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

^Twenty-Eight “He Told Me Not to Tell”

Decades after Ruth Janisch gently coaxed Sally Horner to make the long-distance telephone call that freed her from Frank La Salle, Ruth was having tea with her daughter Rachel. After years of estrangement, Rachel had decided she wanted a closer relationship to her mother.

In Sally’s story, Ruth was a heroine whose actions changed the course of a girl’s life forever. But to her children, Ruth was a more complicated, infuriating, mercurial, manipulative creature, whose actions led to long estrangements. That troubling Ruth was not yet in full bloom in 1949 and 1950. Much of her aberrant behavior was still in the future. Rachel described her mother’s life philosophy to me: Ruth would meet someone and say something along the lines of “Hello, my name is Ruth. What can you do for me?”

Years into adulthood, some of Ruth’s children would make peace with the woman she was. Yes, Ruth had done terrible things in the past. She had looked the other way when her children were abused, physically, emotionally, and sexually, by the men in her life, be they husbands or short-lived romantic partners. Ruth had, at times, enabled that abuse by not believing her children and choosing, instead, to believe the men. One of them ended up as Rachel’s first and only husband.

Ruth was working at a bus station in the Bay Area at that time, around the early 1960s. One of her coworkers had two sons, whom Ruth decided must meet her daughters. Ruth wanted the older boy for herself, but she thought the younger one, still a teenager, would be perfect for Rachel. Instead, the younger boy expressed no interest, and the older one gravitated toward Rachel in a way that made her wonder, much later, if there was something more calculated at play.

Rachel grew certain that her mother had made some sordid arrangement with the older boy. That in order for him to have access to Rachel, he had to have some romantic involvement with her mother. Ruth also goaded her daughter about him at the time, saying she couldn’t possibly land a man like him. Rachel would not grasp the impact of her mother’s verbal abuse for years. Then, she thought Ruth’s behavior was normal.

Rachel did “land” the boy, became pregnant, and she then married him in haste and moved away from home. Seventeen years, three children, numerous moves, and countless beatings, rapes, and threats to her life later, Rachel managed to break free. “It was less a marriage than extended captivity,” she said. When she dared to speak up for herself, her husband punished her. He repeated the pattern she knew too well from childhood, when confessing that something hurt her caused more hurt, psychologically from Ruth and physically from her husbands or partners.

Once Rachel’s divorce was final, in the late 1970s, she found a job near where her mother lived. She also thought about what kind of relationship she wanted with Ruth. Because Rachel, despite the past, liked her mother. They shared a love of gardening and of books. As adult women, they could converse, if not as equals then at least on a similar plane. Rachel decided she could handle visiting Ruth at least once a week for tea. The visits were calm at first. She felt herself understanding her mother better. She felt she had enough emotional distance to appreciate Ruth, the woman, and leave the baggage of neglect and abuse behind.

What Rachel created in this new relationship with her mother was a cocoon where old wounds could be erased. But the cocoon turned out to be an illusion. That it broke apart, Rachel realized, should not have surprised her as it did.

One afternoon, Rachel turned up at Ruth’s house and found her mother immersed in her scrapbooks. They were a living testament to Ruth’s belief that she mattered. Subsequent visits by Rachel and other daughters led to them discovering that the scrapbooks contained items Ruth had no business possessing, items she had pilfered from her children without their immediate knowledge, but Rachel wasn’t aware of that yet. As mother and daughter sat for tea, one scrapbook lay between them. The one Ruth had been working on earlier that morning.

Lying next to the scrapbook was an old paperback novel that Rachel didn’t recognize.

Ruth pointed to a newspaper clipping in the scrapbook. “Do you remember this little girl?” Ruth moved her finger to the headline. “Do you remember that girl, Sally Horner?”

“I do remember,” said Rachel.

“And do you remember Frank La Salle, the man who kidnapped her?”

“I do remember,” Rachel said again.

Rachel told me that she felt herself grow cold. But Ruth did not notice, or even understand, her daughter’s reaction.

“Wasn’t that quite the story?” Ruth carried on. “They’re mentioned in this novel, Lolita!”

Rachel hadn’t heard this story before. She would hear a different version of it years later from her sister Vanessa, who had read the novel—that same tattered paperback—at Ruth’s insistence. Vanessa, sixteen at the time, was puzzled at first at her mother’s insistence she read the novel. Then Ruth explained: “Lolita tells the story of a girl named Sally Horner. A girl who died just before you were born. A girl I helped rescue from a man named Frank La Salle.” This was no mere novel, but literary validation of Ruth’s sense of self, that her single act of decency had larger heroic meaning. Vanessa couldn’t help but read Lolita with her mother’s words echoing in her head. But she also couldn’t read it without thinking of the ways in which Ruth had wronged the family.

Staring at the scrapbook, Rachel knew she had to speak up now or she would never be able to say the words again.

“Mom, there’s something I need to tell you. Something I never told you. Frank La Salle didn’t only molest Sally. He also molested me.”

ONE AFTERNOON while Sally Horner was at school, Frank La Salle invited Rachel over to his trailer. At age five, Rachel wore her white-blond hair in pigtails, a ribbon adorning the left plait. She put on her favorite striped black-and-white dress every chance she got. One portrait of Rachel from that time depicts her as the ideal of innocence. Her smile is trusting, guileless. Her expression is pliant, hinting at a gullible streak that would plague her repeatedly in adulthood.

She might have been by herself, or with one of her sisters. What she most recalled was that Frank was nice to her. He seemed to understand what Rachel wanted. That she saw what Sally had—toys, games, a father’s love—and didn’t have them. Not the toys. Not the games. And her father, George, was a remote presence, more comfortable with adults than with his children.

Of all the things Sally possessed, what interested Rachel most were her crayons and coloring books. They reminded Rachel of an earlier stay at a Minnesota hospital when she was three, quarantined for months with rheumatic fever. She went to school at the hospital because she wasn’t allowed to go home. There were troubles, both at home and in the hospital, the kind so traumatizing Rachel would not remember them for decades without the trigger of unexpected smells and brief image flashes. But what came back to her now was the memory of her parents visiting with big smiles and good cheer, and of learning how to draw with crayons.

Frank made Rachel a deal: She could play with anything of Sally’s. Anything at all. But she had to do favors for him first.

“Essentially, what he wanted from me was to give him a blow job,” Rachel said. “So I did.”

Rachel remembered a single incident. There may have been others that she blocked out. She didn’t remember it until after she was married, and her husband wanted the same thing. The sexual act seemed disgusting to the newly married Rachel, and it would take her years to learn it flowed from normal, healthy desire.

She only realized the enormity of what Frank had done to her when she stumbled across a pamphlet at the local library, long after the end of her marriage. The pamphlet was about child molestation. Its title: “He Told Me Not to Tell.”

Frank La Salle had told Rachel not to tell. But Rachel would have stayed silent regardless. The girl’s earlier hospital experience taught her not to trust adults. They could abandon you for months. They could leave you alone and never tell you when you might come home. And when you did come home, you didn’t know what awaited. Whether it was a safe haven or a recurring nightmare.

While telling the story to me nearly forty years after the fact, Rachel would recall that when she told her mother what La Salle had done, a barrier went up right away between herself and Ruth. Like an electrified fence where venturing too close might lead to a surprise shock. She felt her mother shut down. Rachel decided to change the subject to safer territory. She had taken a risk and it did not work. When that happened, as it had so many times in her past, the best thing to do was to be like a turtle. Retreat within the shell and never reveal your vulnerable self again.

Afterwards, she and Ruth would never be as close. (There would be other visits, including a reunion of all but one of Ruth’s children in 1998, six years before Ruth died.) Rachel sensed her mother must have known, on some level, why there was a new breach between them. Perhaps, Rachel theorized, her mother had helped Sally Horner because she knew she could not save her own children from nearby monsters. But letting her thoughts run in this direction was too much for Rachel. She suspected Ruth never allowed herself to contemplate her complicity in the damage done to her own children.

No wonder Ruth acted as if the conversation never happened. The subject never came up between them again. Neither did Lolita.