Prosecutors traced the path from a Zeeland Township couch to an Interstate 196 call, a Chicago flight and a confession in Las Vegas.
GRAND HAVEN, Mich. — The road out of Ottawa County became a key part of the murder case against Randall Alan Grinwis, who was sentenced in March after prosecutors said he killed his girlfriend on New Year’s Day 2024, stole cash and fled to Las Vegas before confessing.
By the time Grinwis stood for sentencing, the prosecution’s story was no longer limited to the minutes inside the home he shared with Donna Hyma. It included the aftermath: a delayed 911 call from another county, a cellphone thrown from a moving vehicle, a casino stop in Indiana, a flight from Chicago and a confession two weeks later in Nevada. That sequence helped prosecutors argue that Grinwis was not acting in blind panic alone, but taking step after step after killing Hyma, 63, during an argument over the couple’s living arrangements.
Investigators said the violence began Jan. 1, 2024, in the couple’s manufactured home on Patti Place in Zeeland Township. Grinwis later told police he had been drinking with Hyma when the two argued. In audio played for jurors, he said, “She was saying some really crazy s— and I’m telling on myself right now and I snapped.” He described putting his right forearm across Hyma’s neck and pushing down while he stood over her and she sat on the couch. He said he checked for a pulse when it was over. Deputies did not find her until a welfare check later that night. A later autopsy concluded she died of asphyxiation, overturning an initial belief that she may have died of natural causes and turning the case into a homicide investigation.
The hours after Hyma’s death became some of the most detailed and damaging evidence at trial. Prosecutors said Grinwis withdrew or took $1,800 meant for Hyma’s brother, who was away in rehabilitation after surgery and had asked that the money be put in a lockbox. Bank records and testimony tied the cash to the home that day, and police later said the box was found in the back of Grinwis’ vehicle. Senior Assistant Prosecutor Ben Medema told jurors that Grinwis drove away, then called 911 from Interstate 196 in Van Buren County about 90 minutes after Hyma died to ask for a welfare check. After hanging up, prosecutors said, he tossed his phone out the window because he feared being traced. He then stopped at a casino in Michigan City, Indiana, drove on to Chicago and boarded a flight out of O’Hare International Airport.
Las Vegas did not end the case immediately, but it changed its shape. On Jan. 15, 2024, Grinwis walked into a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department kiosk and told a detective he had killed Hyma. He said guilt had pushed him to come forward. “My conscience brought me here,” he said, according to trial testimony. Yet the confession produced an odd pause in the case: because Ottawa County authorities could not be reached right away, he was released and told to follow up, according to testimony summarized during trial coverage. Investigators later reconnected with Las Vegas authorities, obtained a warrant and returned west on Feb. 20 to arrest him. During that second interview, detectives said, Grinwis confessed again and said he had first planned to keep running. Those statements gave jurors both the admission and the timeline.
When the case finally reached an Ottawa County jury in February 2026, the defense faced recordings, travel records, the medical examiner’s findings and Grinwis’ own words. The jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting him of second-degree murder and larceny. The murder conviction carried the possibility of life in prison, though prosecutors and defense lawyers had agreed by the end of trial that jurors would not be asked to consider first-degree murder. That left second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter or acquittal on the homicide count. Judge Karen Miedema later sentenced Grinwis to 32 1/2 to 90 years, saying the killing was avoidable and that he had chosen an “evil option.”
The emotional center of the sentencing hearing, though, was not the interstate route or the confession tape. It was the family’s account of what Hyma’s death did to the people who knew her best. Her daughter, Lisa Vanderyacht, told the court that she had trusted Grinwis with her mother’s life. She said the family did not just lose Hyma that day; they also lost the person they thought Grinwis was after years of knowing him. Prosecutors echoed that sense of betrayal, arguing that the defendant’s repeated claim that he snapped did not match the physical act or the deliberate choices that followed. In that telling, the miles between Zeeland Township and Las Vegas did not create distance from the crime. They became part of it.
The case is now closed at the trial-court level. The sentence entered March 30 leaves Grinwis facing decades in prison, and the chain of events that began in a small Michigan home remains preserved in the record as both a killing and a failed attempt to outrun it.
Author note: Last updated April 19, 2026.