It’s the bane of so many murderers. It would seem a given. What better way to cover up evidence of a crime than with a fire? What better way to dispose of a body than to burn it? Folks who watch shows like FORENSIC FILES (No fake CSI-type shows for me! I dig on the real deal! Documentaries are the way to go!) know better, but your average criminal? Probably not. The human body is over 70% water, see. That’s why human bodies don’t burn all that well. You can scorch the outside easily enough, but to fully consume a corpse requires a LOT of heat, way more than you can generate with your run-of-the-mill fire. How, then, did they do it back in the Stone Age? They didn’t have crematoriums back then. All they had was wood. We’re talking over a thousand degrees, here. That’s a whole lotta heat.
Scientists performed an experiment cremating a pig, using only the materials that would have been available to primitive peoples. It would seem the key is the amount of wood used. Like, a half-ton of wood. Your typical murderer today isn’t likely to spend as much time as is necessary to construct such a large funeral pyre.
Burning the dead, it goes without saying, is one surefire way to guarantee that the deceased don’t reanimate as vampires.