Bestial Quotes

“The wayward morality of the country’s “flaming youth” was blamed, at least in part, on their easy access to enclosed automobiles, which one outraged critic described as “bordellos on wheels.”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“In America, the advent of the modern serial killer coincided absolutely with the coming of the automobile.”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“When Roy Armstrong and Joe Young drove into Wakopa twenty minutes later—having finally extricated their car from the mud—they saw a crowd gathered outside Morgan’s general store. Still dreaming of splitting the reward down the middle, the two men could feel their hearts sink”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“fast. When Roy Armstrong and Joe Young drove into Wakopa twenty minutes later—having finally extricated their car from the mud—they saw a crowd gathered outside Morgan’s general store. Still dreaming of splitting the reward down the middle, the two men could feel their hearts sink”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“By the mid-1920s, psychoanalysis had become all the rage among urban sophisticates. After diverting themselves with humorist Robert Benchley’s “All Aboard for Dementia Praecox!”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“At forty-eight, she was still a strikingly handsome woman with thick, dark hair, almond eyes, a soft, full-lipped mouth,”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“Had the aging widow been murdered by a jewel thief or by the strangler who had been prowling the Pacific Coast for months, preying on unwary landladies?”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“And there was something else about him that quickly became evident, a raw emotional neediness that brought out powerfully maternal feelings in the elderly woman. Something about the nearly sixty-year-old Mary Martin”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“On Monday, November 29, nineteen-year-old Eugenia Dennis, billed as the “Amazing Girl Psychic,” arrived from Kansas for a week-long engagement at Seattle’s Coliseum Theatre. Miss Dennis’ telepathic powers had brought her international renown. No less a celebrity than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had proclaimed her “the eighth wonder of the world.”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“Parsimonious by nature, the “aged spinster” (as the newspapers would soon be describing her)”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“side. In return, the kaiser’s government would reward its new ally not only with “generous financial support” but with the reacquisition of Mexico’s “conquered” territories—Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—once the United States suffered its inevitable defeat.”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“a raw emotional neediness that brought out powerfully maternal feelings in the elderly woman. Something about the nearly sixty-year-old Mary Martin”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“Earle was the single exception to this rule, the only other adult she seemed fully at ease with. Of course, having just turned twenty-two, he was a child by comparison to the aged Mary.”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“with the reacquisition of Mexico’s “conquered” territories—Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—once the United States suffered its inevitable defeat.”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

“Though his formal education had ended after seventh grade, he grew up to be a voracious consumer of dime detective novels, tabloid newspapers, and the tracts of various occult and pseudoscientific beliefs—phrenology, astronomy, palmistry, spiritualism.”
― Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster