Florence Sally Horner was a girl abducted by serial child molester Frank La Salle in 1948.
Abduction
In early 1948, Sally Horner, a 5th grade student in Camden, New Jersey, attempted to shoplift a notebook from a five-and-dime store after a group of girls at her school told her to do it to be accepted into their social clique--the daughter of a single mother whose father had committed suicide when she was 6 years old, Horner grew up in meager circumstances with little money and was somewhat of a social outcast and a loner eager for any opportunity to fit in with peers. She was quickly confronted by a man who identified himself as an FBI agent and told her that she would be in a great deal of trouble for stealing the notebook and might end up in reform school. The man was in fact Frank La Salle, a 50 year old mechanic who had an extensive rap sheet for molesting girls between the ages of 11 and 14 and had been released from prison only six months earlier. La Salle instructed Horner that he would have to monitor her from now on, which she believed. Three months later, La Salle confronted Horner while she was walking home from school and told her that she would have to come with him to Atlantic City by order of the FBI. He instructed her to tell her mother that he was the father of two of her school friends and she had been invited on their family vacation to the New Jersey shore. Horner's mother Ella did not question if La Salle was telling the truth and gave her approval to the trip--since she could not afford to take her daughter on a summer vacation herself, she was willing to let her have the opportunity with someone else. La Salle began presenting the two in public as a father and daughter and Horner made regular phone calls to her mother, who still believed she was vacationing with a family friend, but by the end of July the latter began feeling that something was amiss and contacted police, who issued a missing child alert in New Jersey and several surrounding states. La Salle fled Atlantic City with Horner and took her to Baltimore where he raped her. Afterwards, Horner was raped repeatedly with La Salle using the constant threat of reporting Horner's shoplifting to get her to submit to his demands. When police searched the Atlantic City boarding house where the pair had stayed, they found an undated photograph of Horner on a swingset. This was widely circulated in the press; since Ella Horner did not recognize the photo, it may have been taken by La Salle at some point. With the new school year starting at the end of August, La Salle enrolled Horner in a Baltimore Catholic school under a pseudonym and they continued to live there for the next six months. In March 1949, Camden police indicted La Salle in absentia for kidnapping, so he and Horner fled the area and moved far away to Dallas, Texas. During this entire time, Horner still believed La Salle was an FBI agent. After arriving in Dallas, they took up residence in a trailer park and Horner began attending another Catholic school under a pseudonym. A neighbor, Ruth Janisch, became suspicious of the pair and questioned Horner about the true nature of their relationship, but she would not say. Soon afterward, Janisch and her husband moved to San Jose, California, but she still believed something was amiss. After moving, she wrote to La Salle about job opportunities in San Jose and suggested that he come there. Although Horner had resisted telling Janisch her secret, she eventually admitted it to a classmate in Dallas. The girl told her that what she and La Salle were doing was wrong and that they should stop immediately, and, as she later told police, "I began to reject his advances after that." In early 1950, La Salle and Horner headed to San Jose where they met up with the Janischs. Soon afterwards, while La Salle was away job searching, Horner confessed the truth to Ruth Janisch and told her she missed her mother and wanted to go home. Janisch invited Horner to make a long distance phone call to her older sister in New Jersey, after which they contacted police, who took Horner to a children's shelter and arrested La Salle when he returned home. He offered no resistance, but continued to maintain that he was Horner's father, which was disproven when police performed record checks in Camden and found that her real father had been dead for seven years. Questioned by police, Horner was reluctant to acknowledge that she had been raped many times during the course of her 21 month captivity, but eventually admitted it and also told them that she believed she would go to prison for shoplifting if she didn't comply with La Salle's sexual demands. She recounted that she had served a sort of "housewife" role for her captor, in addition to providing him with sex, she also cooked their meals and performed household chores in the various lodgings they'd stayed in. Horner was reunited with her mother in Camden and attempted to resume her life after 21 months of captivity; 11 years old when she was abducted, she had celebrated her 12th birthday while she and La Salle were in Texas and was a few weeks shy of 13 when she returned home. La Salle was convicted under the Mann Act. During his trial, he refused any legal defense and pleaded guilty to all charges. Horner was not asked to testify at the trial. La Salle was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He served his sentence in the New Jersey State Penitentary in Trenton, where he died in 1967 at the age of 69. During his prison sentence, La Salle filed repeated, unsuccessful appeals in addition to turning down legal counsel and attempting to act as his own attorney. He even sent a bouquet of flowers to Horner's funeral, which her family did not put out on display.
Death
Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen recommended that Horner and her mother leave the area and start a new life elsewhere under assumed names, but they declined and attempted to resume their lives as usual. Horner experienced a difficult readjustment to her normal life--mental health care for victims of sex crimes was limited at the time and she experienced frequent taunting and abuse from classmates who accused her of deliberately provoking her kidnapper's attention. Two years later, in August 1952, the now 15 year old Horner went on a summer trip to the New Jersey shore with a friend. Using a fake ID to pass herself off as a 21 year old, a common practice among teenagers in that era to get into age-restricted restaurants and entertainment venues, she began dating a 20 year old man named Edward Baker, telling him she was 17. While riding in Baker's 1951 Ford on the evening of August 18, Horner was killed when Baker slammed into the rear of a parked truck that he had been unable to see in the darkness. Baker escaped with lacerations and a few broken bones, but Horner suffered massive, fatal injuries to her head, neck, and chest when the rear bumper of the truck smashed into the passenger compartment of the Ford. She was buried in the family plot in New Egypt, New Jersey. As the Associated Press reported on August 20, 1952: "Florence Sally Horner, a 15-year-old Camden, N.J., girl who spent 21 months as the captive of a middle-aged morals offender a few years ago, was killed in a highway accident when the car in which she was riding plowed into the rear of a parked truck."
Cultural references
Critic Alexander Dolinin proposed in 2005 that Frank La Salle and Florence Sally Horner were the real life prototypes of Humbert Humbert and Dolores "Lolita" Haze from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Sarah Weinman's book The Real Lolita also alleges that Horner's ordeal inspired Lolita. Although Nabokov had already used the same basic idea—that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as father and daughter—in his then unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik , it is still possible that he drew on the details of the Horner case in writing Lolita. An English translation of Volshebnik was published in 1985 as The Enchanter. Nabokov explicitly mentions the Horner case in Chapter 33, Part II of Lolita: "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?"
