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

^Fourteen The Neighbor

Ruth Janisch and her family arrived at the Commerce Street trailer park around December 1948. They had spent most of the 1940s traveling a particular geographic loop, following the employment her husband, George, found repairing televisions or working in bowling alleys. It began in San Jose, where Ruth and George met and married, then moved up to Washington, where she’d grown up, tracked east to Minnesota, the home of George’s parents, and finally on to Texas, situated more or less in between. The Janisches bought a caravan somewhere along the way and made it the family home.

Periodically, the trailer ran into trouble. On Thanksgiving 1948, it broke down on the way to Dallas, somewhere in the desert. New Mexico, perhaps, or Arizona. George and his elder stepson, Pat, went looking for help, leaving the rest of the family stranded by the road. Ruth and her other children— another boy from an earlier marriage, and two girls sired by George—figured that if they were stuck by the road, they might as well have Thanksgiving dinner while they waited.

They fetched chairs from a closet in the trailer and set up outside. Ruth cooked up an impromptu meal of pancakes and beans, which she served inside the broken-down trailer. The children lined up to get their meal and then ate outside in the baking desert sun. Ruth warned the children not to stay outside for too long. She was nervous that rattlesnakes might bite them if the kids lingered.

Eventually George and Pat returned with the part they needed to fix the trailer, and they drove on to Dallas, setting up camp at the Commerce Street site. A few months later, in April 1949, a man in his fifties and a girl he said was his daughter moved into the trailer next door. The Janisch girls immediately took to the girl, who introduced herself as Florence Planette. She was twelve, practically grown up, but she was willing to give them her attention. The little girls were five, six, and seven, and regarded her with a mixture of awe and envy.

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. What Ruth saw between the older man and the young girl spurred her to the single gesture that defined her as a decent human being, an act she would relive for the rest of her days and memorialize in scrapbooks. That act did not make her a heroine in the eyes of her children. But it would bring her a level of attention she spent the rest of her life trying to find again.

Ruth Janisch may have been suspicious of Frank La Salle because she wasn’t in the habit of trusting people. She craved love she never found. She got pregnant so often she was in a perpetual state of exhaustion, dealing with babies and children. George always found work, but the money he brought in was hardly enough for an ever-expanding family. 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.

Her bitter outlook took hold upon leaving Washington State to marry her second husband, Everett Findley. (Ruth later said her first marriage, at sixteen to a man whose name she failed to remember, didn’t count.) 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.” The children were never sure if Ruth was referring to her father’s penchant for drink or something uglier.

After their marriage, Ruth had followed Findley, a man more than twice her age, to San Jose, and bore him two sons. She met husband number three, George Janisch, sometime after the dissolution of her marriage to Findley. George hailed from Minneapolis; he was short and slight, and his blond hair and fair appearance befitted his Scandinavian heritage. He’d moved west for work and to escape the harsh Minnesota winter.

George and Ruth ran off to Carson City, Nevada, to wed on October 24, 1940. Perhaps they married for love. Not long before he died, George confided in one of his daughters that before their wedding, Ruth was a “good girl.” But afterward, according to George, she changed, and he admitted that it was his fault.

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 fact was that Ruth had a craving for men that would persist for the rest of her life.

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. One particularly clever, or insidious, way Ruth and George tested each other was with the naming of every new child. 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.

By 1949, Ruth was thirty-three (though would only admit to thirty-one) with a husband she couldn’t help needling and at the mercy of that perpetual pregnancy-birth cycle. She still had most of her looks, with dark hair curling about her face, full, pointed breasts, a strong nose and wide-lipped mouth. Every new child added another dose of bitterness at her lot in life, and the family’s poverty.

But 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. “He never let Sally out of his sight, except when she was at school,” Ruth later recounted. “She never had any friends her own age. She never went any place, just stayed with La Salle in the trailer.” She thought La Salle seemed “abnormally possessive” of the girl he said was his daughter. Ruth tried to cajole Sally, still recovering from her appendectomy, to tell her the “true story” of her relationship with La Salle. Sally wouldn’t open up.

In early 1950, the Janisches packed up their trailer and drove west. Work had dried up for George in Dallas, and he figured he might have better luck in San Jose, which had proven lucky in the past. Once the family, larger by two more children, landed at the El Cortez Motor Inn—perhaps at their exact prior parking space—Ruth wrote to Frank saying that he and Sally should follow them to California. There’s work to be had here, she said. He and Sally could be their neighbors again.

La Salle agreed. Perhaps he had some other pressing reason to abandon Dallas. Maybe he sensed that Sally was distancing herself from him and another move might keep her closer. Whatever the reason, La Salle pulled Sally out of school in February 1950 and they drove the house trailer attached to his car from Dallas to San Jose. Just as in Baltimore, and Atlantic City before it, La Salle had decided he and Sally needed to be on the move. And just as before, Sally had no say in the decision. She did what Frank La Salle told her to do. But his mood was different on the day they headed west. This time they were running toward opportunity, not running from the law.

Sally and La Salle’s journey to San Jose took at least a week, if not more. He drove the trailer through Texas, going around the border of Oklahoma, then through New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California, before moving up the South Bay to their final destination, the farthest Sally had ever been from Camden. She would never venture this far again. 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.

If Sally had allowed herself to let her mind roam, she might have given in to feelings of despair, or to anger over what La Salle had taken away from her. Or perhaps she was focused on how vital it was for her to survive. After days in the car and nights in the trailer parked at a rest stop, eating at diners, one after another, the emotional toll on her must have been considerable.

On the West Coast, Northern California in particular, palm trees lined broad boulevards where cars had room to move instead of getting jammed up like they did back home. Police in uniform shorts patrolled the streets on motorcycles. The air was far less humid than in Dallas, or even on the East Coast. But the prospects of betterment that had enticed La Salle, and so many others before him, were not on Sally’s mind. She had a great many other things to think about.

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. As her friend’s admonishment sank in, Sally began refusing La Salle’s advances, but kept up the illusion he was her dad.

For so long she felt she had to stay silent, or to accept what the man posing as her father said was the natural thing to do between them. All this time she opted to give in because it seemed the surest path to survival. Now 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. Perhaps he looked at Sally, a month shy of her thirteenth birthday, and saw a girl aging out of his tastes. Or perhaps he trusted that Sally belonged to him so completely he no longer needed to use rape as a means of physical and psychological control.

What she knew now was that her relationship with Frank La Salle was the opposite of natural. It was against nature. It was wrong.

FRANK LA SALLE needed to find work. Several days after landing at the trailer park, La Salle abandoned his car—perhaps it needed repairs after so many days on bumpy, unevenly paved highway roads—and took the bus two miles into town to look for a job. 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.