The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

by Sarah Weinman

Days passed with false sightings and near-arrests, until a Chicago-postmarked letter delivered to Arizona governor B. B. Moeur’s residence described where June was being held. A search in the Tucson desert turned up a metal box buried three feet underground. June, chained, malnourished, and covered in ant bites, was found alive inside.

Gahhhhh

As June’s public silence stretched, so did the investigation. Leads proved false, no arrests were made, a grand jury failed to indict anyone, and the FBI eventually gave up, privately agreeing with the grand jury’s conclusion of “alleged kidnapping.” June stayed in Tucson, where she married and had children and grandchildren. By the time she died in 2014, in such obscurity that it took the press three years to connect her to her childhood ordeal, authorities still had no proper answer about who kidnapped her.

Smart, Dugard, and Colleen Stan—the “Girl in the Box” under her tormentors’ sway for seven years—left their abductors’ homes, shopped at supermarkets, and even traveled (Stan visited her parents while she was a captive) without asking anyone for help. They survived by adjusting their mental maps so that brutality could be endured, but never entirely accepted as normal.

What remains of her time on the road with Frank La Salle are bits and pieces cobbled together from court documents and corroborated by city records. Absence is as telling as substance.

La Salle needed to find work right away. The Belvedere Hotel, a place so swanky that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson stayed there, may have hired him. It was less than a mile’s walk from West Franklin Street. It would explain why La Salle listed a hotel bellman named Anthony Janney as a reference in later court documents.

in Baltimore, something changed in their relationship. Publicly, they kept up the pose of father and daughter. In private, the power imbalance between them grew more noxious.

La Salle couldn’t control her every thought and move while she was at school, true. But by this point he’d broken her down enough, between the threats and the rapes, and the apologies and the treats, that he must have felt a measure of confidence that Sally would do exactly what he said, at all times.

I DON’T KNOW WHY La Salle chose to enroll Sally in Catholic schools, both in Baltimore and elsewhere. No one remembered him being a churchgoer or having any religious leanings.

One possible reason is that a parochial school did not have to conform to the same rules and regulations as public schools. Catholic institutions were less likely to ask questions of a new student arriving later in the school year, under a false name, with dubious documentation at best.

But I suspect La Salle gravitated toward Catholic institutions because they were a good place to hide in plain sight.

Perhaps La Salle saw parochial schools for what they were: a place for complicity and enabling to flourish.

A great many forces underlay Camden’s eventual negative transformation. But Sally Horner’s abduction wasn’t the spark. Rather, the morning of September 6, 1949, seems to me like the inflection point between progress and backlash, hope and despair, promise and decline.

Then he cut through the backyard and shot at the first person he saw: a bread deliveryman sitting in his truck. Howard Unruh missed his first target, but he wouldn’t miss many more. Twenty minutes. Thirteen dead. And a neighborhood, a city, and a nation forever marked by his “Walk of Death.”

Thompson might have gotten his hair cut at Clark Hoover’s barbershop a few feet down River Road. That awful morning, the barber took a fatal shot, as did six-year-old Orris Smith, perched on a hobbyhorse inside the shop. If Thompson needed his shoes repaired and shined, he likely got it done at the repair shop next door, where Unruh killed the cobbler, John Pilarchik. Down the street was the tailor shop, owned by Thomas Zegrino. He was out when Unruh arrived, but Zegrino’s new wife, Helen, was not, and she paid the price.

Unruh moved on to his worst grudge late in the rampage, hunting down his next-door neighbor, Maurice Cohen, owner of the drugstore, to make him pay for the business with the fence as well as other perceived grievances.

Charles stayed hidden until it was utterly quiet. When officers finally found him, he would not be comforted—he’d heard everything. Charles leaned halfway out his apartment window and screamed, “He’s going to kill me. He’s killing everybody.”

Ferry had just finished up a midnight-to-eight shift. He was on his way home when he saw his insurance man dead in the street, as well as other victims.

Cohen walked over to the police station to interview the mass shooter and found him cooperative. “It was a horrible, revolting narrative,” Cohen recalled in a 1974 interview. “He really gave it cold, cut-and-dry. There was no attempt to conceal or be furtive. He didn’t seem to experience the normal relief of getting it off his chest. There was no remorse, no tears. There was a lack of all emotion.”

“What really convinced me that [Unruh] was terribly insane was when he got up after two hours and his chair was covered with blood. . . . He had been shot and wasn’t even aware of it.” Unruh was sent to a nearby hospital to recuperate, and Cohen interrogated him further upon his recovery from the bullet wound.

Unruh had been ruled clinically insane, and therefore not competent to stand trial. And so the deaths of thirteen people and the injuries of many more were never properly accounted for in court.

for those who survived the massacre, who attended hearing after hearing to ensure Unruh was never released, it did not seem like proper justice. He died in 2009 at the age of eighty-eight, just one month after Charles Cohen, the last survivor of the massacre, died.

“I have always more to do than I can fit into the most elastic time, even with the most careful packing,”

their westward journey almost ended a few miles from Canandaigua, when Véra changed lanes on the highway and narrowly missed plowing into an oncoming truck. Pulling over, she turned to Buxbaum and said: “Perhaps you’d better drive.”

Vladimir was never without his notebook, ready to record all observations, however minuscule, of quotidian American life on the road, be it overheard conversation at a restaurant or vivid impressions of the landscape.

The conference introduced Nabokov to writers he might not have otherwise met, including John Crowe Ransom, the poet and critic who founded and edited the Kenyon Review; and Ted Geisel, a few years away from children’s book superstardom as Dr. Seuss, whom Nabokov recalled as “a charming man, one of the most gifted people on this list.”

There's a meeting.

From there the quartet headed to Jackson Hole, where Nabokov wanted to look for a particularly elusive subspecies of butterfly, Lycaeides argyrognomon longinus.

Nabokov had three courses to teach that fall, but had attracted only twenty-one students, combined, a workload greeted with suspicion by his fellow professors. Even so, Nabokov wanted more money.

NABOKOV’S RAMSDALE IS not Camden. The made-up town where Humbert Humbert insinuates himself into the lives of Charlotte and Dolores Haze is most likely located in New England, which is why Dolores is deposited in a school in the Berkshires, and why both older man and younger girl seem to know the area well.

the names of the towns are similar, as is the Linden Street of Sally Horner’s childhood home and the Lawn Street where the Haze women live. Both towns shared a white, middle-class bucolic atmosphere. As would happen again and again, the Sally Horner story parallels Lolita in all sorts of surprising ways.

You are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel.”

Hrm

THE DESCRIPTION OF CHARLOTTE HAZE as Dietrich-lite sounds a jarringly familiar bell when I look at pictures of Ella Horner from when her daughter disappeared in 1948.

Sally did not know, and could not know, that the real reason they were leaving Baltimore was that Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen had indicted La Salle on the more serious charge of kidnapping on March 17.

Baltimore was no longer safe, nor was the entire East Coast. Instead of flushing La Salle out, the new charge caused him to run.

The journey from Baltimore to Dallas is approximately 1,366 miles. Today, by car, it would take about twenty hours to drive, on I-81 and I-40. Neither of those highways existed in 1949. La Salle and Sally likely drove south on U.S. 11, traveling all the way to the highway’s end in New Orleans, Louisiana, before switching over to U.S. 80, arriving in Dallas less than two hundred miles later.

The park could hold as many as a hundred motor homes. The mothers mostly stayed home and the fathers worked as farmhands, for steel companies, or at gas stations. Neighbors were closer in the trailer park than they had been in Baltimore. They could pay more attention to the pair, and get to know Sally—or think they did.

Sally was no longer known as Madeline LaPlante, but as Florence Planette. Oddly, it isn’t clear whether La Salle also used the “Planette” alias. One of their new neighbors, Dale Kagamaster, who ended up working with La Salle, knew him as LaPlante.

As in Baltimore, La Salle got a job as a mechanic, but kept Sally in the dark about what he was really doing all day. He also enrolled Sally in another Catholic school. This time it was Our Lady of Good Counsel Academy at 210 Marsalis Avenue in the neighborhood of Oak Cliff, about a seven-minute drive away from West Commerce Street.

At first their Commerce Street neighbors didn’t see anything amiss. Sally appeared to be a typical twelve-year-old living with her widowed father, albeit one he never let out of his sight except to go to school. Sally never displayed despair or asked for help. La Salle wouldn’t let her.

La Salle provided her with a generous allowance for clothes and sweets. She would go shopping, swimming, and to her neighbors’ trailers for dinner— sometimes with La Salle, and other times by herself, when he told her he was working the case for the FBI.

Maude Smillie, who was living in a nearby trailer, seemed bewildered by the idea that Sally had been a virtual prisoner: “[Sally] spent one day at the beauty parlor with me. I gave her a permanent and she never mentioned a thing. She should have known she could have confided in me.”

She’d suffered an appendicitis attack, one that required her to undergo an operation and spend three nights at the Texas Crippled Children’s Hospital (now the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children). The other seven days, presumably, she spent at home, recuperating. Something did change in Sally, though, after the operation. She grew more pensive. Josephine Kagamaster observed that the girl did not move like a “healthy, light-hearted youngster.” She’d heard La Salle say the girl “walks like an old woman.”

She might have been left alone for long stretches at a time, stayed late at a neighbor’s house watching television, and been on her own in the hospital for several nights. But if she told the truth, who would believe her story?

Later, Josephine Kagamaster, Nelrose Pfeil, Maude Smillie, and others said they would have helped Sally had she chosen to confide in them. But they made such declarations with the benefit of hindsight, months or years after Frank La Salle’s diabolical crimes were exposed to the public.

But Sally did talk to someone, a woman named Ruth Janisch, and she believed what the girl had to say. Though Ruth’s motivations were more complex than anyone knew, her belief in the girl eventually emboldened Sally to make the most important decision of her life.

Ruth may well have regarded the girl’s father with extramarital interest. That’s her children’s theory now. Whatever her motives, Ruth noticed something askew in the relationship between Sally Horner and Frank La Salle that had eluded everyone else who interacted with them.

Ruth Janisch may have been suspicious of Frank La Salle because she wasn’t in the habit of trusting people.

When her children misbehaved, it was all too easy for Ruth to fall back into the patterns she learned as a child, berating them the way her mother had berated her, telling them they were worthless, useless, or worse.

The former Ruth Douglass was eager to flee her mother, Myrtle, whose cuts were always unkind, and her father, Frank, whom her children later grew fond of but whom Ruth, in her cups, recalled as being “not so innocent.”

It wasn’t enough for George to sleep with his wife. He had to sleep with other men’s wives, too. Ruth herself had taken up with him while he was married. Since George was fine if Ruth slept with the leftover husbands, she wasn’t about to say no.

The extramarital doings damaged the already tenuous bond between the Janisches, which had been frayed by having three daughters in quick succession. The couple seemed to bring out the worst in each other.