One Trick Penny

With all the movies, books, and TV shows about it, you'd think that someone would have come up with a way to carry out such a dirty deed. But what if there was a place where it didn't matter if you got caught, where you could commit crimes with impunity d and no amount of DNA evidence or eyewitness testimony could be used against you. I'm not speculating about some magical fantasy land. There is a real, actual place that exists.

Bounded in eighteen seventy two, It's visited by almost four million people a year and spans over thirty four hundred square miles, an area that sprawls across three states. If you're a fan of the outdoors, you probably dreamed of going there your entire life. Yellow Stone National Park. It was the first national park established in the United States, and it sits upon a massive volcano several dozen miles wide.

It's also home to more than five hundred active geysers, including the famous Old Faithful, which shoots over four thousand gallons of boiling water more than one hundred forty feet into the air. But there's one other feature of yellow Stone that deserves mentioned. It doesn't get a whole lot

of press, and for good reason. It's a relative of the small parcel of land where visitors dare not dread, a strange fifty square mile area that crossed over Idaho's border where hapless visitors can become victims if they're not careful. Back in two thousand five, a law professor named Brian Coult published an athlete titled paper The Perfect Crime, all

about this part of the park. Within the paper, cult proposed a theory that if someone with keen constitutional knowledge used it in tandem with an obscure statute, they could commit crimes without fear of arrest or prosecution. He didn't mean to give aspiring serial killers a place to carry out their deeds. He just wanted to alert lawmakers to the glaring legal loophole in one of the country's most beloved vacation spots. Cults had found the one place in

the country where someone could get away with murder. It works like this, All legal problems that occur within Yellowstone National Park are handled by the district Court, which resides solely in Wyoming. Even though there are some branches of the park in Idaho and Montana, Yellowstone technically only exists within the state of Wyoming. Therefore, if you were arrested on the Idaho side of the park for murder, you would need to be tried back in Wyoming. But here's

where things get tricky. According to the sixth Amendment of the U. S Constitution, your trial needs to be held where you originally committed the crime. So back to Idaho you go. Only no one lives in that district. There are no roads and no inhabitants, well, no human inhabitants. Yellowstone National Park is federal land, so no one is allowed to legally reside there either. That makes this so called dead zone a gray area where the courts are concerned.

And I'm pretty sure they won't allow a bear to serve on a jury. Cult didn't hold back in his paper, clearly calling out Congress for dropping the ball and how they had gone about forming state borders, something they've done

dozens of times four. He also made a clear point that anyone who used their constitutional rights to avoid prison could still be sued by a victims family, but if that didn't work, the authorities could always take the offender on a one way trip to a little corner of Yellowstone, because, just like Las Vegas, what happens there stays there. John Trickett had no intention of sitting out the Great War, not while his two older brothers were out there fighting

for queen and country. He was built for it too. He was tall, stocky, and he loved horses. A gentle giant, some might have called him. He also looked so much older than he was, which was probably why no one questioned him when he enlisted. He left his home in Lincolnshire, England, to follow in the footsteps of his brothers who had been shipped out earlier. Along with his clothes and toiletries, John packed important things to remind him of home when

he was on the battlefield. One of those items was a penny from eighteen eighty nine. On one side, it featured a bust of Queen Victoria. On the other the figure of Britannia seated upon a rock with a shield to her right and a trident in her left hand. It wasn't special outside of John's sentimental longing for the simple things back in Lincolnshire. Sadly, before the war ended in nineteen eighteen, John's brothers had been killed in battle,

leaving him the only trick it left. He came home at the end of the war, having left a piece of himself back on the Western Front, where he'd been stationed. He was now deaf in one ear and had trouble with his left hand. However, it didn't take him long to settle in at home and build a new life for himself. John took up a job as a postmaster and a switchboard operator. He fell in love with a girl named Clementine, and the two got married. They had

eight children together. Grandchildren eventually followed, but it's not known whether John got to spend much time with them, as he passed away in nineteen sixty two when he was only sixty three years old. It held on to almost all of his belongings from the war, including his medals, a pocket watch, some photographs, and the penny he had kept tucked in his breast pocket under his uniform. When his grandchildren discovered his collection of memorabilia, however, it wasn't

the medals or the photographs that capture their imagination. It was that coin. There was something about it. A part of Queen Victoria's face seemed to rise up from underneath. When John's granddaughter Maureen inspected the other side, she saw why the late Queen's nose had exploded outward. The penny had been hit by a bullet. On the other side, right beside Britannia, Maureen and her siblings saw the round

dvot where a bullet had been stopped. They ran their fingers over the attempted whole and suddenly had a visual representation of the stories they've been told so many years ago, how their grandfather had clashed with the German soldier who had tried to shoot him in the chest but instead hit the penny, which deflected the bullet upward and through John's left ear. It had deafened him for the rest of his life and caused permanent nerve damage, which is

why he had trouble with his left hand. John had been one of many soldiers who had packed objects in their pockets. Doing so was a common practice as a way to prevent bullets from getting through. This was a time before kevlar vests. After all. It just so happened that on that day, at that time, that particular German soldier had aimed and fired at the exact spot where

John's penny happened to be hiding. It's hard to blame John for being worried about what awaited him on the front lines, and no one can fault him for how he handled it by holding on to a small memento that reminded him of home. It was a good idea for many reasons. If it hadn't been for that little metal disc, after all, Maureen and her siblings might not be here today. Looking back, he could have kept that coin anywhere, his pants, his rucksack, even in his hat.

But no, John placed his favorite coin in his breast pocket, close to the heart that was full of so much emotion about the war. He had planned ahead, and those plans, as they say, we're right on the money. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how

Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com and it. Until next time, stay curious.