In May 2019, police in the town of Sturgis, Mich., received an anonymous tip that a 35-year-old resident Wade Allen, had killed his girlfriend, Kelly Jean Warner, and hidden her dismembered body in his apartment.

Allen let them in, as seen in a digital exclusive episode of A&E’s Crime in Progress, but claimed that Warner was an hour away in Kalamazoo. Then police spied something unusual: a closed cooler in the living room. Once opened, police made a horrific discovery: dismembered body parts, later identified as Warner.

Initially, Allen claimed Warner’s death was accidental, a result of a fight they’d had. Still, he was arrested and then charged with mutilation and murder. Once in jail, however, Allen spilled the gruesome details of what he’d done to Warner to his cellmates, revealing that he’d cold-bloodedly strangled her to death.

In June of 2023, Allen was sentenced to 39 to 60 years in prison after pleading no contest to second-degree murder and attempted dismemberment of a body, for which he received an additional two to five years.

The Crimes Continue
Allen’s penchant for violence didn’t stop once incarcerated. When one of his cellmates disclosed the details of Allen’s confessions to police, Allen retaliated by sexually assaulting him, adding another 38 months to five years to his sentence for attempted third degree criminal sexual conduct, where force or coercion is used to accomplish sexual penetration.

For reasons that remain unclear, the cellmate—after snitching on Allen and providing the details that led to Allen’s murder conviction—had been re-housed with him. St. Joseph’s County Jail where Allen was housed did not respond to A&E Crime + Investigation’s request for comment.

Hakim Nathaniel Crampton, the government relations liaison for Citizens for Prison Reform, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that, “There are many lapses in security with the Department of Corrections, which highlights the urgent need for Corrections Oversight and accountability. Without legislated oversight, security lapses like in Allen’s case will continue to persist.”

While prisons do try to keep non-violent offenders housed separately from violent offenders, the system remains far from perfect and prisons have increasingly become dangerous environments.

According to the Bureau of Justice, in 2018, more than one in six state prison deaths (17%) were “unnatural,” compared to less than one in 10 (9%) in 2001. (Unnatural deaths may include suicide, homicide and drug or alcohol intoxication.) In 2018 alone, state prisons recorded a record-high 120 deaths.

Due to a long, drawn-out process of appeals, Allen was kept in county jail for an exceptionally long period; 1,470 days, according to St. Joseph County Prosecuting Attorney Deborah Davis. It was during that time when Allen assaulted his cellmate.

“When you get sentenced on a felony, there’s a requirement in Michigan that a pre-sentencing investigation report be completed,” Davis explains to A&E Crime + Investigation. “And part of that includes scoring the person on a scale: Are they more likely to offend? Do they have a social network? That’s how the Department of Corrections chooses where to house them.”

But that system wasn’t in place at the time when Allen was initially jailed, Davis reports, adding that much has improved since: “There are camera systems, walk-through security to lay eyes on people and a behavioral classification system to ensure non-violent offenders are kept away from violent offenders.”

Still, she adds that, “It’s impossible to completely negate any chances of a violent offender to re-offend, even if you want to segregate people completely by themselves, in a small rural jail, there’s not always the space to do that.”

Crampton also points out that isolation can come with its own drawbacks. “Allowing people convicted of violent offenses to be warehoused for years creates a volatile environment,” he says, recommending that, “people convicted of the most serious charges should be prioritized first for treatment and program services upon entry.”

Davis says that “in a perfect world,” Allen would have had access to “mental health therapies and counseling” as soon as he got to jail. She adds that she would like incarcerated people to “have the ability to get treatment sooner rather than later” since they have “to live and be around not only other incarcerated prisoners, but also the workers that are there—the correctional officers, the staff, etc.”

While various factors such as inhumane living conditions can contribute towards an offender acting up in prison, Davis says access to a support system cannot be underestimated: “Those violent offenders that don’t have a human support group in place—no parent or child or friend coming to see them, someone who keeps them looking forward to things—that can lead to trouble.”

‘No Remorse, No Empathy’
Allen has never publicly shown remorse for his actions. A 2024 episode of the true-crime podcast REAL reported that even Allen’s cellmates were scared of him, with one always staying awake at night to keep an eye on him. California-based forensic psychologist Lisa Dobson, who has not assessed Allen personally, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that he presents as a classic sexual psychopath: “Somebody who has no remorse, no empathy and will only be corrected by consequences, which is usually containment. He’s probably going to be in isolation forever.”

As opposed to a psychotic individual, who may be delusional or paranoid but doesn’t necessarily pose a threat to people, Dobson says that, “Psychopaths are much more dangerous. They get stimulated by harming or manipulating people.”

Dobson believes that he may have a small amygdala—the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions—which could explain the extreme actions he required for stimulation. She points out that cutting up Warner’s body, “dismembering her, strangling her” relates to a “very high rate of psychopathy.”

Future developments in prison security include more expansive use of AI to predict potential security threats, advanced surveillance technologies in the form of thermal imaging and motion sensors and data analytics that can give correctional officers insight into an inmate’s behavior.

But prisons can only do so much; there’s also the “X factor” of prisoner accountability, which can often be lacking. “You can do all the counseling in the world, for someone like Wade Allen, but if he doesn’t buy into it, he isn’t genuinely trying to better himself,” Davis says. “You can’t medicate a personality disorder out of someone. To truly change the criminal way they’re thinking, they have to want to make that change.”