeah.

And Dale goes 0 to 100 in a split second. He has words with Greg. Then he turns on his heel, gets in his truck, and leaves.

To Billy, it seemed an odd reaction. Greg had his own growing suspicions. Dale never joined a single search, seemed detached. And as for that diamond ring Dee supposedly left behind—

The wedding ring thing didn't make sense at all because Dee would never leave him anything.

Billy took a closer look at their relationship. He learned there were frequent fights over money.

There were people who witnessed aggressive arguments.

That argument the night before Dee went missing? Dee's friends believed it was bigger than Dale let on. Dee planned to tell him she was selling the trucking company and wanted a divorce. Billy could only come to one conclusion. Dale killed Dee. Dee's family agreed. Parker, who lived next door to Dale, was on pins and needles. What was that like?

Living so close to him.

It was treacherous. It was terrible. It put a lot of stress on me.

His fear that Dale might target him to derail his father Greg's campaign for justice.

You say you slept kind of with one eye open? Always.

You know, I never thought that I would have to sleep with a gun on my nightstand, but I did.

Greg couldn't keep quiet any longer.

At a vigil for Dee, with the community listening, Publicly, he announced that he thought Dale was the one that murdered Dee.

The intensity of this domestic dispute between Dee and Dale had elevated to a point which seemed of no return. It is my opinion that Dee did not leave her home voluntarily. Okay, let's call it like it is. On Saturday night, April 24th, 2021, there are two people in that house. On Sunday morning, There was only one.

Greg is now publicly calling out Dale.

It kind of put the pressure on because we all thought it, but now we're saying it publicly.

While others around town, like Dale's children, customers, and employees, supported him, the tight-knit community split in two.

It was truly more than it ever had been, the Hatfields and McCoys. There was no mixing. You were either a Justice for Dee warrior, as people refer to it, or you were Team Dale.

Dee's family and friends pressured the sheriff with rallies and impromptu visits. Finally, 15 months after Dee disappeared, he handed the case over to Michigan State Police.

That was a huge relief. That was probably one of the best moments of the entire case because that was when we finally felt heard.

Investigators came in with fresh eyes and big resources. Teaming up with prosecutors Jackie Wise and David McCready, they set out to rebuild the case from the ground up.

I think they searched over 3,000 acres of land looking for Dee's body.

They didn't find her, but searches on Dale's devices turned up some troubling digital clues.

He is searching how to cremate someone using liquid chemicals. And why would you be doing that?

And the morning Dee vanished, Dale logged on to the farm's security camera system. Investigators suspected he was checking the footage for anything that could implicate him.

When does this really turn in your eyes from missing woman to murdered woman?

Early in 2023, Michigan State Police sat me down and they went over the case from top to bottom. And by the time that they were done, I was fully convinced.

But trying an entirely circumstantial case wouldn't be easy.

Without the body, you've got a mountain to climb over.

So prosecutors consulted the family before moving forward.

What did the family say to you?

Let's do it. How's it going?

2 and a half years after Dee disappeared, Dale Warner was arrested and charged with her murder. You're under arrest for the murder of Dee Warner. Put your hands behind your back. Thank you, kid. With Dale behind bars, investigators continued to look for evidence. And the break they'd been waiting for was closer than they knew.

This image from the X-ray was going to change everything. It changed everything.

The case against Dale Warner headed for trial even as the search for Dee continued. Her brother Greg kept coming back to something he'd noticed right after she disappeared.

A day or two after she went missing, we were down getting fertilizer, and I went in to sprayer barn, I saw a rusty old anhydrous tank sitting in that building, and Dale was working on it.

Remember, Dale told Parker he would paint tanks at night when he couldn't sleep.

I said, Dale, what the hell are you doing with this tank?

Greg says he mentioned it to the sheriff's department right away. Now he brought it up again with the state police, and a few days later, a detective called him.

He said, I want you to know that we're doing some more investigation about that tank thing. They came to this location, they found a tank that actually was freshly painted.

It was found on another of Dale's properties about 3 miles from his house. Investigators worried if they cut the tank open, whatever chemicals were inside could be dangerous.

They said, listen, do you know anywhere we could get a tank like this x-rayed? And I remember that when we crossed the Canadian border They have an X-ray of trucks.

Wow. Okay. So they took the tank to customs at the Canadian border?

Yeah, they loaded it right here in this driveway.

One look at the X-ray and the lead detective immediately called the prosecution team.

And as he's telling me this, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck rising.

The images revealed a clear silhouette of a body, a person lying face down. They opened the tank and there was Dee still in her pajamas. Wrapped in a tarp.

You're so happy that you have her, but it's sad that you know that she's in there. I couldn't even breathe.

I got in my truck and I just absolutely lost it. It was like 5 years of emotion just burst out.

The medical examiner concluded Dee died of strangulation and blunt force trauma to the head.

There's some amount of vindictiveness too, because not only did he kill her, then he wrapped her mouth and nose in duct tape before he put her in the tarp.

I'm shutting you up forever.

Shutting you up for good.

If he did this. Yes. Prosecutors had the final piece they'd been hoping for. In February 2026, Dale Warner's trial began. It had been nearly 5 years since Dee's disappearance. This is Dee Warner.

April 24, 2021, she went home to tell her husband, the defendant, that the marriage was over.

Dee's close friend testified that she'd seen her that afternoon.

I could tell she had been crying.

She had, like, red blotchy spots on her—

on her neck.

She said she was done. Dee's son told jurors his mom was ready to confront Dale.

She was done with everything.

She didn't want to do the trucking company anymore.

She didn't want to be with Dale anymore. She wanted to sell everything and be done. Prosecutors theorized Dale snapped, strangled Dee, then staged an elaborate cover-up. The motive? Money. They suggested that selling the farm operation would especially hurt Dale because only the trucking business was profitable, and Dee controlled that. They showed the court a video of Dale telling police how costly another divorce would be. I've been through one divorce.

I sure as hell don't want to go through another one, no matter what.

It's not worth it. When you go back and look at his first divorce, he lost his farm. He had to pay hundreds of thousands hundreds of dollars for— in child support every month.

After killing Dee at their farmhouse, prosecutors said Dale worked fast to hide her body.

We're pretty confident that at that point, he'd put her body into that front-end loader and moved her to the spray barn. We also know that there is a humongous safe that had been in that spray barn for months. And there's not a place in there that you could safely stow a body. Other than the safe that was in there.

Then they said he moved her from the safe to that tank, tank number 34, welded it shut, painted it, and applied inspection decals. Now all that footage deputies collected on the farm took on a new meaning. What looked like routine work, they argued that was actually Dale covering up a murder.

Here with Dale right now, you know, several things.

Here he is speaking with investigators generators in the barn just a few feet from the tank. Later, he warned them about chemicals in the barn, a ploy prosecutors said to keep cadaver dogs away from the body.

I just didn't want you to take the dogs in there because the floor is still covered with it and they'll soak up through the feet. We lost one of our shepherds from that one time.

Prosecutors believe from there Dale only became more brazen. They played footage of him on the front loader moving the tank around the farm. Right in front of them.

Those men on the pad are part of the search team. They're running a drone. Here comes the JCB. There's Dale behind the wheel of that JCB, and here it comes with the tank.

Hearing the court testimony, Parker realized there had been clues all along.

Looking back all these years now, I was such an untrained eye because all I was looking for was Dee.

And now that we know everything that we know, there was so much There were so many clues, so much the surveillance footage from all those cameras, like little Easter eggs.

Exactly. Prosecutors played a call Dale made from jail to his son Jaren shortly after the tank was seized.

So they took that tank and now they're, you know, x-rayed or something. Then if they don't get any x-rays, they're cutting it open.

I'm like, what the fuck? What a waste of time. Wow, that's not good.

Investigators wondered if Jaron was involved. We got a warrant for your arrest, buddy.

Put your hands behind your back.

Even arresting him as an accessory before dropping the charges. They said that jailhouse call proved Dale knew Dee was in the tank. Okay, at trial A forensic scientist testified that Dale's fingerprint was found on a decal.

What was the result of your comparison?

My result was that it was Dale Warner's left middle finger.

Another expert took the jury through those internet searches Dale made in the days after Dee disappeared. This is on Gizmodo for what is liquid cremation and why is it illegal. This is from Google, what to do with 1,000-gallon propane tank. After 12 days, the prosecution rested. The defense had its work cut out for it. But in Dale's camp, one of the best defense attorneys in the state.

Some of your clients have described you as a pit bull in high heels, Mike Tyson in the courtroom.

They have. They have. And a lot more. And a lot more than that.

Inside the packed Lenawee County Courthouse, Dale Warner faced the fight of his life, charged with murder and evidence tampering. At his side, high-profile defense attorney Mary Chartier.

Some of your clients have described you as a pit bull in high heels.

Mike Tyson in the courtroom. They have, they have, and a lot more, and a lot more than that. This case is an incredible tragedy, and there's no doubt about that. There was no witness. There was absolutely nothing tying Mr. Warner to Ms. Warner going missing or being murdered.

Her strategy: convince the jury of reasonable doubt. Chartier argued the state presented an entirely circumstantial case.

The lack of any sort of forensic evidence that Mr. Warner committed this crime at all. So no DNA, nothing like that, as well as the timeline of the day where she is missing.

She told jurors there just wasn't time for her client to commit murder, move the body, and weld the tank shut. And the surveillance cameras prove it.

When you really look at the surveillance video footage from that day, he is both on the property and off the property all day long. He's on camera dozens and dozens and dozens of time throughout the day doing his farm chores.

The defense also said Dale didn't limit where family members could search when Dee first vanished.

You would think that he would want to put some restrictions on people and be like, well, don't go in there because there's a body in there, or there's a tank in there. He puts no restrictions on anyone at all.

Then Chartier poked holes in some of the state's most compelling evidence. That jail call about tank number 34? She said it wasn't a confession, just a farmer reacting to news that investigators were back on his property.

Of course, someone would be annoyed or frustrated by property being searched yet again that had already been searched.

And Dale's fingerprint on the tank? That was hardly surprising. It was his farm. Chartier also pointed out to jurors that investigators couldn't prove the tank Dale was seen moving in front of them was the same one that held Dee's remains. If he had a concern about that, he wouldn't have just gone to farm. He would have moved the tank that everyone is saying he's trying to hide. Then the defense tackled the question at the heart of the prosecution's case, the why. Dale just snapped.

Dee was going to leave him. He's controlling. He was not going to let that happen.

It's just not the reality of their relationship that he would snap. He was a person who was calm and even-tempered.

After calling only 3 witnesses, the defense rested, and the jurors went to work.

It all hangs in the jury, right?

They would decide if Dale was guilty of first-degree murder, meaning premeditation, second-degree, or not guilty.

It was very tense.

It was very, very tense.

A lot of anxiety. Then the verdict. Guilty of second-degree murder. For the family who had pushed so hard for answers, justice had finally come.

We can almost change this from Justice for Dee for Victory for Dee, right? So, uh— She would be very thrilled.

What is your emotion? What's your feeling in the courtroom when you hear that guilty verdict?

We did it. We finally got to the point that we wanted to for 5 years. We would have liked first degree, but we were satisfied.

Well, I think it would be out of character if I said I was satisfied, okay? As I told the prosecutors, good news, you don't have to put up with me anymore. Uh, the bad news is, uh, he should have been convicted of first-degree murder.

So many of you never gave up.

Mm-hmm.

Because she wouldn't have. She would have never given up on any of us. She would have burned the whole town down until she found us.

Two months after the verdict, Dale Warner walked into the courtroom for his sentencing wearing shackles and bright orange.

I only hope that the only way Dale Warner is able to leave prison is in a small dark box.

Here we are finally, the day of judgment for Dale Warner. After I got my statement done, I thought this is a good time to take my bracelet off, that we got justice for Dee, and I was gonna continued to be her voice. We got justice.

That's a real bittersweet moment. Doesn't bring Dee back.

No, because you do get justice and you're happy, but we still don't have Dee.

Yes, Your Honor. Thank you.

Dale Warner's attorney read a statement on his behalf. He loved his wife.

He maintains his innocence, and he did not kill his wife.

The judge gave Dale a sentence of up to 70 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole when he turns 91.

He will be an old man by the time he's even eligible for parole.

Hopefully he's extremely old and extremely dead when he has to come out of there.

He should go as far away as possible. And that way the family can't visit him because there are no visitation rights for us in heaven.

For the mother of 5, the grandmother of 7, her legacy is the joy she brought to all those around her.

She was the life of the party and a spitfire, and that she'll never stop speaking because I'm gonna be her voice.

Dee was finally laid to rest, her grave marked not as Dee Warner, but simply DeeAnn.

That was a big thing. Dale didn't have control of her anymore, and that was a good feeling. We did. We had her back with us. A heart of gold.

Yeah, big heart. Very big heart.

Very big heart.

And that's all for this edition of Dateline. Don't forget to check out our Talking Dateline podcast, in which we'll go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again next Friday at 10, 9 Central. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.

I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. I've always been a glass half full kind of guy, and now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges. Their stories are funny and quite candid, so I hope you'll join me each week And who knows, you might just come away with your own glass half full.

Search Glass Half Full with Craig Melton from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.