To brace their readers, the zone leaders sometimes prefaced their documents with warnings. “What I am about to relate is anything but a pleasant story; in fact, it is so very unpleasant that I cannot recommend anyone without a strong stomach to read it,” Fitch wrote in his diary before publication. “For it is a story of such crime and horror as to be almost unbelievable, the story of the depredations of a horde of degraded criminals of incredible bestiality, on a peaceful, kindly, law-abiding people. . . . I believe it has no parallel in modern history.”
