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More than two decades after a group of Boy Scouts stumbled upon a skull while hiking near Houlton, Wis. a group that specializes in forensic genealogy identified the remains as those of a Stillwater woman who died of natural causes in 2001 and was reported to have been cremated.
The St. Croix County Sheriff’s Office contacted the DNA Doe Project in 2021, and the nonprofit soon created a genetic profile of the woman, which revealed that she was of Swedish ancestry. Early in the investigation, a forensic examination mistakenly determined that the remains were from a person of Asian or Native American heritage.
Using DNA databases, forensic genealogists sketched out the mystery woman’s family tree, and found a distant relative in Stockholm, whose great great granduncle emigrated to the United States in the 1890s. The man married in 1902, and fathered seven children, some of whom settled in Stillwater.
The team identified the remains as belonging to Alyce Catharina Peterson, after the St. Croix County Sheriff’s Office contacted her niece, who agreed to a DNA test.
But putting a name to the remains raised more questions. In a statement on the DNA Doe Project’s website, case manager Eric Hendershott said that further investigation determined that Peterson had died of natural causes in 2001 and records showed that her body was cremated.
“This is the first time that I have seen a Doe identified as someone who had a death certificate and who was supposedly cremated,” Hendershott said in the statement. “The fact that Alyce’s skull ended up where it did was a real shock, but I’m glad that the team was able to identify her and reunite her with her family.”
In a search warrant for cremation records that Maplewood Police Detective Ashley Bergeron requested on Aug. 6, Peterson had been transported to Regions Hospital in St. Paul for a medical emergency. She died there on July 23, 2001 from an aortic aneurysm.
“Through interviewing next-of-kin and a family friend,” Bergeron writes, “the St. Croix County Sheriff's Office determined Peterson had been cremated at the Forest Lawn Cemetery” in Maplewood two days after her death.
“Peterson's next of kin did receive cremated remains; however, it has not been confirmed that those remains are Peterson,” Bergeron adds.
According to the warrant, a medical examiner and a forensic anthropologist determined that Peterson’s skull was severed from her body after her death, “likely with a hand saw tool.”
Bergeron writes that she’s investigating whether cemetery employees severed Peterson’s skull and if it occurred on cemetery property.
MPR News left an email message with cemetery staff on Friday.
In October 2002, Boy Scouts hiking at the Fred C. Andersen Scout Camp near the St. Croix River found a trash back in a ravine several hundred yards from a road. Inside was a human skull that was “in the late stages of decomposition,” according to Bergeron’s warrant. The St. Croix County Sheriff’s Office made several attempts to identify the skull over the ensuing decades before contacting the DNA Doe Project.
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