More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 27 - March 28, 2022
Each baby received a first name either spouse liked. The middle names, however, were those of former lovers. Nine children later, Ruth and George split up. He would marry twice more; she married ten times in total, with lovers scattered in between.
there was something about Sally Horner that Ruth could see clearly. The way the girl shuffled after coming home from an extended hospital stay after an appendectomy. The way Sally’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. The closeness between Sally and Frank that did not strike the right note.
Sally had been La Salle’s captive for nearly two years, since she was just eleven. She felt his presence at every turn, even when she was alone and seemingly free to do what she pleased. How trapped she must have felt to be in such close quarters to him as they spent that week or ten days on the road.
By the time Frank La Salle pulled the house trailer into the El Cortez Motor Inn on Saturday, March 18, Sally Horner felt able to reckon with the changes roiling inside her. She’d already made a significant first step. Before leaving Dallas, she’d mustered up the courage to tell a friend at school that her relationship with her “father” involved sexual intercourse. The friend told Sally her behavior was “wrong” and that “she ought to stop,” as Sally later explained.
Sally felt freer in a small way. Not free—she was still in La Salle’s clutches, and could not see a way to escape. But she could say no now, and he didn’t punish her like he had in the old days.
Sally was already enrolled in school, and may have attended as many as four days of classes. She did not attend class that morning, though. By staying away, Sally changed the course her life had traveled on for the past twenty-one months.
Ruth absorbed what the girl told her. Though she had been suspicious of the relationship, she never imagined that La Salle had kidnapped Sally. Then she sprang into action. She beckoned Sally over to the telephone and showed her how to make a long-distance phone call.
No one answered the house phone, so Sally tried the greenhouse next. Her brother-in-law, Al Panaro, picked up. “Will you accept a collect call from Sally Horner in San Jose, California?” the operator asked. “You bet I will,” Panaro replied. “Hello, Al, this is Sally. May I speak to Susan?” He could barely contain his excitement. “Where are you at? Give me your exact location.”
Panaro passed the phone over to Susan, who was with him in the greenhouse. She was flabbergasted that her younger sister was alive, and on the telephone line. She also urged Sally to stay put and wait for the police.
Ruth spent the next little while keeping Sally calm, hoping the FBI, or even the local police, would show up soon and arrest Frank. Sally, anxious, thought she should go back to her own trailer to wait for the police. Ruth let her go, hoping it would not be for too long.
Marter was the one who relayed Sally’s whereabouts to the New York FBI office. He warned them to proceed with caution around La Salle. He had eluded capture before, and they needed to be certain he would not escape again.
Hornbuckle’s own predecessor was indicted on gambling and bribery charges, and more recently the brutal murder of a high school girl had garnered headlines. But this situation was extraordinary. While many in local law enforcement got their hackles up when the FBI called, Hornbuckle did not. The case of a young girl so far from home was no time to get your nose out of joint.
Hornbuckle then had to ask Sally the toughest question: whether La Salle had forced her to have sex with him during their nearly two years on the road. He phrased it delicately, asking if Sally had “been intimate” with La Salle. She denied it. But later, after a doctor’s examination, she confessed the truth.
IT’S NOT CLEAR if Frank La Salle found gainful employment that morning in San Jose. When he stepped off the bus and walked back to the trailer just after one o’clock in the afternoon, dozens of police officers surrounded him before he could reach his front door.
Later that day, a Camden Courier-Post reporter, Jacob Weiner, found Ella clutching a photo of Sally, the one that had been recovered from the Atlantic City boardinghouse in August 1948. “It seems so long ago, Sally, so long ago,” Ella murmured, gazing at the picture of her daughter. In a stronger tone, but with her voice still shaking, Ella said: “I’m so relieved.”
TELEPHONES ARE A recurring motif in Lolita. The incessant ringing of the “machina telephonica and its sudden god” interrupts the narrative, as Humbert Humbert’s psyche begins to fissure—the monster underneath waging war with the amiable surface personality he presents to the world.
Telephones, Humbert concludes, “happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch.”
Though Frank La Salle was in jail, it wasn’t clear which law enforcement agency would have jurisdiction over him. There were the outstanding warrants for kidnapping and abduction from Camden County. But because La Salle had transported Sally across several states, it became a federal case.
There Hennessy revealed that La Salle’s birth name was Frank La Plante; if true, then at various points during Sally’s captivity, she’d attended school using the first name of La Salle’s biological daughter and his own real last name.
May Smothers, a juvenile court matron, had accompanied the girl to court, and calmed her down. Sally finally entered the courtroom clutching Smothers’s hand. She took a seat only four feet away from La Salle and stole furtive glances at him throughout the proceedings, looking away whenever she came close to breaking down.
The hearing also decided La Salle’s jurisdictional fate. Hennessy told the court that the federal charges would eventually be dropped because the New Jersey state kidnapping charges took precedence. But for the time being, La Salle would sit tight.
No trace of the woman known as “Miss Robinson” was ever discovered by law enforcement. It remains another of the unresolved mysteries of Sally’s captivity. I believe the woman existed, because I believe Sally. Just because police did not track the woman down, and that decades later I also could not find her, does not mean Sally made her up.
Frank La Salle wasn’t allowed to travel from California to Camden by plane. Airline regulations at the time did not allow for passengers to be shackled, and Mitchell Cohen wasn’t about to take any chances that the man would escape.
The solution was to transport La Salle by train. Doing so would increase the travel time from hours to days, but on the train he could stay handcuffed to an officer for the entire duration. Marshall Thompson got stuck with being shackled to the prisoner for the cross-country trip,
Before La Salle boarded, he asked Cohen why he and Sally Horner weren’t getting on the same train. Cohen explained the two were due to fly later on in the day. “Well, take good care of Sally,” said La Salle. “I’ll take better care of her than you did,” Cohen replied.
Thompson had no relief or privacy, shackled to the man he’d been chasing for nearly two years. Just as La Salle could not escape the law, so could the law not escape La Salle.
As Judge Rocco Palese entered, the room rose to attention. Like Mitchell Cohen, the judge had tangled with La Salle before. Palese, then a lawyer, had worked on Dorothy Dare’s divorce petition against La Salle in 1944, even filling in for Dorothy’s main lawyer, Bruce Wallace, at one of the hearings while La Salle was still serving time for statutory rape.
Camden County’s legal world was so small that defense attorneys became prosecutors who then became judges, everyone working with everyone else. What mattered was that, right now, Frank La Salle was in Judge Palese’s courtroom.
How La Salle’s long criminal record and his deviant behavior toward Sally made him, in Cohen’s estimation, “a menace to society—a depraved man and a moral leper.”
The whole matter took perhaps twenty minutes, ending just after noon. But not before Palese decided upon a sentence for Frank La Salle. The judge ordered Sally’s abductor to spend no less than thirty and no more than thirty-five years in prison for the kidnapping charge.
BECAUSE FRANK LA SALLE pleaded guilty, Sally did not get to testify against him.
From that afternoon on, the Horner women were private citizens. They were no longer at the mercy of the legal system, or the national press. The rest of the world could leave them alone. In some fashion, it worked out that way, but their new-found calm did not last for long.
It is not difficult to believe Nabokov, whom Véra described in their diary as being fascinated by true crime, paid avid attention from his sickbed as each day brought fresh news about Sally’s rescue and Frank La Salle’s crimes.
Yet there is no direct proof that Vladimir Nabokov learned of Sally Horner’s abduction and rescue in March 1950. There was no story in the papers he was most likely to read—the Cornell Daily Sun, the college newspaper, or the New York Times. Similarly, there’s no direct proof he glanced at the Camden or Philadelphia papers, the ones that carried the best details and the most vivid photos.
As Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin pointed out in his 2005 essay linking Sally Horner to Lolita, Nabokov fiddled with the case chronology.
In other words, the circumstantial evidence is right there in the text that Nabokov did, in fact, read about Sally Horner in March 1950, rather than retroactively inserting her story into Lolita several years after the fact.
To throw off the scent, or perhaps to amuse himself, Nabokov assigned details of La Salle to other characters. Dolores’s eventual husband and the father of her child, Dick Schiller, is a mechanic. Meanwhile, Vivian Darkbloom—an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov—has a “hawk face,” a phrase akin to the description of La Salle as a “hawk-faced man” in the March 1950 coverage of Sally’s rescue.
Then there is Humbert’s aside in Lolita’s final chapter. He states that he would have given himself “at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges.” The exact sentence Frank La Salle received.
Sally had seen the country and how different so many other places were from Camden. She had been forced to grow up in the cruelest way possible, knowledge foisted upon her that could not be suppressed.
Sally walks, shoulders hunched, beside Susan. At one point she pushes her niece in a white-handled stroller. She moves slowly, with hesitation, but it’s not clear whether that’s how she really moved or if the film clip was preserved at a slower speed.
THERE WERE OTHER PRESSING MATTERS as Sally Horner readjusted to life with her family, in Camden and elsewhere. She had been taken at the tail end of sixth grade; in the fall she would start eighth grade at Clara S. Burrough Junior High School, and was eager for what promised to be a fresh start. When she had gone to school during her captivity period, her energy was focused on surviving each day with Frank La Salle instead of dreaming about what she might want to be when she grew up. Now that Sally was free, she could think of what she wanted, for her own future.
There was no vocabulary, in 1950, to describe the mechanism or the impact of Sally’s victimization, where the violence was psychological manipulation, not necessarily brute force.
Taking Cohen’s advice under consideration, Ella opted for a compromise: Sally would spend the summer of 1950 with the Panaros in Florence, while Ella remained in Camden. No one changed their names, and no one would discuss what happened to Sally for decades.
By Sally’s fourteenth birthday in April 1951, she looked like the typical American teenager of that period, the type to be wowed by Perry Como or Tony Bennett or Doris Day or other popular singers of the time. (In Lolita, Nabokov dutifully listed the soundtrack of Dolores and Humbert’s road trip, including Eddie Fisher’s “Wish You Were Here,” Peggy Lee’s “Forgive Me,” and Tony Bennett’s “Sleepless” and “Here in My Heart.”)
Though Sally adopted a mask of good-natured resilience, Al recalled his sister-in-law drifting into melancholic moods. She would be in the moment, then gone.
The family discouraged discussion about her ordeal, and she almost never spoke of what happened with anyone. There were no heart-to-hearts. She underwent no psychological examinations; nor did she see a therapist. There was only Before, and After.
Despite the photo of Sally with a date, her social life did not open up. She’d had trouble making friends before her abduction; afterward it became even more difficult.
Boys, emboldened and entitled, peppered her with unwanted remarks and propositions. As her classmate Carol Taylor—née Carol Starts—remembered, “they looked at her as a total whore.”
Ugh
It didn’t matter to Sally’s classmates that she had been abducted and raped. That she was not a virgin was enough to taint her. Nice girls were supposed to be pure until marriage.
Carol had some other friends. Sally had no one but Carol, who didn’t care a whit what anyone else thought of Sally.
