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

La Salle justified his kidnapping of Sally, both in his appeals and, later, in person, to his actual daughter, Madeline, on the grounds that he was saving Sally from a mother who was “always out with some man or [was home] in bed,” or by falsely quoting Sally saying that her mother “does not care what becomes of me. She seems to hate me, and never buys any clothing or take [ sic ] care of me and is never at home.”

He embellished these poorly written fantasies of devoted fatherhood to Madeline, a daughter he never saw grow up, by describing trips to Philadelphia “to see his other daughter by his legal wife who he was at the time separated from, but there was nobody at home.” (Dorothy Dare, of course, had filed for divorce from La Salle in 1943 after he was arrested on the statutory rape charges.)

La Salle attested, time and again, to having “sworn proof” that Sally was his daughter, but of course he could never deliver the goods. He even reproved the media for publishing Sally’s name after she was rescued in San Jose on the grounds of “a statute against such publicity for a child.” He claimed his quick guilty plea resulted from being afraid of “MOB VIOLENCE” (the capitalization is La Salle’s) and also claimed that the prosecutor, Cohen, “told the defendant there was no use of his trying to get an attorney as no attorney could do any good.”

La Salle’s appeal documents include purported affidavits that bolstered his claims of loving fatherhood. If the documents are real, they show how many missed opportunities there were for one of Sally’s neighbors to see past the facade of amiable father-daughter interaction to the horrifying reality. If the documents are forgeries, they amplify the grimy, sordid truth of Sally’s abuse: she was under the power of a man so determined to present himself as a well-adjusted human and bury the depth of his crimes that he lied, above all, to himself.

MOST OF THE STATEMENTS attributed to Sally Horner and Frank La Salle’s neighbors in Dallas come from affidavits included with La Salle’s appellate brief in 1954. After reading a copy of the statement his mother, Nelrose Pfeil, purportedly gave about Sally, Tom Pfeil denied she’d ever said anything of the sort. “It was definitely not the way my mother talked. Not her wording or verbiage, anyhow,” he told me. Frequent misspellings in the alleged affidavit also gave Tom pause: “My mother was a good speller,” he said. “She was a secretary for three attorneys just out of college. She may not have had a legal mind, but she was precise.”

Tom Pfeil scoffed at his mother’s supposed statement that Sally spent “many hours a day” at the family home. For one thing, none of the Pfeils were home much. Charles and Nelrose also owned and operated a lumberyard along with the trailer park. They worked sixteen- to eighteen-hour days during the week, and the boys started working at the yard in their teens, considering it a victory when they negotiated a weekly half day off. When Tom joined the marines out of high school and began boot camp, he told me he thought, “Man, I’ve been down this road already.”

“My mother was a very strong woman,” said Tom. “She wasn’t but five foot one but she could thread iron into a water pipe. If a water line froze or broke, [Nelrose] would put it back in the drain. She wasn’t mean, but running a trailer park wasn’t running a bridal store.” She had such a solid work ethic that she worked at the yard most every day until four months before she died in 2001, at the age of eighty-four. She and Charles had an ironclad rule at the trailer park: no socializing with the tenants. “She collected the rent, and not much other than that,” said Tom. “That was one of the things they decided because they got hurt. A couple of times, I befriended some people I shouldn’t have and, unfortunately, they took my parents to the cleaners. As soon as you become a friend, it becomes, ‘Oh, I can’t pay this week.’” As a result, the Pfeils kept their interactions with the trailer park residents to the bare minimum. “Sally would not be in the house several times a day,” Tom emphasized.

His recollections, however, jibe with what his mother’s supposed affidavit said about La Salle spoiling Sally. “She wasn’t laying [ sic ] on the ground kicking…. When she asked [La Salle] for something, she got it,” said Tom. “She had nice clothes. She wasn’t running around in rags. Certainly she was not mistreated. That’s why everybody was surprised. We thought it was a dad’s adoration of a daughter and how nice that was.”

One curious anomaly with Nelrose Pfeil’s alleged affidavit was that it included the family’s new address, 2240 Lawndale Avenue. If the affidavit was a fabrication, as her son insisted, how would Frank La Salle have known where the Pfeils had moved after they stopped living at the Commerce Street trailer park?

Tom Pfeil was adamant that his mother was never in touch with La Salle while he was in prison. “For my mother to have anything to do with an affidavit or anything… is about as farfetched as if she came back from Mars.”

FRANK LA SALLE also wrote letters while incarcerated at Trenton State Prison, just as he had during earlier prison stints. According to some of Ruth Janisch’s children, he wrote their mother on a number of occasions. Both Vanessa Janisch, who was not born until after Sally was rescued, and her older sister Rachel [3] Not their real names. remembered seeing La Salle’s letters bundled up and tucked in one of the many scrapbooks—at least one chiefly devoted to media coverage of Sally’s rescue—that Ruth kept of her life.

As of this writing, I have not been able to see Ruth’s scrapbooks for myself. They have been passed on from family member to family member, down generational lines. Ruth clung to her role in Sally’s rescue for the rest of her life, and brought it up again and again to her children. She wanted them to believe in her as a heroine. She wanted them to know she was capable of a decent act. Some of her sons and daughters never reconciled Ruth’s contradictions. Rachel, however, finally came to believe that her mother “did the best she knew how,” no matter how many grievous mistakes she made as a mother and a human being.

SALLY HORNER’S FAMILY had to grapple with her sudden loss for the rest of their lives. Dolores Haze’s husband, Dick Schiller, had to raise their child without her. But another woman had to reckon with the collateral damage of a father’s abuse. That woman was Frank La Salle’s daughter, known as Madeline.

Her mother, Dorothy, spent the Second World War working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and rebuilding her life while her former husband was in prison. The choices she made as a newly divorced wife and single mother bear some resemblance to what was in store for Dolores Haze as Dick Schiller’s wife. Madeline stayed with her mother during the summer months, and spent winters at her grandfather’s house in Merchantville. After the war, when Madeline was ten, Dorothy met and married an army veteran several years her senior. He adopted Madeline and he and Dorothy had another child. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1986, almost four decades.

When her children were grown, Dorothy got a job with a small advertising firm, and then with Campbell’s Soup, whose headquarters are still in Camden. She worked for the company for thirty years, retiring in 1991. Dorothy was also active in her local Baptist church for more than half a century, serving several years on the Board of Deaconesses.

When Dorothy died at ninety-two in 2011, her survivors included her children and almost a dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The longer Dorothy lived, the more distance she put between her more settled, family-oriented existence and her turbulent early life with Frank La Salle. Madeline did not learn any details of her father’s imprisonment until she was in her early twenties, newly married with children of her own. “There was an article in the newspaper, and my mother felt she had to tell me,” she said in 2014. Knowing that her father was in prison did not repel Madeline. It made her curious. “I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him.”