Nevada is a big place. Just sayin’.
They’ve gotten rid of a couple of bodies like this on “Sons of Anarchy.”
I thought running the cremated remains through a cremulator would take care of the teeth and anything else that wasn’t already ash?
You would think so, but according to Dr. Lee (“Coroner To The Stars”), teeth are incredibly durable.
I am no medical professional, but I think they’d remain conscious for several minutes, in extreme agony.
A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes.
There is a cool Podcast here with Dr Chris Ryan interviewing a mortician, she mentions a place where they used to get rid of bodies back in the day. Interesting listening…
Apparently, it is surprisingly difficult.
The first decision is to destroy or not to destroy.
Destroying - if you can do it with fire or acid or whatever - would be best, because who knows what forensic evidence they can find on a body, if they find it? But destruction requires infrastructure that can be traced, may leave annoying bits of evidence like teeth, medical implants and gallstones.
Not destroying it, but hiding it, is often quicker, but what is hidden can be discovered - maybe years later. This is true in water or earth. Have the best gravesite in the world, and it can be undone by unanticipated development; also, someone could see you digging the hole, or notice the grave subsiding into a hollow. In water, there is the problem of divers, and the risk of fishermen with nets, or dredgers, or simply unpredicatble effects of decomposition.
Even a weighted body can float to the surface if it bloats up with gas. A friend in the Coast Guard talked about finding a weighted body just because of this.
Exactly so. There have been many cases of bodies found in water, even those encased in cement, or in once notable case, in a sleeping bag wrapped with chains. It isn’t a sure-fire method.
I heard a talk by a forensic scientist when I was in law school. He discussed a case in which a man killed his wife, burned her body and rototilled the remains into their garden (he told family and friends that his wife had left him and run away). Police got a warrant and dug up the garden, finding nothing but a tooth fragment, about the size of a matchhead, with an odd notch in it. It turned out the wife was a former Army nurse, and her Army dental records showed she had a very small but distinctive notch in that tooth. The man was convicted of murder, largely on the strength of that tiny tooth fragment.
On the plus side, the tomatoes that year were no doubt awesome. 
My favorite story along these lines was one case in which a body was found in a bog, and neighbours swore it was that of a woman who had gone missing some years earlier. Again, her husband had claimed she had “run off”. Confronted with the evidence, the husband duly confessed - he’d killed his wife and tossed her body in that bog.
Only later it was determined that the body was a mummified, two-thousand-year old body - one of the so-called “bog people” (bogs can, where conditions are right, mummify bodies and preserve them nearly indefinitely). The actual murdered body of the wife in this case was never found!
I have ashes of a loved one. No teeth. Many bones supposedly survive the burning, at least partly. It’s all ground to dust.
When my grandfather died (he had cancer) and was cremated, his cremated bones had green stains over them. We were told that it was an effect of chemotherapy.