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

The meager paper trail frustrated me. My patience frayed as I ran up against dead end after dead end, record search after fruitless record search, to try to build up a picture of the months Sally lived in Baltimore. If she made friends, or had someone she felt she could trust, I couldn’t find them. If there are people still living who knew her at the time, I could not track them down. If she kept a journal during her captivity, it did not survive. She did go to school in Baltimore—a Catholic school—but if any of its records remain, they are buried under decades of detritus no one has the inclination to sift through.

But I needed to understand what Sally was thinking and feeling—or at least approximate an understanding—so I read as many accounts as I could find by girls, born one or two generations after her, who survived years or decades of abuse by their kidnappers. I also examined kidnappings from the decade or so before Sally was taken.

Stranger abductions are rare now and were, perhaps, even rarer when Sally vanished. That’s why the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., in 1932 caught America’s attention and held it for weeks. The celebrity of the boy’s parents, superstar pilot Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, certainly helped, but the boy’s snatching felt like the manifestation of every parent’s worst fear—that their child might be stolen in the middle of the night from his bedroom by strangers—and kept the country gripped until the baby’s body was discovered weeks later.

Abductions where the child is held for a significant period of time before being rescued alive occur with even lesser frequency. That’s why, fourteen years before Sally Horner’s abduction, the kidnapping of six-year-old June Robles, the daughter of a well-to-do Tucson, Arizona, family, stood out. A man driving a Ford sedan waited for June after school on April 25, 1934, and enticed her to get into his car. Several ransom notes arrived at the Robles household. The first demanded fifteen thousand dollars; the second, ten thousand. Days passed with false sightings and near-arrests, until a Chicago-postmarked letter delivered to Arizona governor B. B. Moeur’s residence described where June was being held. A search in the Tucson desert turned up a metal box buried three feet underground. June, chained, malnourished, and covered in ant bites, was found alive inside.

For someone held captive in a tiny box for nineteen days, the girl was in remarkably good spirits. Several days after her rescue, June appeared at a press conference filmed by Pathé studios. (Reporters did not ask her questions, though, allowing her father, Fernando, to steer June through the session.) The little girl seemed poised, her answers sounding rehearsed. She said she was looking forward to going back to school that Friday. It was the last interview Robles ever gave. She never spoke to the media again.

As June’s public silence stretched, so did the investigation. Leads proved false, no arrests were made, a grand jury failed to indict anyone, and the FBI eventually gave up, privately agreeing with the grand jury’s conclusion of “alleged kidnapping.” June stayed in Tucson, where she married and had children and grandchildren. By the time she died in 2014, in such obscurity that it took the press three years to connect her to her childhood ordeal, authorities still had no proper answer about who kidnapped her. It remains a mystery, as does the effect the kidnapping had upon June and her family.

Captivity narratives, such as the recent “found alive” stories of young women including Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, Natascha Kampusch, and the trio Ariel Castro held prisoner in Cleveland, opened up a psychological trapdoor into Sally’s probable state of mind. They also allowed me to understand how kidnappers were able to subject these girls and women to years of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse.

Smart, Dugard, and Colleen Stan—the “Girl in the Box” under her tormentors’ sway for seven years—left their abductors’ homes, shopped at supermarkets, and even traveled (Stan visited her parents while she was a captive) without asking anyone for help. They survived by adjusting their mental maps so that brutality could be endured, but never entirely accepted as normal. Every day, every hour, their kidnappers told these women that their families had forgotten all about them. Year after year, their only experience of “love” came from those who abused, raped, and tortured them, creating a cognitive dissonance impossible to escape.

Dugard’s eighteen-year bond with her abductor resulted in her bearing two children by him. The fear of losing her daughters, no matter how squalid her situation, caused her to deny her real identity to the police at first, revealing the truth only when she felt secure that she was safe from her kidnappers. Smart, too, needed the same foundation of trust to tell law enforcement who she really was.

We know how these girls coped and felt because several of them published books about their extended ordeals. Smart, Dugard, and the Cleveland three—Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus together, and Michelle Knight on her own—were able to tell their stories the way they wished and when they chose. In doing so they sought to make something meaningful of their lives.

Sally Horner did not have the chance to tell her story to the world, unlike the women and girls of later generations. She also didn’t have the choice of keeping her account wholly private, unlike June Robles. What remains of her time on the road with Frank La Salle are bits and pieces cobbled together from court documents and corroborated by city records. Absence is as telling as substance. Inference will have to stand in for confidence. Imagination will have to fill in the rest.

THE SUMMER’S GREAT HEAT WAVE was some weeks away, but it still sweltered plenty on the Baltimore-bound bus. Frank La Salle and Sally Horner had taken a taxicab to the bus depot in Philadelphia. Perhaps Sally wondered why they were going so far out of the way if they were headed south. Maybe she asked why they had to leave Atlantic City so quickly, or where the station wagon had gone, or why they had to leave their clothes and photos behind. Most likely, she kept any complaints or questions to herself.

She had to keep remembering the script, that La Salle was her father. His word was law. She had to stick to the story to avoid punishment. She had to endure his daily torments. She had to retreat to her own mind to escape the void of her current situation.

The cab pulled up in front of the Philadelphia station. Frank and Sally made their way to the Greyhound bus bound for Baltimore before it pulled away at 11:00 A.M. He bought their tickets, Sally squeaking under the wire for the half-price fare. They settled in their seats for the three-hour trip. They may not have been alone. Sally later said that a woman she knew as “Miss Robinson” had joined them. La Salle had told her the woman was some sort of assistant or secretary. She was perhaps twenty-five, though an eleven-year-old girl’s sense of how old people are can be skewed.

The Philadelphia Greyhound made one stop along the way, either in Wilmington or in Oxford, Delaware. After the short break, the bus moved over to Route 40, which turned into the Pulaski Highway. Was Sally impressed by the wider lanes and speeding cars on the still-new highway? What did she allow herself to dream over the three-hour trip before the bus pulled into the downtown depot in Baltimore? Did she hope for a chance of escape, or had she resigned herself to being trapped by La Salle’s new vision of her life?

They arrived in Baltimore just after 2:15 in the afternoon. “Miss Robinson,” if she existed, vanished from the picture, perhaps as soon as they got off the bus, collected their luggage, and looked for a cab or local transit to take them to their lodgings. Most likely they ended up staying downtown that first evening and for the next few days, around West Franklin Street in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon. Blocks away lay the city’s most prized landmarks, including City Hall, the Museum of Art, and the original Washington Monument. Testaments to Baltimore’s beauty and power, but also a refuge out of Sally’s grasp.