The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  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.

  Eight

  “A Lonely Mother Waits”

  The more months that slipped by without answers, the greater the existential toll on Sally Horner’s family. Ella bore the brunt of it. Sally was her daughter. She’d let the girl go off with a stranger because he’d said he was the father of school friends, who were waiting for her down by the Jersey Shore. She believed the lies the man forced her daughter to tell, and now the girl was gone.

  Perhaps Ella entertained fleeting thoughts that Sally was dead, but she never admitted it in public. She’d found work as a seamstress for Quartermaster Depot, so at least there was enough money coming in to keep the lights on in the house, as well as the telephone in operation. Sally hadn’t called home again, but if she ever chose to, it would be a disaster if the line was disconnected.

  Ella aired her anguish in a December 10, 1948, article published by the Philadelphia Inquirer, headlined “A Christmas Tree Glows, a Lonely Mother Waits.” Sally had been missing for nearly half a year by that point. Ella kept a figurative candle burning for the time when her daughter would return home safe. And with Christmas a little more than two weeks away, the tree Ella set up was, according to the unbylined reporter, “freighted with memories of other and happier Christmases,” a means of multiplying the “candle’s tiny gleam.” Ella could think of no better way to express her faith that Sally would come back to her.

  When that happened—Ella could not allow herself to think “if,” only “when”—Sally would have to contend with one very big change to the family. Her niece, Diana, was five months old when the article appeared in the Inquirer. But Diana’s arrival couldn’t help but be bittersweet for her grandmother, Susan, and her husband, as long as they had no clue to Sally’s whereabouts. Sally had so looked forward to being an aunt.

  The young couple buried their uncertainty and despair in the daily care of their new baby. Changing diapers, rocking her to sleep, trying to get much-needed rest in small bursts. They also had the family greenhouse to look after—the flowers and plants wouldn’t grow themselves.

  Ella was thrilled to be a grandmother. But her joy was always tempered so long as Sally wasn’t here with her. And as she told the Inquirer, the moment Sally walked back through the front door at 944 Linden Street, she would not be punished in any way. “Whatever she has done, I can forgive her for it. If I can just have her back again.”

  SALLY HORNER’S TWELFTH BIRTHDAY, on April 18, 1949, came and went with no news. Had she vanished into the ether? Would her body turn up? Or was Sally out there, ready to be found, hoping that she would come home again? Camden police kept the case open, and Marshall Thompson tracked every lead.

  The case had taken on added urgency a month earlier, on March 17, when the Camden County prosecutor’s office added a second, more serious, indictment of kidnapping to the existing charge against La Salle. Where abduction carried a maximum prison sentence of only a few years, a kidnapping conviction upped the ante to between thirty and thirty-five years—effectively, for someone of Frank La Salle’s age, a life sentence.

  No documents have survived to explain the more serious charge. Perhaps the prosecutor, or the Camden Police Department, had received a credible tip to La Salle’s whereabouts and hoped that news of the new indictment might flush him out. Or perhaps there were concerns about the statute of limitations on the original abduction charge if Sally stayed missing for a long time, or even forever.

  The media moved on from covering the story. No one marked the first anniversary of her disappearance. At Christmas 1949, they did not publicize appeals for Sally’s safe return. Other sensational local crimes pushed her out of the papers, including a mass shooting on Camden’s East Side and another mysterious disappearance: that of the wife of Jules Forstein, a Philadelphia magistrate.

  Dorothy Forstein’s disappearance baffled investigators. She had spent the previous four years in a state of anxiety after an unknown assailant nearly killed her just outside her front door. On the evening of October 18, 1949, Dorothy’s husband, Jules, attended a party on his own. He said he asked Dorothy to come with him, but she insisted she’d rather stay home with the children, stepdaughter Marcy, nine, and their seven-year-old, Edward.

  When Jules got home at 11:30 P.M. Dorothy was gone and the children were frantic. They claimed a stranger had come into the house, knocked their mother unconscious, and then hefted the five-foot-two, 125-pound woman, clad in pajamas and red slippers, over his shoulder, carrying her out and locking the door behind them. Before he left, he patted Marcy on the head and told her, “Go back to sleep.” Marcy recalled that he was wearing a brown cap and “something brown in his shirt.”

  Jules said he did not report Dorothy missing right away because he thought Marcy was telling a fib, and believed— oddly, considering her near-agoraphobia—that his wife must still be in the neighborhood. He called police four and a half hours later, just before 4:00 A.M. The police also brushed off Marcy’s story as fantasy. Then a female psychiatrist was called in to question the little girl, and after several lengthy conversations, the psychiatrist concluded Marcy was telling the truth about what happened that night.

  Over the next few days, people reported sightings of the missing woman all over the Philadelphia area. Camden also figured in the initial investigation. The Friday night after Dorothy vanished, Camden patrolman Edward Shapiro noticed a blond woman hovering around the corner of Broadway and Fourth Street. Shapiro told Philadelphia detectives he first saw the woman coming out of a telephone booth next to a candy store. She seemed startled to see him, and he was himself startled by how much she resembled Dorothy Forstein. Shapiro followed her to a tavern, where she ordered a beer, but when the woman noticed him again, she split.

  The following night, Shapiro saw the woman again on the same corner, and overheard her speaking with a male companion. “I’ve only got one arm,” he heard the woman say. This statement caused detectives to perk up. One of Dorothy’s lingering injuries from her earlier attack was a recurrent dislocated shoulder that landed her in the hospital for treatment several times a year. Detectives were certain Dorothy, even under a false name, might turn up at a hospital to have her shoulder reset again. She did not. A thousand-dollar reward offered by Jules Forstein yielded no new leads. Dorothy was declared legally dead eight years later, in 1957, a year after her husband had died of a heart attack at home.

  SALLY’S FAMILY took the waning public interest as a sign that it was better not to speak of her disappearance, even among themselves. Her absence was a low thrum, ever-present but unacknowledged. Of course they worried. Of course they feared for her safety. But no news meant no answers, and her fate was beyond their control. It was better to carry on with life.

  Baby Diana turned one in August 1949. She was, by her parents’ account and her own later recollection, a happy little girl, eager and talkative, who loved eating Grape-Nuts and drinking apple juice. Al ran the greenhouse, and Susan stopped in when she was up to it. Ella remained at 944 Linden Street, but living there was like a nightmare. “It was so different when Sally was here,” she later recalled. “She was so cheerful and full of life.”

  Ella had difficulty sleeping. Many times in the night she would leave her room and go to Sally’s. She would take out her daughter’s toys and games and “just sit there and look at them.” Ella washed and rewashed Sally’s clothes “so they would be ready for her when she came back.”

  As the months wore on, she lost jobs and found others. Sometimes she couldn’t pay her bills for weeks. Sometimes the phone got disconnected, or the electricity was shut off. Periodically, Ella would go to Florence to stay with Susan and look after her granddaughter. Otherwise, Ella was alone. Alone to contemplate again
and again the ways in which she held herself responsible for Sally’s disappearance.

  Nine

  The Prosecutor

  Sally Horner disappeared a few months after Mitchell Cohen was appointed as prosecutor for Camden County, a ten-year term that would last until 1958. He was already on the way to becoming the pivotal law enforcement figure in the city, a status that saw his name emblazoned, decades later, on the downtown federal courthouse. Taking on the prosecutor gig only bolstered his reputation. In the late 1940s, Camden County did not have enough major crime to justify a full-time prosecutor. So Cohen worked in spurts, spending the rest of his time on Republican party politics. He was so successful at it that he became the state party’s de facto leader, allied closely with the New Jersey governor of the day, Alfred Driscoll.

  Cohen’s term as prosecutor was one of many jobs he held in law enforcement over a long legal career that stretched from early private practice with local law firms all the way to chief judge for the federal district court of New Jersey. He moved smoothly between prosecuting criminals and delivering judgments. Cohen wasn’t one to bask in career glories, though. He was far too busy working to spend much time reflecting on the past.

  Cohen did, however, take the time to dress the part of a big-shot lawyer. In his bespoke suits, he cut a figure that landed somewhere between David Niven and Fred Astaire. One lawyer told Cohen’s son, Fred, “Whenever I appeared in front of your father, I felt I wanted to wear a white tie and tails and be at the top of my game because he was a classy guy.”

  Any resemblance Cohen bore to famous actors was, perhaps, intentional. He caught the bug for theater early in life, making trips up to New York to see Broadway shows a priority. In his younger years, Cohen spent his Saturday nights in line for concerts and stage performances at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, angling for a twenty-five-cent seat in the gallery. Once established in his legal career, he could afford to split a box seat with a friend.

  He’d met Herman Levin at South Philadelphia High; they remained pals even after Cohen’s family moved to Camden just before his senior year. The boys made a point of seeing every play in Philadelphia—long a city where Broadway-bound shows worked out problems and test-ran productions on audiences—on opening night. Levin ended up producing musicals like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Destry Rides Again, and My Fair Lady. Before the latter show opened in 1956, Levin told Cohen to “hock everything he had in the world” to invest in the production. Cohen did, and reaped the benefits as My Fair Lady smashed box-office records. Cohen also became a theatrical producer himself, cochairing the short-lived Camden County Music Circus during the summers of 1956 and 1957.

  But Cohen’s fashion sense, his theatrical interests, and even his political machinations did not overshadow his commitment to jurisprudence. Cohen cared about the law and about being fair. He believed it was as important to know when not to prosecute a case as when to prosecute. In 1938, early in his tenure as acting judge for the city of Camden, a husband and wife appeared together in his courtroom after she had attempted suicide by poison—back then a punishable crime.

  “We had a quarrel, and I thought he didn’t love me anymore,” the twenty-eight-year-old woman told Cohen.

  “Do you?” Cohen asked her husband, who was twenty-nine.

  “I sure do.”

  “Then go home and forget about it.”

  Cohen didn’t seek out notorious cases. They found him. When he won a trial, he didn’t dwell upon the details. Those cases, and how Cohen approached them, are an important window into 1940s Camden, as well as the forces that set the city up for great societal changes.

  WHEN MITCHELL COHEN set out to prosecute the men responsible for the murder of Wanda Dworecki in the fall of 1939, he had never worked on a capital case before, even though he’d been appointed city prosecutor for Camden three years earlier. Murders were rare then, a far cry from the statistics that designated the city as America’s murder capital as recently as 2012. The strangulation of a girl a month shy of her eighteenth birthday stood out in its singular brutality.

  Wanda’s body was discovered on the morning of August 8, 1939, in an area near Camden High School frequently used as a lovers’ lane. A corsage of red and white roses adorned her neck. The killer strangled her so forcefully that he broke her collarbone and breastbone. Then he dropped a rock onto her head, fracturing her skull.

  Police working on the case weren’t all that surprised Wanda had died so violently. Four months before her murder, in April 1939, two men had accosted Wanda on the street and thrown her into their car. They beat her up—a near-fatal assault—and tossed her out into a field in a desolate part of Salem County, just south of Camden. She spent weeks recovering in the hospital.

  That beating wasn’t Wanda’s first brush with violence. In late 1938, she and a friend had been out walking in the neighborhood when several men tried to kidnap them. Police were convinced—or at least, this is what they said—that Wanda was “destined to be murdered.” What they would soon learn is how much one man manipulated things so that destiny would become reality.

  Wanda’s father, Walter Dworecki, who had emigrated from Poland in 1913, appeared to be an upstanding figure. He preached at the First Polish Baptist Church, a congregation he’d founded when the family moved to Camden from rural Pennsylvania. His teenage daughter troubled him, especially after her mother, Theresa, collapsed at the breakfast table and died in 1938. He brooded over Wanda’s fondness for the opposite sex, lecturing her about preserving her virtue, verbally abusing her in such a way to make an example of her to her younger siblings, Mildred and Alfred.

  Respectable appearances can hide awful secrets, and Dworecki had plenty. Like being out on bail for setting fire to a house in Chester, Pennsylvania, in a scheme to collect insurance. Or having been sentenced to five years’ probation for passing counterfeit money. Like getting so angry at a neighborhood boy that he allegedly fractured the teen’s jaw with a broomstick. Or taking out a $2,500 life insurance policy (nearly $45,000 in 2018 dollars) on his wife, Theresa, whose cause of death was officially “lobar pneumonia”—the same cause of death listed for a number of victims of a murder-for-insurance scheme in Philadelphia whose culprits had some connections to the preacher.

  The secret Walter Dworecki should have tried harder to keep was his fondness for hanging around Philadelphia dives, looking for men who might be willing and able to kill his daughter.

  Immediately after Wanda’s murder, Dworecki slipped into the role of grieving father. He cried, “My poor Wanda!” when he saw his daughter’s body at the morgue, and then fainted. He had an alibi for the time of her death, but his grief-stricken act cracked quickly once police started to investigate.

  A witness had seen Wanda with a “large blond gentleman” the night before she was murdered, who turned out to be twenty-year-old Peter Shewchuk, who boarded at the Dworeckis’ and romanced Wanda every now and then. When Shewchuk learned he was wanted for questioning, he fled Camden for his boyhood home in rural Pennsylvania. Police caught up to him on August 27, after his father turned him in.

  In the interview room, all it took was the offer of a single cigarette for Shewchuk to open up. He told the detectives that he and Dworecki had met up in Philadelphia earlier in the evening of August 7. “He gave me 50 cents to cover my expenses and then went to conduct his religious services. I met Wanda and we strolled down the street.” Walking past the lovers’ lane, Shewchuk said he “suddenly felt the urge to kill” Wanda the way her father had told him to: “Choke her, hit her with a rock, twist her neck.” Dworecki was supposed to pay Shewchuk a hundred dollars for the murder, but after Wanda was dead, he reneged on the deal.

  Armed with Shewchuk’s confession, Camden police brought in the preacher. It turned out Dworecki had taken out a life insurance policy on Wanda around the same time as he had taken one out on her mother. He had hired three men, including Shewchuk, to kidnap and kill Wanda back in April. When she survived the failed attemp
t, Dworecki upped the policy on his daughter to nearly $2,700, with a double indemnity clause should she die in an accident, and got ready to try again.

  Dworecki eventually confessed in a statement that ran to nearly thirty pages. The preacher admitted to being aggrieved by Wanda’s behavior, but he claimed the idea to kill Wanda originated with two men, Joe Rock and John Popolo, whom he’d met in Philadelphia. Dworecki said they urged him to kill his daughter to collect the insurance money and pressed him again as time went on. He roped Shewchuk into the murder plot after learning the younger man had bragged about sleeping with Wanda. Shewchuk denied it, but Dworecki sensed an opportunity to manipulate the boy into carrying out his murderous scheme.

  Both men entered guilty pleas in Camden County Court on August 29, 1939. Dworecki refused to look at anyone. Shewchuk chose the opposite tack, smiling whenever someone caught his eye. Then Mitchell Cohen, the city prosecutor, explained to the assembled crowd, including the surprised defendants and their lawyers, why the guilty pleas had to be thrown out. New Jersey state law at the time stipulated that one was not allowed to be sentenced to death if he pleaded guilty. Capital cases, and murder certainly counted, required that the defendants face a full trial, verdict, and sentencing.

  Cohen voided the pleas, then bound the cases over to the county court, where Samuel Orlando (whom Cohen would succeed a few years later) would prosecute them. Cohen’s work was done, but he paid attention to what happened in the county courtroom. Orlando cross-examined both Shewchuk and Dworecki with extra vigor. Shewchuk received a life sentence in exchange for being the primary witness against Dworecki. The preacher’s confession was admitted into evidence, despite his lawyer protesting it should be kept out. The jury found him guilty after swift deliberations.

  Shewchuk was paroled in 1959 after surviving his own near-fatal beating in prison; he died in the late 1980s. Dworecki was put to death by electric chair on March 28, 1940. Before his execution, he implored his surviving children, Mildred and Alfred, to lead pious lives and asked that “God have mercy on their souls.” Dworecki’s grave lies next to that of the daughter he murdered.