HOULTON, Wis. — DNA analysis has identified a skull found in rural Wisconsin as belonging to a woman who was supposedly cremated over two decades ago.
The skull had been a Jane Doe case ever since a group of Boy Scouts found it in a plastic bag while walking through the woods in Houlton in October 2002.
The nonprofit DNA Doe Project has identified her as 92-year-old Alyce Catharina Peterson. She had died in the hospital of natural causes in St. Paul, Minnesota 15 months before her skull was found.
Peterson’s family told authorities her body had been cremated at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Maplewood, Minnesota.
“This is the first time that I have seen a Doe identified as someone who had a death certificate and who was supposedly cremated,” case manager, Eric Hendershott said in a press release. “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.”
The St. Croix County Sheriff’s Office brought the case to the DNA Doe Project in 2021, which generated a DNA profile with Swedish ancestry that didn’t match original forensic examination. They found a DNA match with a woman living in Stockholm.
Researchers then found a great-great-granduncle of the DNA match who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1890s and identified one of his children as Alyce Catharina Philen, who changed her last name to Peterson after marriage. They asked if one of Peterson’s living nieces would be willing to take a DNA test and confirmed an aunt/niece relationship.
Authorities are still investigating why the skull ended up in the woods.
