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

^Nineteen Rebuilding a Life

Sally Horner was only two months past her eleventh birthday when Frank La Salle spirited her away from Camden. She returned home less than two weeks before turning thirteen on April 18. “When she went away she was a little girl,” Ella murmured on the day she was finally reunited with her daughter. “Now she is practically a young lady.” 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.

How the family marked her birthday isn’t known, since no one, aside from Sally’s niece, Diana, is alive to recall—and Diana was only twenty months old at the time. But a family outing to the Philadelphia Zoo, captured on a minute-long film clip shot by Sally’s brother-in-law, Al Panaro, appears to provide a possible answer. It is the only known surviving footage of Sally.

In it, Sally seems dressed for spring, wearing the same outfit that she had on the plane from California, as well as to court the day that Frank La Salle pleaded guilty to her kidnapping. Her sister, Susan, has on a cream or white coat covering a pale blouse and dark skirt, while Diana is dressed in a pink two-piece suit.

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.

In a close-up, Sally’s face is angled to the left. Her expression is tentative, suggesting she still feels vulnerable out in public. That even though she is among her family, among those she loves, she isn’t ready to let down her guard.

She does not look at the camera once.

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. “She has a definite ambition,” the San Jose detention center matron had said a few days after Sally’s dramatic rescue. “She wants to be a doctor.”

Ella, who had been out of work, needed to find a new job to support not only herself, but also a daughter who, through no fault of her own, was far closer to womanhood than any thirteen-year-old was supposed to be. Ella’s repetition to the press of the phrase “whatever Sally has done, I can forgive her” points to her discomfort about the abuse Sally suffered, or even her lack of comprehension.

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. Where the innocent-seeming facade of the father-daughter dynamic masked repeated rapes, unbeknownst to almost everyone around her. For Ella, who was struggling to pay the bills, put food on the table, and keep the lights on in the house, the details of Sally’s captivity may have been too much to bear. As was the idea of starting over where no one knew what had happened to her. The stigma they knew must have seemed a better choice than the uncertainty of what they didn’t know.

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.

Over the summer of 1950, Sally Horner allowed herself to feel safe. She looked after Diana when Susan and Al Panaro had to work in the greenhouse, and sometimes Sally tended to the flowers and herbs as well. One family photo shows Sally in the greenhouse next to Susan, wearing dungarees, a white shirt, and a dark cardigan, her curly hair tousled around her face and chin, her mouth open as she is caught in mid-conversation with her sister.

Other photographs from the same time suggest that living at the Panaros did Sally some good. One shows Sally standing by herself, clad in an elaborate pale-hued frock suitable for going to church or an afternoon social event. She’s smiling at the camera, though her eyes carry remnants of the shyness she displayed while being filmed at the Philadelphia Zoo.

Sally’s smile is wider in a second photo of her in a different fancy dress. Here she poses with a dark-haired young man wearing a suit at least two sizes too large. The boy is her apparent date, for a school dance or a church social. His name, and how the evening went, is lost to time—as is whether he was aware of what had happened to Sally.

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.”)

One candid photo, likely taken by Al Panaro, hints at more complicated undercurrents in her than in a “bobby-soxer,” as Sally was sometimes referred to in the press coverage of her rescue. She wears jeans again, as she did in the greenhouse photo with Susan, but now her shirt is dark, and her curly hair is pulled back. Her lipstick looks near-black in the black-and-white photo, which suggests she is wearing a ruby-red shade. The camera has captured Sally as she emerged from her bedroom, newspaper in her right hand, expression quizzical, as if she’d been interrupted while reading the funnies. She seems to be in need of sleep, caffeine, or a combination of the two.

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. A light would shine, and then flicker out. “She never said she was sad and depressed,” Al told me in 2014, “but you knew something was wrong.” 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.

At Burrough Junior High, located on the corner of Haddon and Newton Avenues, Sally, once more, excelled on the academic side. Al recalled his sister-in-law being “very smart, an A student,” and said that “it seemed like she knew a subject before it was taught.” She graduated in June 1952 with honors.

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. Classmates whispered and gossiped about her time with La Salle. 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.” Emma DiRenzo, whom Sally knew as Emma Annibale, agreed. “She had a little bit of a rough time at first. Not everyone was very nice. I think some people didn’t believe her.”

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. “No matter how you looked at it, she was a slut,” Carol said. “That’s the way it was in those days.”

Carol met Sally in eighth-grade homeroom. Carol had street smarts; Sally did, too, but she wanted to close the door on how she got them, and escaped into the land of books. Carol lived two blocks away from the junior high while Sally had a longer daily walk of four to five blocks. Carol came from a large family—she was one of ten siblings, a far cry from Sally’s smaller pool of immediate relatives. Carol had some other friends. Sally had no one but Carol, who didn’t care a whit what anyone else thought of Sally. Carol said she was oblivious about Sally’s supposedly sullied reputation, but it’s as likely Carol chose not to behave the same way as her classmates, and not to judge Sally so harshly. Carol admired Sally’s manners, her love of books, and sophisticated outlook. Sally admired Carol’s freedom. She was as eager to be Carol’s friend as Carol was to be hers.

Sally found refuge in the outdoors. She loved everything about being outside: the sun, swimming, and especially the Jersey Shore. As a little girl, before Frank La Salle kidnapped her, she’d spent many summer weekends at various seaside towns, like Wildwood and Cape May. After her rescue, the beach was a place where she could forget about cruel taunts and pervading despair. The Shore couldn’t solve all of her problems, but at least it provided space for her to feel happiness.

In the summer of 1952, Sally was looking forward to starting Woodrow Wilson High School. At fifteen, she looked far older than her years. She wanted to make more friends and find a boyfriend.

Then, one weekend in the middle of August, she took another trip to Wildwood.