Remove dom element without knowing its parent?

Is it possible to remove a dom element that has no parent other than the body tag? I know this would be easy with a framework like jquery, but I'm trying to stick to straight javascript.

Here's the code I've found to do it otherwise:

function removeElement(parentDiv, childDiv){
     if (childDiv == parentDiv) {
          alert("The parent div cannot be removed.");
     }
     else if (document.getElementById(childDiv)) {     
          var child = document.getElementById(childDiv);
          var parent = document.getElementById(parentDiv);
          parent.removeChild(child);
     }
     else {
          alert("Child div has already been removed or does not exist.");
          return false;
     }
}   

Thanks!