Sarah Pryor
Appearances
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
Can I just start with this? Because Sarah knew first and called me, and I didn't believe her. That just doesn't happen. That, you know, after more than three years that they find Dee, I was like, are they sure? And then I kept thinking why it stuck with me and sticks with me to this moment was because three weeks before they found her, I'm out 100 yards away from where her body was found.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
Are you serious? And I'm interviewing her brother. And I'm like thinking, well, she could be anywhere. And she is found 100 yards behind me. I think I feel a relief like everyone else does because I had spent so much time with this family that they now knew where she was. But then this incredible sadness that you can't fool yourself anymore. She is not alive.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
And there is no hope that maybe she'll come back home sometime. So it's a very powerful moment, too. Mm-hmm. And I should point out another thing. Even though her body was found on property that Dale and Dee owned, somebody could have gone, I mean, it's- Right next to the road. It is. Somebody could have gone in there and put her body in.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
And there was on the tank that she was found a non-manufacturing welding line, which would indicate that someone else had disconnected and put this tank together. But we don't know whether it was Dale.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
And there's a great other detail that there was a sign on the tank that says, do not fill out of service. And so, again, this was kind of a red flag to them. Yeah. But I think what you can say, even though we don't know exactly all the details of what led investigators to this tank, it was good investigative work. And then they x-rayed it. In the search warrant, it says we will try to x-ray it.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
And if that fails, then we will open it up. But x-raying did show a body inside the tank.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
One of the reasons has to do with legal, you know, be able to have some control over her financial assets. So part of it was just practical.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
What's next? the trial. At this moment, there is a trial scheduled for fall of 2025. We know from working 48 hours, you do too, Anne-Marie, that those dates are very flexible, but that's where it stands.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
There's so much we don't know. We don't have an autopsy. So we don't know if there was time of death or how she died. If they even know. Right. And there's so, so many questions that we still have that hopefully will be answered at trial. Yeah.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
Think about how screwed up we would be if we had survived a plane crash only to end up eating each other.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
No, that's what, honestly, Emery, that's what made this story unusual and very satisfying. It's rare that a story develops in front of our eyes. But when we start on a missing persons case, the family may have very definite ideas about what happened, but we have to be more careful. There was no evidence of a crime. There was no evidence of a crime scene.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
Even though it did seem after that much time hard to believe that she had simply disappeared and gone somewhere else. I think a missing persons case is tougher to report because we have to be very skeptical.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
The other thing, though, about covering this case, and both Sarah and I agree on this, we realize that there's emotions and a poignancy that you don't always encounter in a homicide case, a case that has already been declared a homicide. In this case, the family members were absolutely convinced that Dee had been murdered, but they still had that question. Maybe she was out there.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
So they were dealing with the kind of grief that everyone does when someone disappears, but also that fear that she had left them. And what a heartbreak that was. And we could see it in almost every interview.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
I think one of the reasons why the family was so open with us was because 48 Hours had started on this story pretty early. We have a development producer by the name of Cindy Caesar who really, about a year after Dee disappeared, had reached out to the family and spoke with them frequently and stayed in touch with them.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
And I think it really opened a lot of doors for me when I came and sat down with these family members.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
And everyone said this, that Dee Warner was a nonstop texter. This was a woman who, if you didn't respond to a text, she was sending you another. Everyone said that. And so while there was certainly some evidence that she had disappeared on her own, I should point out, and you hear this in the hour. Her hair iron was missing. Curling iron. Yeah, curling iron was missing.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
And her makeup bag and her passport. I mean, that would point to her phone. And there was also a lot of evidence from Dale that he said, look, you know, she could have left on her own. And he was very cooperative with police when he gave police what he did the morning that she disappeared. It matched on video. So I just want to throw that out there, too. He gave reasons that seemed to make sense.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
So you have all of that saying, well, maybe she did leave, but that didn't sound like Dee. And most important, at that time when she disappeared, she had a nine-year-old daughter that she was devoted to. And everyone in the family said there's no way she would have left her daughter. So that was really very strong evidence that Dee did not leave on her own.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
A ring worth as much as $40,000. And I can take a very small survey of the three women right now. And if we were really upset with someone, are we going to leave our $40,000 ring behind? Are we going to take it in case we need it down the road? I'm just saying. That's so funny. And I should point out that there was no surveillance video showing her leaving it behind.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
Well, I think it came from Billy Little, the investigator that they began working with. He suggested that you put pressure on both the person that you think might be involved and on investigators. Let me point out, this is a rural area. You know, if someone had killed her and put her body somewhere, there were so many places. There were acres and acres of farms. So...
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
It's understandable that even though the sheriff's department did at least seven searches in that first year looking for Dee, there were a lot of places to look. And so the family wanted to put pressure on investigators to say, don't give up. It's a nobody case maybe, but she can be found. Greg talked about how important it was to him and to members of the family to
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
to see they weren't really alone in this when he would drive in the area and see that other families had the signs that said justice for Dee. There was a lot of pressure to get some kind of justice for Dee.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
But, you know, just charging someone just means you get a preliminary hearing. Doesn't mean you necessarily get to go to trial. So they really need as much evidence as possible. But there's no evidence of a crime or evidence of a crime scene. No blood anywhere. So this is a tough one.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
Well, there was some evidence presented at this preliminary hearing that there might have been domestic abuse. Apparently, Dee had a massage therapist who testified that there were bruises on her body. But let's keep in mind that she worked on a farm and she ran a trucking business once.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
When Dee's masseuse was cross-examined, of course, at that hearing, she admitted that she didn't witness anything that Dee had told her and that she didn't document that anywhere and that she didn't call police.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The “No Body” Case of Dee Warner
Right. The judge has to make the decision whether there is enough evidence to indicate that the defendant, the person who is charged, was involved with the disappearance and murder. But it is not a murder trial. Right.