Or perhaps he said "no body, no crime" because Natalee had been shipped elsewhere. I remain intrigued that the father, relatively sophisticated in things legal, very early on decided that his son's best defense was to stonewall, a strategy that would put the son into a hole if the body ever turned up by making it difficult to then put forward any of a number of innocent, or at least relatively less culpable, explanations for the death. I find it difficult to believe that that the father had time to be involved in corpse disposal, or that he would have been that convinced that his son had done so effectively.
The father's involvement intersts me too. I have not discounted that Natalee could have been shipped elsewhere. But I think Daddy VDS is a primary key to solving this crime.