Ex-funeral home director gets jail time for beheading corpse, discarding skull

A decades-old human skull mystery has been put to rest with the sentencing of a Twin Cities funeral director who decapitated a woman's dead body and left her head in the woods of western Wisconsin.Benjamin Carl Hanson, 57, of Bayport, received a 90-day jail sentence Tuesday after pleading guilty to a charge of hiding a corpse with the intent to conceal a crime. He also was ordered to serve four years of probation, participate in mental health services, and pay almost $15,000 in restitution.Hanson admitted to using a handsaw to cut off the head of Alyce Catharina Peterson, 92, of Stillwater, who died of natural causes, before taking her body to be cremated when he worked at Simonet Funeral Home in Oak Park Heights in 2001.Hanson said he later tried to bury Peterson's head in a Stillwater cemetery but eventually dug it up and threw it over a ravine, where he didn't think anyone would find it.The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that Hanson read a statement in court Tuesday, saying he was mentally ill at the time, struggled with “dark and intrusive thoughts” while working at the funeral home, and remains "mortified" at what he did. St. Croix County Sheriff's Office A group of Boy Scouts discovered the skull in a garbage bag while hiking in western Wisconsin in 2002.For years, the case remained a mystery to both the community and detectives, with DNA tests failing to identify the person to whom the skull belonged.A partnership with the DNA Doe Project finally led to the skull being identified as Peterson's more than two decades later.Hanson was charged in 2025 after he was determined to have been the sole person responsible for preparing the woman's body while it was in the funeral home’s custody.