The Real Lolita Page 11

  Weiner asked Ella if she ever gave up hope that Sally would be found alive. There were times, Ella said, where she felt “pretty hopeless” because “I always knew she had enough sense to call me or drop me a line.” And yet Sally hadn’t.

  What did Ella think about Frank La Salle? “That man . . . ,” she began, but her voice broke.

  Susan was sitting with her mother during Weiner’s interview, and picked up the thread. “I hope that man La Salle is properly punished. He should receive life imprisonment . . . or the electric chair.”

  Then Susan turned her thoughts to a second telephone conversation she’d just had with her younger sister. “I couldn’t believe it was Sally I was talking to. It was wonderful.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t wait to see her.”

  Sally had asked Susan how their mother was faring. She also asked after Susan’s daughter, Diana, now nineteen months old.

  “She looks just like you,” Susan said, and Sally burst into tears.

  TELEPHONES ARE A recurring motif in Lolita. The incessant ringing of the “machina telephonica and its sudden god” interrupts the narrative, as Humbert Humbert’s psyche begins to fissure—the monster underneath waging war with the amiable surface personality he presents to the world. Telephones are also the means through which Humbert discovers Charlotte’s accidental death, since he is too preoccupied with fixing her a drink to notice that she has left the house.

  Sally on the telephone to her family in the hours after her rescue.

  With Charlotte permanently out of the picture, he goes to pick up Dolores at Camp Q to break the news of her mother’s death in his own special way—“all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale.” After he picks her up, he takes Dolores to the Enchanted Hunters hotel, where he rapes her for the first time. The following morning, the telephone plays a pivotal role in binding the older man and girl together. Humbert had told Dolores that he was taking her to Charlotte, who he said was in the hospital in Lepingville. At a rest stop, Dolores asks: “Give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in the hospital. What’s the number?”

  Humbert says, “You can’t call that number.”

  “Why?” cries Dolores. “Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”

  “Because,” he says, “your mother is dead.”

  It is the news that totally breaks Lolita and puts her in Humbert Humbert’s power. He knows it, too: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

  From there Humbert and Dolores begin their road trip, a journey that would take them thousands of miles across the United States. Deep into their trip, Humbert’s paranoia grows as he suspects Dolores has confided the truth about him to Mona, a school friend suspicious of the relationship between the so-called father and daughter: “the stealthy thought . . . that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself.”

  Dolores’s first escape, after she yells “unprintable things” and accuses Humbert of murdering her mother and violating her, occurs as the phone rings and she breaks free of his grip on her wrist (in part echoing La Salle’s grip upon Sally’s arm at the Camden five-and-dime). That escape lasts only a few hours, and Humbert finds her “some ten paces away, through the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us).”

  After that, Dolores asserts her will as to where they should go next. And then, though the reader is not privy to it, she makes a final, mysterious call, presumably to Clare Quilty, to help her escape. Telephones, Humbert concludes, “happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch.” For Dolores, telephones are the means for her to find freedom from the abuser who has engulfed her life—just as a telephone call was for Sally Horner.

  Sixteen

  After the Rescue

  Though Frank La Salle was in jail, it wasn’t clear which law enforcement agency would have jurisdiction over him. There were the outstanding warrants for kidnapping and abduction from Camden County. But because La Salle had transported Sally across several states, it became a federal case. La Salle was charged with violating the Mann Act, for “allegedly taking the girl across state lines for immoral purposes.”

  On the morning of March 22, Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen spoke with the San Jose police, including Sheriff Hornbuckle. After the thirty-minute call, he told reporters in Camden that he would convene a grand jury to indict La Salle on the outstanding warrants, and start extradition proceedings immediately.

  La Salle seemed ready to fight his extradition to Camden, but Cohen was undeterred. “Regardless of what La Salle says he will do about returning here, I am taking no chances,” Cohen said. “I will start formal proceedings at once and get him back here as soon as possible.” But the prosecutor had to wait on New Jersey governor Alfred Driscoll’s approval, and there was a delay because Driscoll was out of town on a business trip.

  That afternoon, in California, Commissioner Marshall Hall presided over La Salle’s arraignment on the Mann Act charges. He set a $10,000 bond and scheduled a hearing for the following morning. La Salle retained Manny Gomez as his attorney, while Frank Hennessy was the federal prosecutor.

  The hearing began at 10:30 A.M. on March 23. There Hennessy revealed that La Salle’s birth name was Frank La Plante; if true, then at various points during Sally’s captivity, she’d attended school using the first name of La Salle’s biological daughter and his own real last name.

  When police officers attempted to lead Sally into the courtroom, she resisted at first, frantic at the thought of seeing La Salle: “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” she cried.

  May Smothers, a juvenile court matron, had accompanied the girl to court, and calmed her down. Sally finally entered the courtroom clutching Smothers’s hand. She took a seat only four feet away from La Salle and stole furtive glances at him throughout the proceedings, looking away whenever she came close to breaking down. La Salle stared at her, impassive, saying nothing.

  When Sally began her testimony, Commissioner Hall asked, “Are you afraid of anything? Is there anything you want?”

  “I want to go home!”

  “He can’t hurt you,” said Hall.

  And so, once more, Sally described her ordeal, starting with the Camden five-and-dime and ending with the San Jose trailer park. She told the court how La Salle had forced her to have sex with him, the abuse only ending in Dallas. La Salle told his story again, too, continuing to insist that he was Sally’s real father.

  Commissioner Hall affirmed the $10,000 bond, and ordered La Salle transferred to the county jail in San Francisco.

  The hearing also decided La Salle’s jurisdictional fate. Hennessy told the court that the federal charges would eventually be dropped because the New Jersey state kidnapping charges took precedence. But for the time being, La Salle would sit tight. Even if he raised the full $10,000 bond, federal authorities “were confident they could hold [La Salle] on other charges until he could be extradited,” reported the Courier-Post.

  Sally returned to the San Jose detention center. At first, she was so anxious about La Salle possibly going free that she could hardly eat. Matron Smothers told the papers that Sally also “fretted a lot about whether her folks would want her after what happened.” Sally was kept apart from the other detained juveniles because, an unnamed sheriff’s official told the Courier-Post, “We have some pretty hardened kids here and we don’t want Sally to come in contact with them.”

  Over the next few days, Sally grew more secure in the detention center. Matron Smothers took her shopping for new clothes, because in her estimation, Sally’s old ones did not measure up: “The clothes she had at the [trailer park] were neat but shabby and very inadequate.” Smothers said that Sally had also stopped worrying about whether her family would welcome her back. “All she�
�s thinking about is getting home and what she’ll do when she gets there.”

  The detention center felt “responsible for Sally’s well-being until New Jersey’s authorities arrive to take her home,” said an unnamed sheriff’s official. “We’ve had a number of offers from people in San Jose to take care of Sally until she’s ready to go home, but we are positive no harm can come to her where she is now.”

  BACK IN CAMDEN, police continued to investigate another dangling thread: the mysterious “Miss Robinson” Sally said had accompanied her and Frank La Salle on the bus to Baltimore, after which she disappeared. Camden police tried to reconcile Sally’s statement to Sheriff Hornbuckle with what they found in their own initial investigations. They had proof, after all, that Sally and La Salle had spent time in Atlantic City, in the form of unsent letters, photographs, clothing, and other material abandoned at 203 Pacific Avenue. Proof bolstered by the recollections of Robert and Jean Pfeffer, the young Philadelphia couple who had reported spending a summer day with Sally and La Salle.

  No trace of the woman known as “Miss Robinson” was ever discovered by law enforcement. It remains another of the unresolved mysteries of Sally’s captivity. I believe the woman existed, because I believe Sally. Just because police did not track the woman down, and that decades later I also could not find her, does not mean Sally made her up.

  A CAMDEN GRAND JURY indicted La Salle for kidnapping and abduction at 2:20 P.M. on March 23, the same day as the hearing in San Francisco. Ella Horner testified in front of the grand jury. There’s no record of what she said, but she was likely asked about why she put Sally on the bus to Atlantic City and whether La Salle was her daughter’s biological father, as he claimed.

  Mitchell Cohen sent a copy of the grand jury indictment to the New Jersey governor to start the extradition process. A second copy of the proceedings, signed by Judge Rocco Palese, was airmailed to California to reinforce La Salle’s detention. Cohen also received permission to bring both Sally and La Salle—separately—back to Camden, and to cover their travel expenses, as well as those of Camden city detective Marshall Thompson and county detective Wilfred Dube.

  Cohen, Dube, and Thompson flew into San Francisco on Sunday, March 26. Over the next few days, Cohen received approval to extradite La Salle from Governor Driscoll in New Jersey as well as his California counterpart (and future chief justice of the Supreme Court) Earl Warren. Cohen also interviewed various residents of the trailer park. One was Ruth Janisch, who told Cohen she was willing to testify at La Salle’s trial.

  On Thursday, Sally was released from the San Jose detention center into Cohen’s custody. Just after 8:40 A.M. Pacific time on Friday, March 31, Sally and Cohen boarded a United Airlines flight headed for Philadelphia. Sally wore a navy-blue suit, polka-dot blouse, black shoes, a red coat, and a straw Easter bonnet for her first-ever plane trip. She told Cohen how much she looked forward to seeing her family. She threw up only once, when the plane ran into turbulence just outside of Chicago.

  Sally Horner and Mitchell Cohen board a Philadelphia-bound United Airlines flight, March 31, 1950.

  Ella waited at the airport in the backseat of Assistant Camden County Prosecutor (and future New Jersey governor) William Cahill’s car. The rest of Sally’s family, including Susan, Al, and their baby, Diana, arrived separately. Several other planes landed first, each one lifting Ella’s spirits before crushing them again. “Why doesn’t it come,” Ella said, her face pressed against the car window. Sally’s plane finally landed just after midnight, just over an hour late.

  From the plane, Sally spotted her brother-in-law in the crowd. Sally wanted to get out right away, but Cohen told her to wait for the other passengers to leave first. Then she spotted her mother. “I want to see Mama!” she cried.

  “All right, Sally,” said Cohen. “Let’s go.”

  Sally stood at the doorway for a moment, looking around. Then she spotted her mother running toward her, holding out her arms. Sally raced down the steps, her face lit up with joy and washed in tears.

  Sally sees her mother, Ella Horner, for the first time in twenty-one months.

  She and her mother clung to each other for several minutes, oblivious to the myriad flashbulbs popping at them. At first, they were weeping too hard to speak. Then Sally said: “I want to go home. I just want to go home.”

  Sally leans on her mother’s shoulder minutes after they are reunited.

  When they were safely in Assistant Prosecutor Cahill’s car, Ella explained to Sally that she couldn’t go home just yet. Instead, the authorities would take her to the Camden County Children’s Shelter in nearby Pennsauken, New Jersey, where she had to stay “until the trial is over.”

  After a short drive, their car arrived at the center, the Panaros following closely behind in a separate vehicle. Susan got out of the car at the same time as Sally.

  “Susan!” Sally cried upon spotting her older sibling. Sally had been so overwhelmed by the sight of her mother, the photographers, and so many well-wishers that she hadn’t realized her sister was part of the crowd.

  “I kissed you at the airport but you didn’t recognize me!” Susan said.

  Then Sally realized her sister was holding a little girl in her arms. Sally reached for Diana, the niece she’d never met, and hugged her tightly. “Gee, she looks like pictures of me taken when I was a baby!”

  Cohen, exhausted from the trip, gently informed the family that Sally needed to get some sleep.

  In the days that followed, Ella was the only family member allowed to visit Sally at the Children’s Shelter, to ensure the girl stayed in a calm frame of mind before and during the trial. Fortunately, Sally got along well with the matron. She also attended Palm Sunday mass with six other children from the shelter the day before her first scheduled court appearance, and that offered some solace. No one knew how long La Salle’s trial would last, and they tried not to bring the subject up with Sally, lest she get upset. The place she really wanted to be, after all, was home.

  Thanks to an unexpected development, Sally’s stay at the center didn’t last long at all.

  Seventeen

  A Guilty Plea

  Frank La Salle wasn’t allowed to travel from California to Camden by plane. Airline regulations at the time did not allow for passengers to be shackled, and Mitchell Cohen wasn’t about to take any chances that the man would escape. “It is possible he could be a docile prisoner,” Cohen remarked. “On the other hand, he could cause trouble.”

  The solution was to transport La Salle by train. Doing so would increase the travel time from hours to days, but on the train he could stay handcuffed to an officer for the entire duration. Marshall Thompson got stuck with being shackled to the prisoner for the cross-country trip, hardly a reward for all of his dogged investigative efforts. Wilfred Dube took the berth next door to Thompson and La Salle, staying as close as possible to the two men. (While it would have made sense for the two detectives to trade off being handcuffed to La Salle, I couldn’t find any evidence that they did.)

  Mitchell Cohen was at the train station to see La Salle and the detectives off. Before La Salle boarded, he asked Cohen why he and Sally Horner weren’t getting on the same train. Cohen explained the two were due to fly later on in the day.

  “Well, take good care of Sally,” said La Salle.

  “I’ll take better care of her than you did,” Cohen replied.

  The train trip took two nights and two days. La Salle, Detective Thompson, and Detective Dube left San Francisco at 5:00 P.M. Pacific time on the City of San Francisco. Overnight the train passed through Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Council Bluffs and reached Chicago early Saturday morning, where the trio changed trains to the New York–bound General. Thompson had no relief or privacy, shackled to the man he’d been chasing for nearly two years. Just as La Salle could not escape the law, so could the law not escape La Salle.

  The General pulled into North Philadelphia Station at six minutes before se
ven in the morning on April 1. To the surprise of waiting reporters and photographers, the trio of men were not on board. To avoid the scrum, they’d gotten off at an earlier stop in Paoli, met there at 6:30 A.M. by Assistant Prosecutor William Cahill and Camden County Police Captain James Mulligan.

  They took La Salle directly to the prosecutor’s office. Then Thompson went home, no doubt relieved to be free of the man. Dube, Mulligan, and Cahill stuck around for Cohen’s interrogation of La Salle, which lasted about four hours. At 1:00 P.M., La Salle was taken to the Camden County jail.

  Mitchell Cohen told the press later on Sunday that he expected the case to go before the jury no earlier than June. Early on the morning of April 3, 1950, the day La Salle was due to be arraigned on the abduction and kidnapping charges, Cohen received a phone call from the county jail. The accused wanted to talk.

  Cohen arrived at the jail at 9:45 A.M. and discovered La Salle by himself in a waiting room. He still lacked a lawyer—he hadn’t been able to keep on Manuel Gomez because Gomez was not licensed to practice outside of California.

  Cohen reminded La Salle of his right to an attorney. If he couldn’t afford one, the court would appoint a lawyer for him.

  “I don’t need any counsel,” La Salle replied. “I am guilty, and I am willing to go in and plead guilty. The sooner the better. I want to get it off my chest, and I want my time to commence to run.”

  When Cohen asked him why he wanted to plead guilty, La Salle said, “I want to avoid this girl [receiving] any further unfavorable publicity.”

  Cohen told him that court was already in session, and he could immediately enter his plea.

  “Then I want to get it over with now,” said La Salle.