A 51-year-old Lee County man was arrested Thursday and charged with killing his live-in girlfriend, whose skeletal remains were discovered in remote Golden Gate Estates in 2015.
Michael J. Zutten of Cape Coral is charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of Heather Lee Grimshaw, 45, of East Naples.
Hikers discovered Grimshaw’s remains in the Picayune Strand State Forest on Aug. 29, 2015. Detectives believe the remains had been in place for at least four days.
The remains were identified as Grimshaw in December 2015, thanks to a fingerprint match.
The Collier County Medical Examiner’s Office conducted an autopsy and in April 2016 ruled the manner of death as homicide. A cause of death was undetermined.
Grimshaw was reported missing on Nov. 18, after Crime Stoppers of Southwest Florida received an anonymous tip. Collier County Sheriff’s Office detectives entered Grimshaw into state and national missing person databases The investigation continued, with detectives pursuing bank and phone records and following other potential leads.
Detectives say that Grimshaw and Zutten were living together as boyfriend and girlfriend in East Naples at the time of her disappearance, though he never reported her missing.
Detectives tied Zutten to the crime partly based on statements he made about Grimshaw’s disappearance that weren’t corroborated by the evidence obtained during the nearly three-year investigation.
“There was an enormous amount of work that went into this case to bring it to a successful conclusion,” said Sgt. Mark Williamson of the CCSO Special Crimes Bureau, which handled the investigation. “We never stopped working this case.”
A warrant for Zutten’s arrest was issued Thursday. Zutten was sitting at the bar at The Pub, 1232 N. Tamiami Trail in North Fort Myers, around 3:45 p.m. when members of the U.S. Marshals Service Task force, along with deputies from CCSO and the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, approached him and placed him under arrest. Zutten agreed to be transferred to Collier County, where the warrant originated.
Tammy Domek, a patron at The Pub, said she was shocked to learn that Zutten was a murder suspect.
"When I found out about it, it blew my mind," Domek said Friday. "He was a very nice man, never bothered anybody. He'd buy people a beer. He was a nice guy, always."
Zutten was booked into the Naples Jail Center. He made his first court appearance Friday at 2 p.m. The prosecutor asked for his bond to be set $1 million, but Judge Mike Carr denied that and set bond at $250,000.
