A skull inside of a plastic bag was found in a ravine in 2002 at a Boy Scout camp in western Wisconsin and just this year was found to be of a woman who was reportedly cremated in a funeral home after dying at age 92. The DNA Doe Project is responsible for this identification. The skull was found to belong to Alyce Peterson who died in 2001.
There was just an arrest made of a former employee of the funeral home. According to the article he had been stealing from his workplace by using the company card to pay his own expensive and had been hospitalized due to a mental health crisis. Interestingly, his wife is the mayor of the small eastern Minnesota town that they live in (Bayport, Minnesota.) His wife put out a statement that this occurred 20 years ago and she is standing by her husband.
Very strange and interesting case and hopefully more details will come to light soon on how exactly this fiasco happened. Hopefully the family of this woman can find peace.
so he was stealing from the company, but what was he doing with the bodies?
I hope this isn't another case where a crematorium wasn't actually burning the bodies.
We’ve got this going on in my town right now..haven’t set a trial date yet
What do you mean....
Some morgues have been caught "cutting costs" of cremation by disposing of bodies in other ways
"Discovery of 189 decaying bodies in Colorado funeral home suggests families received fake ashes", 2023
Edited for formatting
How much money could that possibly save, really?
Someone outlined this better than I can a few years ago, but basically what happens is that the owners skim off money once, and it gets them into a vicious cycle. They have a body, they have the money from that person's family, they spend it instead of using it to bury or cremate the body. They wait till the next person dies and use that person's money to deal with the first body. But now they have a second body and no money left. So they need a third person to die to cover those costs...and then if they skim again, they get further into the hole. It's like a Ponzi scheme of dead people.
You outlined that perfectly!
This makes me think of those cases where they discovered perfectly sliced(4inch by 4 inch) cubes of people in the sewers of Detroit.
Oh, delightful.
A rabbit hole to enter lol
But in all seriousness, that's horrific
Please link any good articles you find as I'm also curious
Remains in Drain Pipe Raise Fears About Michigan Serial Killer
That's crazy, being that cremation is supposed to be the "cheap option" when families can't afford to have them buried.
I think the expensive parts of burial, as opposed to cremation, are the cost of the burial plot (you're effectively buying a small piece of real estate that you can't ever sell) and, I suspect, the cost of the casket. If your loved one is cremated, the casket can be put aside and "sold" over and over again.
The energy cost of a cremation is only about $40, I think. There is a very small saving to be made by stockpiling bodies and then hiding them somewhere.
I think it's often less a money issue than a capacity issue. It's like that I Love Lucy clip at the candy factory except with dead people. The energy cost is relatively small but getting a whole new furnace is expensive.
You overbook your crematorium, bodies have to sit around waiting to be cremated, you don't want to tell the family that grandpa's going to have to sit in the backroom rotting for two weeks because there's a line but you do want their money so you give them some fake ashes and send them away, and then well, you've already lied, you might as well just dump grandpa in the woods and make the line even shorter. And then you realize hey, you can just take everybody's money and dump the bodies, no capacity limits anymore! You can take all the people who other crematoriums send away because they're too busy! It's free money!
And eventually the crematorium needs expensive maintenance and you're like well, we haven't been caught yet, we can just save the money, not do the repairs, and dump *everybody* in the woods.
Listen to the podcast, Noble - it’s not that many episodes, and is about a crematorium that simply stopped cremating people. They stacked bodies everywhere: outbuildings, outside, just all over the place. They gave cement dust and potentially other people’s ashes to families instead of cremains.
It’s a really interesting listen that (kind of) explains how this particular crematorium spun out of control.
That’s what I thought too! I live in western WI and my mom’s been cremated here. I cant imagine how her family feels. I would be so, so shocked, angry, confused.
I don’t understand really
This is my question. She had already passed.. and he stole her head?? What? Why on earth?
I've heard of people selling body parts on the black market before, but it seems odd that it would end up in a ravine.
If he was stealing from the company it’s most likely he was in need of money. I’m assuming selling skulls or other bones may have a decent cash market in some weird circles. Or, he could have been embezzling. If he took the money that would have been used to create the body and then disposed of the body somewhere? Though that seems unlikely as they only found the skull.
i thought maybe her remains had been scattered by the wild before her skull was found and he had either dumped her there to divert the money for her cremation or was covering up a screw up somehow— maybe he gave someone the wrong ashes or was behind schedule and had promised her ashes by a certain date.
But it sounds like the skull was found in a plastic bag, so depending on what that means, it sounds like her head was not attached to her body. Like was it in a sealed ziplock or in a torn up contractor bag that could’ve contained her entire body in one piece?
although i guess a guy who is dumping an old woman’s body in the woods to steal her cremation money or whatever probably wouldn’t draw the line at dismemberment.
edit: some sources say it was “human remains, consisting of a skull” and others say “human remains, including a skull”, but all sources say “found in a black garbage bag” so it sounds like it’s possible that her entire body was in one piece and in that bag at some point.
Black market body part sales. It's a thing, been a thing as far back as Burke and Hare. In fact, Harvard got caught with some employees doing this. Last I saw, one of the involved parties is going to prison .
I’m not condoning stealing….. but using the company credit card for personal expenses isn’t exactly taking skulls. I wonder how the connected the stealing and the skull?
It doesn’t seem like those two elements are related but he is accused of both things.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/former-funeral-home-employee-charged-174800649.html
Just found this article and apparently she has been less than helpful in the investigation. Her name was amongst the paperwork of the deceased at the funeral home for an unknown reason.
I’m very interested to see where this goes.
Thanks for linking the article. The thing that stood out to me was the first thing the former funeral employee’s wife / mayor asks police when they show up at their door is whether she is in trouble.
I’m sorry, but if police showed up at my door the first thing I’d think is that it was either a mistake or some kind of emergency notification. Why? Because I haven’t committed any crimes. She was involved, somehow.
Right, if I opened the door to see cops standing there my first thought would be that something terrible had happened to a close family member.
my horrible anxiety would make me automatically assume I’d done something horrible even though I haven’t, so I can empathize with her there…but literally everything else about her is sketchy and screams insurance fraud
She was def involved
Insurance payout? Stolen jewelry? Stolen gold fillings?
That's sketchy AF
it very well might be too late to prosecute, statute of limitations in Wisconsin for hiding a corpse appears to be 6 years
I live in Wisconsin. Just over a week ago, our governor extended the statute of limitations for hiding a corpse. As of like 9 days ago, charges for hiding a corpse can now be brought within six years of when the crime occurs or within six years of when the victim's remains are found or identified (whichever happens last). This bill was pursued in honor of Starkie Swenson, who was killed in 1983 but his remains weren't found and identified until 2021. His killer was only sentenced to two years in jail back in the 90's. Prosecutors tried to charge the killer with hiding a corpse after Starkie was identified in 2021, but the charges were dismissed due to the statute of limitations at the time. I remember reading about Alyce Peterson being identified earlier this year, I would imagine that the timing with this change in the statute of limitations coincides with St Croix county making an arrest in the Peterson case.
He's being charged in Minnesota. It's where the crematorium is/was, where the perp worked and lived, and where the decedent lived.
No, he’s being charged in St Croix County, Wisconsin:
https://www.wqow.com/news/top-stories/man-charged-with-hiding-a-corpse-decades-after-skull-found-in-st-croix-county/article_aff4d02d-276b-4062-9626-099a515bed48.html
You’re totally right. Ignore me. Not sure why I thought otherwise.
Thats not what the charges are.
literally direct from the subheadline of the article "Charges of hiding a corpse and felony theft have been filed against Benjamin Hanson, who worked as a funeral director during the time the skull was found."
"The husband of the mayor of Bayport has been charged with stealing the skull of a woman before her body was cremated in 2001." Well clearly her body wasn't cremated so who was? Or is the crematorium shonky as well? Whose ashes did the family receive? I have so many questions.
It kind of sounds like they cremated most of her, but not her head.
Oh OK. In the article it refers to "human remains found in garbage bags" so I thought there was more than just her head. But I suppose just a head is still human remains. Wouldn't the crematorium notice the head was missing?
Maybe the person who removed the head is the person doing the cremation?
Yikes. We need a Netflix doco or podcast series on this.
But why 😭
So was he selling the bodies to someone or some company, ? I’m not making the connection between embezzlement and how this woman ended up not being cremated. Do the authorities believe that there are other bodies that were not cremated and this is a serial fraud case?
Probably the latter. There are cheaper ways to dispose of a body than cremation, and once the family’s check clears and they get an urn of generic ash, that’s all margin to an unscrupulous company.
“Zwach made note of a form in Alyce Peterson’s file that included a list of services dated July 23, 2001: “(A family friend) was listed for billing information and the total price listed was $2,755.50,” the complaint states. “Additionally on the form was a note as follows: Hair: Michele Hanson. … It was noted that the spelling of Michele Hanson is how Ben Hanson’s wife spells her name.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/former-funeral-home-employee-charged-174800649.html
WHY would it say “Hair:[Wife’s Name]”? I’m gonna hope that it means that his wife was going to do this woman’s hair for her service before cremation.
Edit: further googling uncovers this “police found a bill to do Peterson’s hair for $2,700.” which her executor says they never asked for. https://www.weau.com/2025/12/18/charges-filed-against-minnesota-man-after-skull-was-found-st-croix-county/?outputType=amp
so that’s both more and less disgusting than it could have been.
I believe the total price was the 2700, including cremation etc
Well then of course his wife stands by him....she was probably involved in whatever....this...is
Per the header I was envisioning the skull being arrested
Alright, time to put the handcuffs on
I know the Hansons personally and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was doing something creepy with the body. I was friends with his son growing up, and my parents knew him since high school. Even as a kid I hated being around him because I knew something was just off. Since this news came out, my mom hasn’t slept because she is so disturbed by this case… if that gives you any indication of what we think he might’ve actually been doing
This is very weird, like how did they trace the skull back to an elderly women that was meant to be cremated it seem inconceivable unless her dna was on a database ? I'm so confused 😕
https://dnadoeproject.org/case/st-croix-county-jane-doe-2002/
Very interesting article about how this came about.
Almost feels like a not the onion case
there was a guy in Florida one time who was selling dead people's false teeth out the back door😔