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

La Salle needed to find work right away. The Belvedere Hotel, a place so swanky that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson stayed there, may have hired him. It was less than a mile’s walk from West Franklin Street. It would explain why La Salle listed a hotel bellman named Anthony Janney as a reference in later court documents. And what better place for a fugitive to hide than among hotel staff serving the toniest, richest guests in a Beaux Arts building nestled within Baltimore’s most prominent neighborhood?

I was also struck, while walking around the district, by how close Sally was to the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It’s a wonderful place for researchers, and a safe harbor for bookish types of all kinds. Sally loved to read; were books a way for her to imagine herself in different worlds she could control, or was the library yet another place she couldn’t go, somewhere she fantasized about as a refuge from Frank La Salle’s relentless assaults?

Because in Baltimore, something changed in their relationship. Publicly, they kept up the pose of father and daughter. In private, the power imbalance between them grew more noxious. It was in Baltimore, according to Sally, that rape became a regular occurrence. It was the place where Frank La Salle subjugated her totally to his will psychologically and physically. The outside world never had a clue, even after La Salle sent his “daughter” to school.

There was no way he could have kept her home if he wanted to maintain the illusion of normalcy. The summer was over and an eleven-year-old girl, shut away at home or loose on the streets while he was at work, would draw attention— and questions. La Salle couldn’t control her every thought and move while she was at school, true. But by this point he’d broken her down enough, between the threats and the rapes, and the apologies and the treats, that he must have felt a measure of confidence that Sally would do exactly what he said, at all times.

To enroll Sally at Saint Ann’s Catholic School, they had to leave West Franklin Street. So in September 1948, they moved to Barclay, a neighborhood on Baltimore’s east side. There La Salle and Sally settled in an apartment around East Twentieth Street between Barclay and Greenmount Avenues, a block up from the local cemetery. At the time, the neighborhood was a middle-class enclave of brick town houses, where neighbors mingled freely if they wished, or kept to themselves if they did not. Over the next eight months, Sally got used to the new name Frank had given her: Madeline LaPlante.

Here’s how I imagine Sally Horner’s days during the 1948–1949 school year. She’d wake up, get dressed, act the part of daughter to her “daddy,” and shove from her mind the fact that her current life was the opposite of normal. He probably took Sally to school for the first week, just to be sure she wouldn’t do anything rash like speak out or run away. Afterward, he trusted Sally to go by herself. She knew he had to be at work early in a different part of town. She did not want to disappoint him. She resolved she never would.

She’d smile and nod to their landlady—Mary or Ann Troy; she got the two confused even though she’d been told over and over that they weren’t related—and other neighbors as they headed off to work. Then, she’d walk west along East Twentieth Street. At the end of the block was the Diamond, the diner where she and La Salle took many of their meals, since he didn’t have the time or the patience to cook, and she was still learning how. Sally usually skipped breakfast, waiting to eat until after morning prayers. Perhaps on some days, the waitress, Marie Farrell, packed up a piping-hot fried egg sandwich for her and put it on Frank’s tab.

Breakfast in hand, Sally would turn right at the end of the block, walking up Greenmount Avenue until she reached the corner of Twenty-Second Street. There was Saint Ann’s, an extension of a Roman Catholic church that had been in Barclay for more than a century. The schedule was strict. All students had to attend mass first thing in the morning. Sally sat with her classmates on uncomfortable pews as Monsignor Quinn, Saint Ann’s pastor and principal, intoned the daily prayers in Latin and English. She kept an eagle eye out for Mother Superior Cornellous—the older woman did not tolerate her students fidgeting or misbehaving.

Then, if she had remembered to fast, Sally took Communion. The priest placed the host on her tongue. As it melted, Sally knelt and prayed for her eternal soul. Was the possibility of escape part of her prayers? Did she pray that someone would see behind the calm facade of Madeline LaPlante to the captive Sally Horner? Did she wonder if the things Frank asked her to do, which he said were “perfectly natural,” were, in fact, a mortal sin? Or did she pray for things to stay as they were because they might get even worse?

When Communion ended, Sally went back to her pew. Mass was over, so it was time for the fried egg sandwich, now cool enough to eat, and then for her classes. So many hours in the day stretched ahead where all she had to think about was her studies. She had to do well and keep up her grades or else there would be more punishment at home, and so she likely did. But Sally also didn’t want to draw undue attention to herself, in case someone—especially the Monsignor or the Mother Superior—grew suspicious and started asking too many questions. Better to embrace the invisibility. Better not to stand out.

When the last school bell rang and it was time to go home, Sally reversed her morning walk. But if there was time, or if she felt a smidgen bolder, perhaps she ventured up a block to Mund Park. The park was a place where the mind could roam and think of freedom. Where the green grass grew just like it did in Camden. Where she could think of her real home, and wonder if she would ever see it again.

I DON’T KNOW WHY La Salle chose to enroll Sally in Catholic schools, both in Baltimore and elsewhere. No one remembered him being a churchgoer or having any religious leanings. Before her abduction, Sally likely attended a Protestant church. One possible reason is that a parochial school did not have to conform to the same rules and regulations as public schools. Catholic institutions were less likely to ask questions of a new student arriving later in the school year, under a false name, with dubious documentation at best. Instead of viewing a girl like Sally with suspicion, some opposite effect, like sympathy, may have prevailed.

But I suspect La Salle gravitated toward Catholic institutions because they were a good place to hide in plain sight. The Church, as we now know from decades’ worth of scandal, hid generations of abused victims, and moved pedophile priests from parish to parish because covering up their crimes protected the Church’s carefully crafted image. Perhaps La Salle saw parochial schools for what they were: a place for complicity and enabling to flourish. A place where no one would ask Sally Horner if something terrible was happening to her.

Back in Camden, Sally Horner’s plight had been consigned to the same purgatory that befalls every long-term missing child investigation. The city hadn’t moved on, but her fate was no longer the highest priority. Camden residents wanted to embrace progress, to bask in fortunes they believed would last forever. There was little warning of the outsized event that would bewilder them and foreshadow the precipitous decline in the city’s near-future.

In the fall of 1949, Camden believed in its own prosperity. It had weathered the Great Depression and near-bankruptcy in 1936, the result of financial mismanagement by the local government. Private industry still thrived. The New York Shipbuilding Corporation still had contracts from the navy and the Maritime Administration. Smaller shipbuilding companies, like John Mathis & Company, had doubled their workforce during the Second World War and seemed primed to expand. Manufacturing jobs in the region were a year away from an all-time peak of 43,267. Campbell’s Soup still employed thousands of workers at its local headquarters.