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

^Seven Frank, in Shadow

Unlike Humbert Humbert, there was nothing erudite about Frank La Salle. His prison writings are unreliable, lacking the silky sheen that is Lolita’s narrative hallmark; grammatical mistakes pepper La Salle’s rambling and incoherent oral and typewritten declamations. When he was employed, irregularly at best, he worked blue-collar jobs, a far cry from teaching foreign languages.

La Salle was a crude, slippery figure, who lied so much in middle age that it was impossible for me to verify the facts of the first four decades of his life. One pseudonym dead-ended into another. Calls and emails to helpful, friendly archivists around the country bore no fruit, save for commiseration over my extended, failed, quest.

Without knowing the substance of his childhood and upbringing, and whether or not his predilections asserted themselves early on, it was difficult for me to determine where he came by his long-running desire for young girls. La Salle behaved as a pedophile, but it’s hard to say whether that was his orientation—compulsion spurring opportunity—or he impulsively seized on opportunity as a means of asserting power. Whatever he was is dwarfed by what he did.

A likely birth date is May 27, 1895, give or take a year, somewhere in the Midwest. Frank La Salle was probably not his birth name. Once, he said that his parents were Frank Patterson and Nora LaPlante. Another time he wrote down their names as Frank La Salle and Nora Johnson. He hailed from Indianapolis, or perhaps Chicago. He said he served four years at the Leavenworth, Kansas, federal prison between 1924 and 1928 on a bootlegging charge, but the prison has no record of him being there during those years. He needed a new origin story every time he changed aliases, among them Patterson, Johnson, LaPlante, and O’Keefe. As far as I could find out, the first name almost never varied.

For someone who shrouded his life in secrecy, it seems fitting that one of his most notorious aliases was that of Frank Fogg.

It is as Fogg that a sharper picture forms of the man later known as La Salle. In the summer of 1937, Fogg had a wife and a nine-year-old son. They lived in a trailer in Maple Shade, New Jersey. He claimed that his wife took their son and ran away with a mechanic. It’s possible that might be true. By July 14 they were gone, and just over a week later Fogg himself would become a fugitive, with a new wife in tow.

He met her at a carnival: Dorothy Dare, not quite eighteen, with brown curly hair that framed an openhearted, bespectacled face. Born in Philadelphia, the oldest of six, Dorothy lived with her family in Merchantville, a ten-minute car trip from Maple Shade, and had graduated high school just the month before. Fights with her father over his strict parenting had grown so tense that Dorothy looked for every chance to escape. At the carnival, she found it in the man calling himself Frank Fogg.

He was more than twice as old as Dorothy, but she didn’t mind the age difference. He wanted to marry her and she thought it was a terrific idea to elope. Which they did, only a few days after meeting, to Elkton, Maryland, the “Gretna Green of the United States,” where weddings happened fast with few questions asked.

Dorothy’s father, David Dare, was livid. Though they fought, he knew Dorothy was fundamentally a good girl. Even if she was not, technically, a minor, she was young, and this Fogg fellow was clearly not. When Dare discovered that Fogg was using a fake name, and was actually married, he got local police to swear out an eight-state warrant for the man’s arrest on kidnapping and statutory rape charges on July 22, 1937. He claimed that Dorothy was fifteen, and thus a minor. The law caught up with the couple ten days later.

Cops arrested La Salle, still using the Fogg alias, in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, where he’d found a job, and took him to jail in Haddonfield, New Jersey. The charge: enticing a minor. Bail: withheld. Police simultaneously picked up Dorothy in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Wissahickon, where the couple had rented a room, and also brought her to jail. The two had a surprise for the arresting officers: Dorothy was not a minor, their Elkton marriage was legit, and Frank had the certificate, dated July 31, to prove it.

“He told me the truth,” Dorothy cried, nervously fingering the shiny gold ring on her left hand. “I know he did. He couldn’t have been married before. But if he did—oh, I’d just want to die!” Not long after uttering those words, Dorothy was released from jail, and slipped away from her parents, not yet ready to give up on her new husband, Frank.

The next morning, La Salle appeared in Delaware Township court. Dorothy was not there; nor did anyone know her whereabouts. Her father, however, was very much present. When he spotted La Salle, he punched the other man in the jaw. Dare grew even more furious when the presiding judge, Ralph King, dismissed the charges against La Salle, after the man testified that Dorothy had gone with him of her own will, and that they were lawfully married.

“I’ll lock you up if you aren’t careful,” King warned Dare after he raised his voice in court one too many times demanding La Salle be held. But in the end, Dare got his wish, because the court wasn’t done with Frank.

A day after the eight-state warrant had gone out on the wire, there was a hit-and-run accident near Marlton. A car resembling the one La Salle drove collided with a car owned by a man named Curt Scheffler. The driver of the first car fled the scene. La Salle, in court, denied he had been the driver. Justice of the Peace Oliver Bowen disagreed. On August 11, 1937, La Salle was fined fifty dollars and sentenced to fifteen days in jail. He also received an additional thirty days’ sentence after failing to pay a two-hundred-dollar fine for giving false information. When he got out of jail, Dorothy was waiting. They picked up their marriage where it had been interrupted, and, apparently, the next few years were happy ones.

Dorothy and Frank, who cast off the Fogg alias and was La Salle once more, moved to Atlantic City. Their daughter, Madeline (not her real name), was born in 1939, and the young family were living at 203 Pacific Avenue when the Census came knocking a year later. So, too, did police, who this time arrested La Salle on bigamy charges. Few details are available—was it the earlier wife or a different woman?—save that La Salle wriggled out of it with an acquittal.

Two years later, when Madeline was three, Dorothy sued Frank for desertion and nonpayment of child support. Dare family lore had it that Dorothy discovered her husband in a car with another woman, and grew so enraged she hit the other woman over the head with her shoe.

What was passed down as a dark but amusing family story turned out to hide a more sinister truth. What Dorothy Dare discovered about her husband first came to light in the wee hours of March 10, 1942.

THREE CAMDEN POLICE OFFICERS walked into a restaurant on Broadway near the corner of Penn and spotted a girl sitting alone in a booth. Women sitting by themselves in public at three in the morning still stand out. Imagine what the cops thought in the early 1940s when they stumbled across a twelve-year-old girl all on her own so late in the night.

When acting sergeant Edward Shapiro and patrolmen Thomas Carroll and Donald Watson asked the girl what she was up to, “being out alone at such an hour,” she evaded their questioning. So the policemen took her back to headquarters, where a city detective would ask the questions.

Under gentle coaxing by police sergeant John V. Wilkie, the girl opened up. She admitted she’d been out that night because she “had a date with a man about 40 years old.” The man’s name, she said, was Frank La Salle. He’d given her a card with the phone number and address of the Philadelphia auto body shop where he worked.

In his report, Wilkie wrote that the girl said La Salle had “forced her into intimacies.” The girl almost certainly used plainer language. She also told Wilkie that La Salle made her introduce him to four of her friends by threatening to tell her mother what she had done with him.

The five girls were Loretta, Margaret, Sarah, Erma, and Virginia.[2] From the available records, it’s not clear which of them was the one in the diner, but based on their birth dates, it was likely Loretta or Margaret. (Sarah, the oldest, had just turned fifteen.) All of them lived in Camden County, either in the city or in nearby Pennsauken. All of them were named in a 1944 divorce petition by Dorothy Dare as having “committed adultery” with her husband.

When police brought the other girls in to be questioned, Wilkie reported, each of them also told of “how they had been raped by La Salle.”

SERGEANT WILKIE SWORE OUT a warrant for Frank La Salle’s arrest, alerting police in Philadelphia of the twelve-year-old girl’s sickening allegation. But when police showed up at La Salle’s workplace, he wasn’t there. They didn’t find him at his last known address, either. Who knows how La Salle learned the police were coming for him, but he had fled. What’s more, police learned, he’d gone back to his earlier alias of Fogg. They dug up an address in Maple Shade, then received word that he, Dorothy, and Madeline had moved back to Camden.

Police got a tip La Salle and his family now lived at a house on the 1000 block on Cooper Street. They kept the place under constant surveillance, hoping he might turn up. On the evening of March 15, a car pulled up in front of the house. The car had a license number linked to La Salle.

Detectives rushed into the house. They found and arrested a nineteen-year-old man who claimed he was La Salle’s brother-in-law. But no La Salle. “We found out later,” Wilkie said, “that as detectives walked up the front steps, La Salle made his escape out the back door.”

For nearly a year, La Salle eluded the law. An official indictment for the statutory rape of the five girls came down on September 4, 1942. Tips streamed into Camden and Philadelphia police placing him in New Jersey, and sometimes in Pennsylvania, but nothing panned out—not until the beginning of February 1943, when cops got a tip that La Salle now lived at 1414 Euclid Avenue in Philadelphia, in the heart of where Temple University stands today.

On February 2, police descended upon the house and found La Salle, alone. They arrested him, taking him back to Camden to be arraigned. The Camden city court judge who signed the indictment and oversaw the February 10 hearing was a man named Mitchell Cohen. The two men would meet again, seven years later, in even more explosive circumstances.

La Salle pleaded not guilty to the multiple rape indictments from the Camden grand jury, but on March 22, 1943, he changed his plea to non vult, or no contest. The presiding judge, Bartholomew Sheehan, sentenced La Salle to two and a half years on each rape charge, to be served concurrently at Trenton State Prison.

WHILE LA SALLE was incarcerated, Dorothy and Madeline had moved back to Merchantville to be closer to Dorothy’s parents. She moved quickly to divorce him, filing a petition on January 11, 1944, stating that La Salle had “committed adultery” with the five girls beginning on March 9, 1942—the night the first girl reported her rape to police—and “at various times” between that date and February 1943, when La Salle was finally arrested. Frank wrote her frequently from prison—a habit he would repeat later in life—but if he meant to persuade Dorothy to stay married to him, he was not successful.

La Salle was paroled on June 18, 1944, after fourteen months in prison. He took a room at the YMCA on Broadway and Federal, registered for the draft, and got his Social Security card. He also had to register with the city as a convicted criminal; a blurry photo from June 29, 1944, shows a middle-aged man with gray hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a squint. He wore a more subdued expression than in the prison intake photo from March 1943, where he’d smirked at the camera, seemingly free from worry or care.

La Salle found work as a car mechanic in Philadelphia, but found himself in repeated trouble with the law. An indecent assault charge was dropped on Halloween, but the following August, he got caught at Camden’s Third National Bank trying to pass off a forged $110 check. He was indicted the following month and swiftly convicted for “obtaining money under false pretenses.” His divorce from Dorothy also moved toward completion that same month. The family court judge awarded full custody of Madeline to her mother on August 21. The divorce was final on November 23.

La Salle returned to Trenton State Prison on March 18, 1946, to serve eighteen months to five years on the new charges. The clock also began again on the balance of the statutory rape sentence. La Salle finished up both those sentences in January 1948, and was paroled again on the fifteenth of that month.

Now that he was back on the streets, it seems likely La Salle went to the downtown Camden YMCA for a cheap place to stay. It was across the street from Woolworth’s, where weeks later, on a crisp March afternoon, he would spy a ten-year-old girl attempting to steal a five-cent notebook.