The true crime behind Lolita’
Kidnapped by a man claiming to be FBI, a New Jersey preteen was taken on a hellish cross-country adventure — then had her tragic story romanticized by Nabokov
SALLY Horner, age 11, kissed her mother goodbye and climbed aboard a bus bound for Atlantic City. “It was a chance for Sally to get a little vacation,” Ella Horner would later recall — a seaside escape from steamy Camden, NJ, in the summer of 1948.
She entrusted her girl to a man she knew as Mr. Warner. Sally said he was the father of a school friend who had invited her to join their family at the Jersey Shore. He had been so charming when he called Ella on the phone to explain that he and his wife had “plenty of room” for Sally in their beachside apartment.
It was the last Ella would see of her daughter for nearly two years.
Sally’s beach trip became a crosscountry odyssey as Frank La Salle, a convicted pedophile, took her on the lam, posing as her father in public and raping her repeatedly behind closed doors.
If the scenario sounds familiar, it should. It’s the basic plot of “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov’s enduring 1955 novel about a middle-aged man’s sexual fixation on a prepubescent girl.
Now, two books — the novel “Rust & Stardust” by T. Greenwood (St. Martin’s, out Tuesday) and the nonfiction “The Real Lolita” (Ecco, Sept. 11) by Sarah Weinman — look at how Sally’s kidnapping, exploitation and early death provided the raw materials for Nabokov to complete a novel that had bedeviled him for a decade.
Florence “Sally” Horner lived with her widowed mother and an older sister in Camden, where Ella supported them by working long hours as a seamstress.
In the spring of 1948, the bookish fifth-grader took a dare from a clique of popular girls in her class to shoplift an item from the local Woolworths. She sneaked a five-cent notebook into her bag and was quickly grabbed by a stern-looking older man.
“I am an FBI agent, and you are under arrest,” he said.
In fact, he was La Salle, 53, just out of state prison. He’d been convicted on five counts of statutory rape for “forced intimacies” with 12- to 14year-old girls.
He told Sally that an FBI agent like him had a responsibility to send young thieves to the reformatory. The girl burst into tears, and he seemed to soften. He’d make her a deal, he said: If she promised to obey him whenever he checked in on her, he would let her go.
In June, he reappeared, intercepting her as she walked home alone from school. The government wanted her in Atlantic City, he said. She was to trick her mother with a cover story about a family vacation with a friend.
“If I went back home, or they sent for me, or I ran away, I’d go to prison,” Sally eventually told investigators. “The government ordered him to keep me and take care of me, that’s what he said.”
The pair rented a room in a boardinghouse a few blocks from the beach on June 14. Soon they were presenting themselves as father and daughter.
Ella received letters and phone calls from Sally for six weeks. Then, on July 31, Sally wrote that she was heading to Baltimore. She promised she’d be home soon — but added ominously, “I don’t want to write anymore.” Worried, Ella called the police. Camden cops visited the return address on Sally’s letters on Aug. 4. The room still contained two packed suitcases and a photograph that Ella had never seen: Sally on a swing, smiling uncertainly in a frilly dress, bobby socks and shiny patentleather shoes.
Although it’s unknown what prompted La Salle to leave in such a rush, detectives told the press, “He didn’t even stop long enough to get his hat.”
AN eight-state police search began Aug. 5, and the photo of the girl on the swing appeared in papers nationwide. A Camden prosecutor filed abduction charges against La Salle.
Meanwhile, Sally and her “father” were just where she said they would be. There, the rapes began.
“The first time was in Baltimore right after we got there,” she told police later. “And ever since, too.”
The two took an apartment in a three-story brick row house. La Salle found a job and enrolled Sally in a Catholic grammar school, where she attended sixth grade as Madeleine LaPlante. He told neighbors that he had divorced his dissolute wife to give his girl a more stable home.
Back in Camden, the police kept working Sally’s case. In March 1949, prosecutors indicted La Salle in absentia for kidnapping, which carried a prison term of 30 to 35 years.
The news spurred him to hit the road again. He told Sally — who still believed he was an FBI agent — he had to investigate a new case out west. They ended up in Dallas in late April. Sally turned 12 during the journey to Texas.
The two, still posing as father and daughter, moved into a trailer park, where La Salle claimed to be a widower named Planette. Sally began going by her given name, Florence. La Salle got a job as a mechanic and Sally started seventh grade at another Catholic school. She cooked their meals and sometimes baked.
They “seemed happy and entirely devoted to each other,” one neighbor said to investigators.
Another neighbor, Ruth Janisch, wasn’t so sure. “He never let [Sally] out of his sight, except when she was at school,” she noticed. Concerned, she tried to pry the truth out of the girl, without success.
Janisch and her family moved on, and when they arrived in San Jose, Calif., Ruth wrote La Salle about job opportunities there.
In February 1950, 20 months after he had abducted her, Le Salle pulled Sally out of school for another move.
But before leaving Dallas, Sally confided to a new friend at school what La Salle had been doing to her for the last year and a half. Her friend’s judgment was swift: It was “wrong, and I ought to stop,” Sally said later, “I did stop, too.” She began to rebuff La Salle’s advances.
The two joined the Janisches at the El Cortez Motor Inn. On March 21, when La Salle left to seek work, Janisch invited the girl over.
Finally, the story poured out — how La Salle had kidnapped and threatened her and how much she missed her mother. She kept quiet about the sexual abuse.
Janisch helped the girl dial a long-distance call that reached Al Panaro, Sally’s brother-in-law.
“I’m with a lady friend in California. Send the FBI after me, please!” the girl shouted over the cross-country static.
As a phalanx of cops headed for the trailer park, Sally nearly collapsed. “What will Frank do when he finds out what I have done?” she moaned.
LOCAL deputies took the terrified 12year-old to a children’s shelter, while other officers staked out La Salle’s mobile home. When he returned, he surrendered quietly.
The sheriff questioned Sally gently, asking if her captor had “been intimate” with her. She denied it at first but finally admitted the truth.
“Whatever she has done, I can forgive her,” Ella said back in Camden.
Not surprisingly, Sally “fretted a lot about whether her folks would want her after what happened,” the matron at the children’s home told reporters.
With the nation captivated by the story, the press corps followed Sally’s every move. On March 31, they snapped pictures of her boarding an airplane home and the tearful reunion with Ella in Philadelphia.
La Salle was extradited to New Jersey. On April 3, 1950, he pleaded guilty and was immediately sentenced to 41 years in prison.
Sally was spared the ordeal of having to testify against him in her home town. But the damage was done. All of Camden knew what had happened to her. In the 1950s, rape victims bore a badge of shame. “They looked at her as a total whore,” her friend Carol Starts said of their classmates’ harsh welcome back to junior high.
With no such thing as trauma counseling or victim support groups, Sally dealt with the aftermath alone. “She never said she was sad or depressed,” Al Panaro said. “But you knew something was wrong.”
AT the time of Sally’s abduction, Nabokov had been struggling for nearly a decade with a novel he tentatively called “The Kingdom by the Sea,” about a man madly obsessed with a young girl. The Russian-American novelist made careful observations of adolescent slang and attitudes — reading teen magazines and even visiting a girls’ school on the pretext of wanting to enroll a nonexistent daughter — and took relentless notes.
Nabokov, who had published two novels in English by 1948, tended to scribble notes and scenes on index cards while writing his books. His wife, Vera, would type these into manuscript form before he burned the notes. But he found himself stymied by the plot of “The Kingdom by the Sea.” Several times, when her husband despaired of completing his story, he attempted to burn the manuscript and Vera had to rescue the typed pages from the flames.
In the summer of 1952, as Nabokov wrestled with his frustrating project, 15-yearold Sally and her friend Carol took a weekend trip to Wildwood on the Jersey Shore. Forged ID in hand, she passed herself off as 17 to Ed Baker, 20, who spent the next two days with her.
“She impressed me as a darn nice girl,” Baker said. “Who asks to see birth certificates when you go out with a girl?”
Baker offered to take Sally on a drive before she caught a Camden-bound bus. Just after midnight on Aug. 18, speeding along a dark two-lane highway, he plowed into the back of a broken-down truck. The car’s passenger side took the worst of the impact. Sally died instantly. The tragic end of the lost-and-found kidnapping victim set off a fresh round of news coverage — including a story devoured by Vladimir Nabokov.
The article he transcribed onto one of his notecards called Sally the “cross-country slave” of a “middle-aged morals offender” who “was branded a ‘moral leper’ by the sentencing judge.” That note is one of the few the author saved with his archived papers.
It all set off a creative burst that carried Nabokov through the completion of “Lolita” in 1953. Sally’s story, which parallels his heroine’s throughout the second half of the book, “helped him to transform a partial manuscript primed for failure” into a 50-million-copy best-seller, Weinman writes.
Nabokov never admitted to Sally’s role in the “Lolita” backstory. But he did tuck a tribute into its pages.
As the novel nears its end, narrator Humbert Humbert asks himself: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank La Salle, a 50-year-old mechanic, had done to 11-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”