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

by Sarah Weinman

They ignite within me the twinned sense of obsession and compulsion. If these feelings persist, I know the story is mine to tell.

Only a few months earlier I’d breezed through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Some months later I’d reckon with Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth.

The appreciation of art can make a sucker out of those who forget the darkness of real life.

Unruh’s “Walk of Death” also seemed to foreshadow Camden’s deeper decline. “It’s something you never really forget. . . . You take extra precautions to protect your family and your property,” Paul Schopp, a former director of the Camden County Historical Society, said in an interview to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the mass shooting. “He didn’t just rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their essence.” The trauma of a mass shooting, and a collective desire to forget, seems like the true beginning of Camden’s downward slope.

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

She was ecstatic about the largely positive press and fast sales of the novel, but was unnerved by what critics weren’t saying. “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along.”

“I would hear, ‘but they were just a friend.’ I would hear that about Sally. That we should be moving right along. I wasn’t willing to move right along. I wanted to grieve. And when I finally came out of shock, I did.”

FRANK LA SALLE made his presence known to Sally Horner’s family one final time. On the morning of her funeral, they discovered he had sent a spray of flowers. The Panaros insisted they not be displayed.

Her reaction to him was visceral: “I hated him because he was driving and had the accident that killed my best friend.”