There was a big to do about this kind of thing in Europe a few years back. It seems there are organizations who kidnap children and do terrible things with and to them and afterwards they dispose of the bodies. One of the disposal methods used was to dissolve the poor little things in acid. One of the newspapers here in Germany had some research done, and it seems that they came to the conclusion that some Draino type stuff worked best. They didn’t say how much you needed and, if I remember correctly, the manufacturer changed the formulation not long afterwards. Of course, the paper was one of the flaky boulevard press things, so I wouldn’t even try to guess how much truth and how much sensationalism was involved.
Forensic pathologist Keith Simpson’s memoirs, Forty Years of Murder, go into the Haigh case in some detail. The identification of Mrs. Durand-Deacon depended on some fragments of bone which were imperfectly dissolved, plus some plastic debris (including, IIRC, a denture) and a gallstone. Simpson reckoned that Haigh had been too hasty in the disposal, and that, if he’d left the body for longer, there might not have been enough traces left to make a convincing identification. Of course, that’s not reckoning in the circumstantial evidence. Corpus delicti, by the by, translates (fairly) literally as “the body of the offense”, or, more loosely, as the “body of evidence” concerning a crime. Robertson Davies commented that the Haigh case constituted “Evidence, surely, of the folly of neglecting a classical education.”
I’ve heard a value of “two carboys” of hydrochloric acid as being enough to dissolve an average human body; I assume it’s acid of a commercially-available strength, but I don’t know what size of carboy is involved (5 gallons seems common, but it may be US gallons (=19 litres) or UK gallons(=23 litres)). I hope it’s superfluous to add that I have no practical experience in this area…
Well, I find the best thing to do is cut off the head and fingers, dispose of the fingers separately, and dump the head and body a mile or two apart in the Jersey swamps, well away from Route 3.
. . . Umm, so I’ve been, ummm, told . . .
Eve, shouldn’t you be pulling out all the teeth, too? They’re pretty long-lasting, even if you leave the head to scavengers, and you can learn a lot from dental records.