The chilling truth about Yellowstone’s ‘Zone of Death’: the perfect crime scene?

While Yellowstone National Park might be one of the most recognisable and trekked locations across the entire 50 states, the ‘Zone of Death’ is one of the least visited in the world.

Rangers warn those who travel to the park that some areas are not for beginners, with the rugged landscape, grizzly animals and chilling natural phenomena simply nightmare-inducing. And on top of that, a legal loophole means that here, where nobody dare go, you can literally get away with murder...

What is the Yellowstone ‘zone of death’?

It’s 50-square miles of land that has just one road in and out, and it’s curious geography means that it is a legal loophole.

What is important when trying to understand first of all is that if you commit a crime in the United States, you can be prosecuted either by the State or by the Federal Government.

Tom Scott explains in his fascinating video that when carving up the US, Congress gave all of Yellowstone to the Federal District of Wyoming, despite some small areas of the park actually leaking across the Idaho and Montana state borders.

When you add to this the fact that only Federal Government can prosecute in Yellowstone, it means that the 50-square miles of Idaho’s part of the park is a legal deadzone. You can stand in the State of Idaho but be in the Federal District of Wyoming.

The constitution states that upon being trialled for a crime, the jury must be made up of people who live in both the same state and district as the crime committed - but nobody lives in the Idaho overlap of Yellowstone.

There can be no jury.

Just to be clear: crime is not legal in the ‘zone of death’, but compiling a jury may be tricky.

There was one case of a man who shot an elk, and went to trial. The judge, in that case, did bend the rules to prosecute the offender, but the guilty plea and strong legal advice on not running (metaphorically) the Zone of Death did see his sentence heavily reduced.

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Professor Brian Kalt explains in the video that while no reports of serious crimes here exist and nobody has, as of yet, dared to test the water, prison sentences have been avoided on technicalities in the past, so who knows?

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