Sarah Weinman - The Real Lolita - The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

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] I am withholding their last names to protect the privacy of their families, and because of the difficulty in locating descendants to verify the details. 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.