Thinking back to CB's comments about being able to make a body "disappear" quickly:
Barmaid Lenta Johlitz, 34, revealed: “Once he was completely freaked out when we were sitting talking with friends about the Madeleine case.
“He wanted us to stop. He cried out, ‘The child is dead now and that’s a good thing’, then he said: ‘You can make a body disappear quickly. Pigs also eat human flesh’.”
SUSPECT Christian B “freaked out” as his staff discussed the Madeleine McCann case — then yelled: “The child is dead… pigs eat human flesh.” The convicted paedo’s cold outburst in 2014 appall…
www.thesun.co.uk
Given how forensically astute CB was, it seems logical that in the event of trying to "disappear" a body he would take certain measures to eradicate the possibility of the body being later discovered and forensically tested.
He mentions pigs in the above account but for that you'd need private access to pigs, and confidence that all the body got cosumed, and that the undigested parts don't get discovered once passed. Acid is another option but again, that's not easy to get hold of. The most practical option is to burn the body to destroy (almost) all forensic traces and then scatter the bone fragments over an area or into water. This is what police suspect Mark Bridger did to April Jones, they found some remnant bone fragments in the fireplace but they believe he probably took the bulk of them and scattered them somewhere familiar to him.
Unless you have furnace conditions (like in a crematorium), it's impossible to reduce a body down to ash, the bones and teeth will eventually break down into fragments but even in a fire kept going for a whole day, you'd still be left with chunks. The main advantage is destroying the DNA and being able to easily dispose of the remnants in manageable sizes such that they become almost impossible to find unless you knew exactly where to look.
Portuguese, German and UK news outlets are all now reporting that they are taking various soil samples away for analysis. Often, soil samples are used to tie a suspect to a location but I struggle to see what use that would be here since there already appears to be other proof that CB frequented this location. Another option would be to tie the sample to something connected to the victim, but again that seems unlikely here since they don't appear to have anything connected to the victim.
So I am wondering if the soil samples are indeed looking for forensic traces using dogs to mark spots of interest and it is perhaps based on the above hypothesis. That they have intel to indicate CB has perhaps cremated the body and scattered the remanants at his remote "little paradise".
