Ex-Minnesota funeral director decapitated body of woman whose skull found in WI woods, charges say

A former Minnesota funeral director has been charged with the post-death decapitation of a woman whose skull was found by Boy Scouts in western Wisconsin woods nearly a quarter-century ago.

Benjamin Carl Hanson, 57, of Bayport was charged Thursday in St. Croix County Circuit Court with two felonies — hiding a corpse and felony theft — in connection with the handling of the body of Alice Catharina Peterson, who was living in Stillwater when she died in 2001 at age 92.

Hanson, who has since retired as a funeral director, was booked into jail Wednesday, posted bond and was released Thursday ahead of a Feb. 26 court appearance.

Defense attorney Eric Thole said Friday that “we’re talking about an alleged incident that happened 24 years ago. I’ll need time to review everything [before commenting].”

Two decades of various DNA and genetic testing led investigators this summer to confirm the skull belonged to Peterson.

While law enforcement has charged the man they say is responsible for the decapitation, there remains uncertainty about whether the ashes turned over to Peterson’s survivors were indeed hers.

There remain “a number of unanswered questions, to include whose remains went where,” St. Croix County Sheriff Scott Knudson told the Star Tribune. “[It’s a] very sad story for the family.”

The Sheriff’s Office took the case to the nonprofit DNA Doe Project in 2021 in hopes of unraveling the long-running mystery. The California-based organization narrowed her ancestry to Swedish. From there, the DNA Doe Project followed the family tree until they came up with Peterson, who was born Alyce Philen but later changed her name. The project contacted a niece, whose DNA was a major factor in confirming the skull’s identity.

The criminal complaint and related court filings lay out the DNA sleuthing as well as how investigators zeroed in on Hanson as the suspect. The filings do not reveal a motive for Peterson’s skull being removed or how it ended up where it was found.

According to the court records:

In October 2002, hikers from the Andersen Scout Camp in Houlton, Wis., found a trash bag in a wooded ravine several hundred yards from the road. Inside was a human skull “in the late stages of decomposition,” the filing read. The bag and skull were turned over to the St. Croix Sheriff’s Office.

Medical professionals, a medical examiner and a forensic anthropologist examined the skull and concluded that it was severed from the body at the base of the neck, likely with a hand saw.

With arrangements made by Simonet Funeral Home in Stillwater, Peterson was cremated at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Maplewood two days later. Her ashes were turned over to a woman who was nannied as a child by Peterson and spread on a family farm.

The woman, executor of Peterson’s family trust, “believed all of [the body] would be cremated per her request,” the complaint read. “She did not give anyone permission to remover any of [Peterson’s] body parts.”

However, while her family received cremated remains, “it has not been confirmed that those remains are Peterson,” according to a search warrant affidavit filed by Maplewood police on Aug. 6, 2025, in Ramsey County District Court that cleared the way for investigators to collect records from Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Investigators determined the funeral home had two employees around the time of Peterson’s death. One of them was Hanson, its licensed funeral director. Funeral home prep rooms, where bodies are prepared for viewing before burial or cremation, can only be accessed by licensed funeral directors.

The other employee told police that Hanson “went off the deep end” in the summer of 2001 and was admitted to Regions Hospital.