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

^Ten Baltimore

Here’s the point in the narrative where I would like to tell you everything that happened to Sally Horner after Frank La Salle spirited her away from Atlantic City to Baltimore, and the eight months they lived in the city, from August 1948 through April 1949. The trouble is, I didn’t find out all that much. A scattershot list of addresses and court documents can’t bring to life what a little girl thought or felt. Visiting the neighborhood where Sally lived, and walking by the school she attended, can’t adequately bridge the decades. The neighborhood has changed, demographically and socioeconomically. Sally, were she still alive today, would barely recognize it.

The meager paper trail frustrated me. My patience frayed as I ran up against dead end after dead end, record search after fruitless record search, to try to build up a picture of the months Sally lived in Baltimore. If she made friends, or had someone she felt she could trust, I couldn’t find them. If there are people still living who knew her at the time, I could not track them down. If she kept a journal during her captivity, it did not survive. She did go to school in Baltimore—a Catholic school—but if any of its records remain, they are buried under decades of detritus no one has the inclination to sift through.

But I needed to understand what Sally was thinking and feeling—or at least approximate an understanding—so I read as many accounts as I could find by girls, born one or two generations after her, who survived years or decades of abuse by their kidnappers. I also examined kidnappings from the decade or so before Sally was taken.

Stranger abductions are rare now and were, perhaps, even rarer when Sally vanished. That’s why the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., in 1932 caught America’s attention and held it for weeks. The celebrity of the boy’s parents, superstar pilot Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, certainly helped, but the boy’s snatching felt like the manifestation of every parent’s worst fear—that their child might be stolen in the middle of the night from his bedroom by strangers—and kept the country gripped until the baby’s body was discovered weeks later.

Abductions where the child is held for a significant period of time before being rescued alive occur with even lesser frequency. That’s why, fourteen years before Sally Horner’s abduction, the kidnapping of six-year-old June Robles, the daughter of a well-to-do Tucson, Arizona, family, stood out. A man driving a Ford sedan waited for June after school on April 25, 1934, and enticed her to get into his car. Several ransom notes arrived at the Robles household. The first demanded fifteen thousand dollars; the second, ten thousand. 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.

For someone held captive in a tiny box for nineteen days, the girl was in remarkably good spirits. Several days after her rescue, June appeared at a press conference filmed by Pathé studios. (Reporters did not ask her questions, though, allowing her father, Fernando, to steer June through the session.) The little girl seemed poised, her answers sounding rehearsed. She said she was looking forward to going back to school that Friday. It was the last interview Robles ever gave. She never spoke to the media again.

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. It remains a mystery, as does the effect the kidnapping had upon June and her family.

Captivity narratives, such as the recent “found alive” stories of young women including Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, Natascha Kampusch, and the trio Ariel Castro held prisoner in Cleveland, opened up a psychological trapdoor into Sally’s probable state of mind. They also allowed me to understand how kidnappers were able to subject these girls and women to years of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse.

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. Every day, every hour, their kidnappers told these women that their families had forgotten all about them. Year after year, their only experience of “love” came from those who abused, raped, and tortured them, creating a cognitive dissonance impossible to escape.

Dugard’s eighteen-year bond with her abductor resulted in her bearing two children by him. The fear of losing her daughters, no matter how squalid her situation, caused her to deny her real identity to the police at first, revealing the truth only when she felt secure that she was safe from her kidnappers. Smart, too, needed the same foundation of trust to tell law enforcement who she really was.

We know how these girls coped and felt because several of them published books about their extended ordeals. Smart, Dugard, and the Cleveland three—Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus together, and Michelle Knight on her own—were able to tell their stories the way they wished and when they chose. In doing so they sought to make something meaningful of their lives.

Sally Horner did not have the chance to tell her story to the world, unlike the women and girls of later generations. She also didn’t have the choice of keeping her account wholly private, unlike June Robles. 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. Inference will have to stand in for confidence. Imagination will have to fill in the rest.

THE SUMMER’S GREAT HEAT WAVE was some weeks away, but it still sweltered plenty on the Baltimore-bound bus. Frank La Salle and Sally Horner had taken a taxicab to the bus depot in Philadelphia. Perhaps Sally wondered why they were going so far out of the way if they were headed south. Maybe she asked why they had to leave Atlantic City so quickly, or where the station wagon had gone, or why they had to leave their clothes and photos behind. Most likely, she kept any complaints or questions to herself.

She had to keep remembering the script, that La Salle was her father. His word was law. She had to stick to the story to avoid punishment. She had to endure his daily torments. She had to retreat to her own mind to escape the void of her current situation.

The cab pulled up in front of the Philadelphia station. Frank and Sally made their way to the Greyhound bus bound for Baltimore before it pulled away at 11:00 A.M. He bought their tickets, Sally squeaking under the wire for the half-price fare. They settled in their seats for the three-hour trip. They may not have been alone. Sally later said that a woman she knew as “Miss Robinson” had joined them. La Salle had told her the woman was some sort of assistant or secretary. She was perhaps twenty-five, though an eleven-year-old girl’s sense of how old people are can be skewed.

The Philadelphia Greyhound made one stop along the way, either in Wilmington or in Oxford, Delaware. After the short break, the bus moved over to Route 40, which turned into the Pulaski Highway. Was Sally impressed by the wider lanes and speeding cars on the still-new highway? What did she allow herself to dream over the three-hour trip before the bus pulled into the downtown depot in Baltimore? Did she hope for a chance of escape, or had she resigned herself to being trapped by La Salle’s new vision of her life?

They arrived in Baltimore just after 2:15 in the afternoon. “Miss Robinson,” if she existed, vanished from the picture, perhaps as soon as they got off the bus, collected their luggage, and looked for a cab or local transit to take them to their lodgings. Most likely they ended up staying downtown that first evening and for the next few days, around West Franklin Street in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon. Blocks away lay the city’s most prized landmarks, including City Hall, the Museum of Art, and the original Washington Monument. Testaments to Baltimore’s beauty and power, but also a refuge out of Sally’s grasp.

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. And what better place for a fugitive to hide than among hotel staff serving the toniest, richest guests in a Beaux Arts building nestled within Baltimore’s most prominent neighborhood?

I was also struck, while walking around the district, by how close Sally was to the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It’s a wonderful place for researchers, and a safe harbor for bookish types of all kinds. Sally loved to read; were books a way for her to imagine herself in different worlds she could control, or was the library yet another place she couldn’t go, somewhere she fantasized about as a refuge from Frank La Salle’s relentless assaults?

Because 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. It was in Baltimore, according to Sally, that rape became a regular occurrence. It was the place where Frank La Salle subjugated her totally to his will psychologically and physically. The outside world never had a clue, even after La Salle sent his “daughter” to school.

There was no way he could have kept her home if he wanted to maintain the illusion of normalcy. The summer was over and an eleven-year-old girl, shut away at home or loose on the streets while he was at work, would draw attention— and questions. 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.

To enroll Sally at Saint Ann’s Catholic School, they had to leave West Franklin Street. So in September 1948, they moved to Barclay, a neighborhood on Baltimore’s east side. There La Salle and Sally settled in an apartment around East Twentieth Street between Barclay and Greenmount Avenues, a block up from the local cemetery. At the time, the neighborhood was a middle-class enclave of brick town houses, where neighbors mingled freely if they wished, or kept to themselves if they did not. Over the next eight months, Sally got used to the new name Frank had given her: Madeline LaPlante.

Here’s how I imagine Sally Horner’s days during the 1948–1949 school year. She’d wake up, get dressed, act the part of daughter to her “daddy,” and shove from her mind the fact that her current life was the opposite of normal. He probably took Sally to school for the first week, just to be sure she wouldn’t do anything rash like speak out or run away. Afterward, he trusted Sally to go by herself. She knew he had to be at work early in a different part of town. She did not want to disappoint him. She resolved she never would.

She’d smile and nod to their landlady—Mary or Ann Troy; she got the two confused even though she’d been told over and over that they weren’t related—and other neighbors as they headed off to work. Then, she’d walk west along East Twentieth Street. At the end of the block was the Diamond, the diner where she and La Salle took many of their meals, since he didn’t have the time or the patience to cook, and she was still learning how. Sally usually skipped breakfast, waiting to eat until after morning prayers. Perhaps on some days, the waitress, Marie Farrell, packed up a piping-hot fried egg sandwich for her and put it on Frank’s tab.

Breakfast in hand, Sally would turn right at the end of the block, walking up Greenmount Avenue until she reached the corner of Twenty-Second Street. There was Saint Ann’s, an extension of a Roman Catholic church that had been in Barclay for more than a century. The schedule was strict. All students had to attend mass first thing in the morning. Sally sat with her classmates on uncomfortable pews as Monsignor Quinn, Saint Ann’s pastor and principal, intoned the daily prayers in Latin and English. She kept an eagle eye out for Mother Superior Cornellous—the older woman did not tolerate her students fidgeting or misbehaving.

Then, if she had remembered to fast, Sally took Communion. The priest placed the host on her tongue. As it melted, Sally knelt and prayed for her eternal soul. Was the possibility of escape part of her prayers? Did she pray that someone would see behind the calm facade of Madeline LaPlante to the captive Sally Horner? Did she wonder if the things Frank asked her to do, which he said were “perfectly natural,” were, in fact, a mortal sin? Or did she pray for things to stay as they were because they might get even worse?

When Communion ended, Sally went back to her pew. Mass was over, so it was time for the fried egg sandwich, now cool enough to eat, and then for her classes. So many hours in the day stretched ahead where all she had to think about was her studies. She had to do well and keep up her grades or else there would be more punishment at home, and so she likely did. But Sally also didn’t want to draw undue attention to herself, in case someone—especially the Monsignor or the Mother Superior—grew suspicious and started asking too many questions. Better to embrace the invisibility. Better not to stand out.

When the last school bell rang and it was time to go home, Sally reversed her morning walk. But if there was time, or if she felt a smidgen bolder, perhaps she ventured up a block to Mund Park. The park was a place where the mind could roam and think of freedom. Where the green grass grew just like it did in Camden. Where she could think of her real home, and wonder if she would ever see it again.

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. Before her abduction, Sally likely attended a Protestant church. 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. Instead of viewing a girl like Sally with suspicion, some opposite effect, like sympathy, may have prevailed.

But I suspect La Salle gravitated toward Catholic institutions because they were a good place to hide in plain sight. The Church, as we now know from decades’ worth of scandal, hid generations of abused victims, and moved pedophile priests from parish to parish because covering up their crimes protected the Church’s carefully crafted image. Perhaps La Salle saw parochial schools for what they were: a place for complicity and enabling to flourish. A place where no one would ask Sally Horner if something terrible was happening to her.