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

^Fifteen San Jose

On the morning of March 21, 1950, Ruth Janisch invited Sally Horner over to her trailer. She knew Frank La Salle wouldn’t return from his job search for several more hours, and sensed the girl might open up to her. All it would take was the right push at the right time. If Ruth didn’t seize the opportunity now, she never would. Gently, she coaxed more honesty out of the young girl. Before, in Dallas, Sally wouldn’t budge. This time, in San Jose, she did.

Sally confirmed Ruth’s suspicion that Frank La Salle was not, in fact, her father, and that he’d forced her to stay with him for nearly two years. She said she missed her mother, Ella, and her older sister, Susan. Sally told Ruth she wanted to go home.

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. Sally had never done so before.

Sally dialed her mother’s number first, but the line was disconnected; Ella had lost her seamstress job in January and, while unemployed, could not afford to pay the bill. Next, she tried her sister, Susan, in Florence. 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.”

“I’m with a lady friend in California. Send the FBI after me, please! Tell Mother I’m okay, and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.”

The connection was poor, and Al had a hard time hearing his sister-in-law. But he heard enough to get the trailer park address down on paper, and to assure Sally he would call the FBI. She just had to stay exactly where she was.

Then 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.

After Sally hung up, she turned to Ruth, her face drained of color. She looked ready to collapse. She kept saying, over and over, “What will Frank do when he finds out what I have done?”

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.

AFTER SPEAKING with his sister-in-law for the first time in nearly two years, Al Panaro immediately called the Camden County Police Department. He asked for Detective Marshall Thompson, the man who’d been investigating Sally’s disappearance exclusively for more than a year. But Thompson worked the night shift and was home in bed when Panaro’s call came in. William Marter, another detective, answered.

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. Then the FBI rang the sheriff’s office in Santa Clara County. Sheriff Howard Hornbuckle picked up, and soon learned that a girl abducted almost two years earlier was alive and well and in his jurisdiction.

Hornbuckle had been elected sheriff three years earlier. He was a local boy, a graduate of San Jose High School, and had attended the state college before he joined the police department in 1931. He had spent fourteen years on the force, as a detective and later a captain. He’d also moonlighted as a traffic safety instructor in his spare time, where he stressed the danger of cars and how too many young people died while at the wheel. A cautionary slogan he coined—“Death Begins at 40”—even got picked up by the wire services and circulated nationally for a while.

Santa Clara County had its fair share of crime. 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. The FBI and the sheriff’s office would work together on this.

When Hornbuckle sent his deputies to the trailer park on Monterey Road, federal agents were already on their way. The fleet of cops, local and national, sped to the El Cortez Motor Inn. Three men from the sheriff’s office, Lieutenant John Gibbons and Officers Frank Leva and Douglas Logan, found Sally, alone, in La Salle’s trailer.

“Please get me away from here before he gets back from town,” she said, terror winning out over relief for the moment. What if he returned before she could get away from the trailer park? What if he tried to take her again? And if he did, what if he did things to her she didn’t want to think about?

But this time she was in the hands of the real police and the real FBI, not the pretend agent, Frank La Salle. These cops promised Sally she was safe. La Salle would not be able to take her or touch her again. Three deputies whisked her to a detention center in the city, run by Matron Lillian Nelson. Once she was settled there, the remaining local and federal police waited for La Salle to return.

Lieutenant Gibbons at first held back from questioning Sally. “She’s too shaken up,” he told reporters a few hours later when they pressed him for details. But when Sally calmed down, Sheriff Hornbuckle led her into an interview room where she told him what had happened, and where she had been all this time. Hornbuckle listened, with patience, as Sally told him the whole terrible story. At first she gasped, sobbed, and cried. The hysterics were understandable, and the sheriff did not hurry her.

Then, at last, Sally found her voice. She started at the beginning, describing how La Salle caught her trying to steal a notebook on a dare at the five-and-dime. How he said he was an FBI agent and that she was “under arrest.” How scared she was, and then how relieved when he let her go. How he found her again several months later, coming home from school. And how he told her she could avoid reform school only if she went away to Atlantic City with him, telling her mother he was the father to her friends, “because the government insisted I go there.”

Sally confirmed that she and La Salle had lived in Baltimore for eight months before moving on to Dallas, and had only just arrived in San Jose. The entire time he held on to her, La Salle told Sally “that if I went back home, or they sent for me, or I ran away, I’d go to prison. The government ordered him to keep me and take care of me, that’s what he said.”

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. “The first time was in Baltimore right after we got there. And ever since, too.” And then in Dallas, she said a “school chum of mine” told her that what she was doing with Frank was “wrong, and I ought to stop. I did stop, too.”

She said La Salle was “mean and scolded me a little, but the rest of the time he treated me like a father.” Sally also said he had carried a gun for a time, in keeping with his pose as an FBI agent, but she thought La Salle had left it behind in Baltimore.

Sally was emphatic that La Salle was not her father. “My real daddy died when I was six and I remember what he looks like. I never saw [La Salle] before that day in the dime store.”

Once she began to talk, she could not stop. Until finally, pausing for breath, she said, “I want to go home as soon as I can.”

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. They’d been hiding behind other trailers. Deputies from the sheriff’s office. FBI agents. Local San Jose cops. All present because of a chain of events that began as soon as Sally Horner hung up the phone. La Salle did not fight, but instead surrendered quietly.

At the San Jose jail, La Salle grew more animated. He denied abducting Sally. He insisted he was her father and that her mother “has known where I am and where the girl is every day since I’ve been gone.” La Salle elaborated his alternate reality. “I took her when she was a little thing…. I am the father of six kids, three by this wife (Mrs. Horner) and three by another wife. I didn’t take [Sally] from Camden but from New York. It was four years ago, not two. She kept house for me and she had money and freedom.” The authorities, La Salle claimed, could have found him “at any time.” He had a business in Dallas, after all, and “always had cars registered in my name.” When he was done protesting his innocence, La Salle refused to speak further.

“He’s a tough, vicious character,” said Lieutenant Gibbons.

ELLA HORNER WAS OVERJOYED and overcome by the news that her daughter was alive and had been found. So much so that at first, she could hardly speak. When she composed herself, she told the large crowd of reporters and photographers who had descended upon 944 Linden Street that she was chiefly concerned with Sally’s safety. “I just want her back and to see her again. I am very thankful, and I will be a whole lot more thankful when I really see Sally.”

She also repeated the sentiment she’d expressed to the press—and, perhaps, countless other times in private—back in December 1948, while Sally was still missing. “Whatever she has done, I can forgive her.”

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.”

Ella repeated that Sally had been gone for nearly two years. “That’s a long time,” she said. “During that time, I didn’t hear from her. No word. No postcard. No news of any kind.”

About that June day when she allowed Sally to accompany Frank La Salle for a seashore vacation, she said, “I must have been very foolish… at least I know it now.” She picked up the picture of Sally again. “Anyway, I let her go. I haven’t seen her since….”

Weiner asked Ella if she ever gave up hope that Sally would be found alive. There were times, Ella said, where she felt “pretty hopeless” because “I always knew she had enough sense to call me or drop me a line.” And yet Sally hadn’t.

What did Ella think about Frank La Salle? “That man… ,” she began, but her voice broke.

Susan was sitting with her mother during Weiner’s interview, and picked up the thread. “I hope that man La Salle is properly punished. He should receive life imprisonment… or the electric chair.”

Then Susan turned her thoughts to a second telephone conversation she’d just had with her younger sister. “I couldn’t believe it was Sally I was talking to. It was wonderful.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t wait to see her.”

Sally had asked Susan how their mother was faring. She also asked after Susan’s daughter, Diana, now nineteen months old.

“She looks just like you,” Susan said, and Sally burst into tears.

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 are also the means through which Humbert discovers Charlotte’s accidental death, since he is too preoccupied with fixing her a drink to notice that she has left the house.

With Charlotte permanently out of the picture, he goes to pick up Dolores at Camp Q to break the news of her mother’s death in his own special way—“all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale.” After he picks her up, he takes Dolores to the Enchanted Hunters hotel, where he rapes her for the first time. The following morning, the telephone plays a pivotal role in binding the older man and girl together. Humbert had told Dolores that he was taking her to Charlotte, who he said was in the hospital in Lepingville. At a rest stop, Dolores asks: “Give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in the hospital. What’s the number?”

Humbert says, “You can’t call that number.”

“Why?” cries Dolores. “Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”

“Because,” he says, “your mother is dead.”

It is the news that totally breaks Lolita and puts her in Humbert Humbert’s power. He knows it, too: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

From there Humbert and Dolores begin their road trip, a journey that would take them thousands of miles across the United States. Deep into their trip, Humbert’s paranoia grows as he suspects Dolores has confided the truth about him to Mona, a school friend suspicious of the relationship between the so-called father and daughter: “the stealthy thought… that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself.”

Dolores’s first escape, after she yells “unprintable things” and accuses Humbert of murdering her mother and violating her, occurs as the phone rings and she breaks free of his grip on her wrist (in part echoing La Salle’s grip upon Sally’s arm at the Camden five-and-dime). That escape lasts only a few hours, and Humbert finds her “some ten paces away, through the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us).”

After that, Dolores asserts her will as to where they should go next. And then, though the reader is not privy to it, she makes a final, mysterious call, presumably to Clare Quilty, to help her escape. Telephones, Humbert concludes, “happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch.” For Dolores, telephones are the means for her to find freedom from the abuser who has engulfed her life—just as a telephone call was for Sally Horner.