The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  Ruth Janisch, ca. 1940s

  Her bitter outlook took hold upon leaving Washington State to marry her second husband, Everett Findley. (Ruth later said her first marriage, at sixteen to a man whose name she failed to remember, didn’t count.) The former Ruth Douglass was eager to flee her mother, Myrtle, whose cuts were always unkind, and her father, Frank, whom her children later grew fond of but whom Ruth, in her cups, recalled as being “not so innocent.” The children were never sure if Ruth was referring to her father’s penchant for drink or something uglier.

  After their marriage, Ruth had followed Findley, a man more than twice her age, to San Jose, and bore him two sons. She met husband number three, George Janisch, sometime after the dissolution of her marriage to Findley. George hailed from Minneapolis; he was short and slight, and his blond hair and fair appearance befitted his Scandinavian heritage. He’d moved west for work and to escape the harsh Minnesota winter.

  George and Ruth ran off to Carson City, Nevada, to wed on October 24, 1940. Perhaps they married for love. Not long before he died, George confided in one of his daughters that before their wedding, Ruth was a “good girl.” But afterward, according to George, she changed, and he admitted that it was his fault.

  It wasn’t enough for George to sleep with his wife. He had to sleep with other men’s wives, too. Ruth herself had taken up with him while he was married. Since George was fine if Ruth slept with the leftover husbands, she wasn’t about to say no. The fact was that Ruth had a craving for men that would persist for the rest of her life.

  The extramarital doings damaged the already tenuous bond between the Janisches, which had been frayed by having three daughters in quick succession. The couple seemed to bring out the worst in each other. One particularly clever, or insidious, way Ruth and George tested each other was with the naming of every new child. Each baby received a first name either spouse liked. The middle names, however, were those of former lovers. Nine children later, Ruth and George split up. He would marry twice more; she married ten times in total, with lovers scattered in between.

  By 1949, Ruth was thirty-three (though would only admit to thirty-one) with a husband she couldn’t help needling and at the mercy of that perpetual pregnancy-birth cycle. She still had most of her looks, with dark hair curling about her face, full, pointed breasts, a strong nose and wide-lipped mouth. Every new child added another dose of bitterness at her lot in life, and the family’s poverty.

  But there was something about Sally Horner that Ruth could see clearly. The way the girl shuffled after coming home from an extended hospital stay after an appendectomy. The way Sally’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. The closeness between Sally and Frank that did not strike the right note. “He never let Sally out of his sight, except when she was at school,” Ruth later recounted. “She never had any friends her own age. She never went any place, just stayed with La Salle in the trailer.” She thought La Salle seemed “abnormally possessive” of the girl he said was his daughter. Ruth tried to cajole Sally, still recovering from her appendectomy, to tell her the “true story” of her relationship with La Salle. Sally wouldn’t open up.

  In early 1950, the Janisches packed up their trailer and drove west. Work had dried up for George in Dallas, and he figured he might have better luck in San Jose, which had proven lucky in the past. Once the family, larger by two more children, landed at the El Cortez Motor Inn—perhaps at their exact prior parking space—Ruth wrote to Frank saying that he and Sally should follow them to California. There’s work to be had here, she said. He and Sally could be their neighbors again.

  La Salle agreed. Perhaps he had some other pressing reason to abandon Dallas. Maybe he sensed that Sally was distancing herself from him and another move might keep her closer. Whatever the reason, La Salle pulled Sally out of school in February 1950 and they drove the house trailer attached to his car from Dallas to San Jose. Just as in Baltimore, and Atlantic City before it, La Salle had decided he and Sally needed to be on the move. And just as before, Sally had no say in the decision. She did what Frank La Salle told her to do. But his mood was different on the day they headed west. This time they were running toward opportunity, not running from the law.

  Sally and La Salle’s journey to San Jose took at least a week, if not more. He drove the trailer through Texas, going around the border of Oklahoma, then through New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California, before moving up the South Bay to their final destination, the farthest Sally had ever been from Camden. She would never venture this far again. Sally had been La Salle’s captive for nearly two years, since she was just eleven. She felt his presence at every turn, even when she was alone and seemingly free to do what she pleased. How trapped she must have felt to be in such close quarters to him as they spent that week or ten days on the road.

  If Sally had allowed herself to let her mind roam, she might have given in to feelings of despair, or to anger over what La Salle had taken away from her. Or perhaps she was focused on how vital it was for her to survive. After days in the car and nights in the trailer parked at a rest stop, eating at diners, one after another, the emotional toll on her must have been considerable.

  On the West Coast, Northern California in particular, palm trees lined broad boulevards where cars had room to move instead of getting jammed up like they did back home. Police in uniform shorts patrolled the streets on motorcycles. The air was far less humid than in Dallas, or even on the East Coast. But the prospects of betterment that had enticed La Salle, and so many others before him, were not on Sally’s mind. She had a great many other things to think about.

  By the time Frank La Salle pulled the house trailer into the El Cortez Motor Inn on Saturday, March 18, Sally Horner felt able to reckon with the changes roiling inside her. She’d already made a significant first step. Before leaving Dallas, she’d mustered up the courage to tell a friend at school that her relationship with her “father” involved sexual intercourse. The friend told Sally her behavior was “wrong” and that “she ought to stop,” as Sally later explained. As her friend’s admonishment sank in, Sally began refusing La Salle’s advances, but kept up the illusion he was her dad.

  For so long she felt she had to stay silent, or to accept what the man posing as her father said was the natural thing to do between them. All this time she opted to give in because it seemed the surest path to survival. Now Sally felt freer in a small way. Not free—she was still in La Salle’s clutches, and could not see a way to escape. But she could say no now, and he didn’t punish her like he had in the old days. Perhaps he looked at Sally, a month shy of her thirteenth birthday, and saw a girl aging out of his tastes. Or perhaps he trusted that Sally belonged to him so completely he no longer needed to use rape as a means of physical and psychological control.

  What she knew now was that her relationship with Frank La Salle was the opposite of natural. It was against nature. It was wrong.

  FRANK LA SALLE needed to find work. Several days after landing at the trailer park, La Salle abandoned his car—perhaps it needed repairs after so many days on bumpy, unevenly paved highway roads—and took the bus two miles into town to look for a job. Sally was already enrolled in school, and may have attended as many as four days of classes. She did not attend class that morning, though. By staying away, Sally changed the course her life had traveled on for the past twenty-one months.

  Fifteen

  San Jose

  On the morning of March 21, 1950, Ruth Janisch invited Sally Horner over to her trailer. She knew Frank La Salle wouldn’t return from his job search for several more hours, and sensed the girl might open up to her. All it would take was the right push at the right time. If Ruth didn’t seize the opportunity now, she never would. Gently, she coaxed more honesty out of the young girl. Before, in Dallas, Sally wouldn’t budge. This time, in San Jose, she did.

  Sally confirmed Ruth’s suspicion that Frank La Salle was not, in fact, her father, and that he’d forced her to stay with him for nearly two year
s. She said she missed her mother, Ella, and her older sister, Susan. Sally told Ruth she wanted to go home.

  Ruth absorbed what the girl told her. Though she had been suspicious of the relationship, she never imagined that La Salle had kidnapped Sally. Then she sprang into action. She beckoned Sally over to the telephone and showed her how to make a long-distance phone call. Sally had never done so before.

  Sally dialed her mother’s number first, but the line was disconnected; Ella had lost her seamstress job in January and, while unemployed, could not afford to pay the bill. Next, she tried her sister, Susan, in Florence. No one answered the house phone, so Sally tried the greenhouse next.

  Her brother-in-law, Al Panaro, picked up.

  “Will you accept a collect call from Sally Horner in San Jose, California?” the operator asked.

  “You bet I will,” Panaro replied.

  “Hello, Al, this is Sally. May I speak to Susan?”

  He could barely contain his excitement. “Where are you at? Give me your exact location.”

  “I’m with a lady friend in California. Send the FBI after me, please! Tell Mother I’m okay, and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.”

  The connection was poor, and Al had a hard time hearing his sister-in-law. But he heard enough to get the trailer park address down on paper, and to assure Sally he would call the FBI. She just had to stay exactly where she was.

  Then Panaro passed the phone over to Susan, who was with him in the greenhouse. She was flabbergasted that her younger sister was alive, and on the telephone line. She also urged Sally to stay put and wait for the police.

  After Sally hung up, she turned to Ruth, her face drained of color. She looked ready to collapse. She kept saying, over and over, “What will Frank do when he finds out what I have done?”

  Ruth spent the next little while keeping Sally calm, hoping the FBI, or even the local police, would show up soon and arrest Frank. Sally, anxious, thought she should go back to her own trailer to wait for the police. Ruth let her go, hoping it would not be for too long.

  AFTER SPEAKING with his sister-in-law for the first time in nearly two years, Al Panaro immediately called the Camden County Police Department. He asked for Detective Marshall Thompson, the man who’d been investigating Sally’s disappearance exclusively for more than a year. But Thompson worked the night shift and was home in bed when Panaro’s call came in. William Marter, another detective, answered.

  Marter was the one who relayed Sally’s whereabouts to the New York FBI office. He warned them to proceed with caution around La Salle. He had eluded capture before, and they needed to be certain he would not escape again. Then the FBI rang the sheriff’s office in Santa Clara County. Sheriff Howard Hornbuckle picked up, and soon learned that a girl abducted almost two years earlier was alive and well and in his jurisdiction.

  Hornbuckle had been elected sheriff three years earlier. He was a local boy, a graduate of San Jose High School, and had attended the state college before he joined the police department in 1931. He had spent fourteen years on the force, as a detective and later a captain. He’d also moonlighted as a traffic safety instructor in his spare time, where he stressed the danger of cars and how too many young people died while at the wheel. A cautionary slogan he coined—“Death Begins at 40”—even got picked up by the wire services and circulated nationally for a while.

  Santa Clara County had its fair share of crime. Hornbuckle’s own predecessor was indicted on gambling and bribery charges, and more recently the brutal murder of a high school girl had garnered headlines. But this situation was extraordinary. While many in local law enforcement got their hackles up when the FBI called, Hornbuckle did not. The case of a young girl so far from home was no time to get your nose out of joint. The FBI and the sheriff’s office would work together on this.

  When Hornbuckle sent his deputies to the trailer park on Monterey Road, federal agents were already on their way. The fleet of cops, local and national, sped to the El Cortez Motor Inn. Three men from the sheriff’s office, Lieutenant John Gibbons and Officers Frank Leva and Douglas Logan, found Sally, alone, in La Salle’s trailer.

  “Please get me away from here before he gets back from town,” she said, terror winning out over relief for the moment. What if he returned before she could get away from the trailer park? What if he tried to take her again? And if he did, what if he did things to her she didn’t want to think about?

  But this time she was in the hands of the real police and the real FBI, not the pretend agent, Frank La Salle. These cops promised Sally she was safe. La Salle would not be able to take her or touch her again. Three deputies whisked her to a detention center in the city, run by Matron Lillian Nelson. Once she was settled there, the remaining local and federal police waited for La Salle to return.

  Lieutenant Gibbons at first held back from questioning Sally. “She’s too shaken up,” he told reporters a few hours later when they pressed him for details. But when Sally calmed down, Sheriff Hornbuckle led her into an interview room where she told him what had happened, and where she had been all this time. Hornbuckle listened, with patience, as Sally told him the whole terrible story. At first she gasped, sobbed, and cried. The hysterics were understandable, and the sheriff did not hurry her.

  Then, at last, Sally found her voice. She started at the beginning, describing how La Salle caught her trying to steal a notebook on a dare at the five-and-dime. How he said he was an FBI agent and that she was “under arrest.” How scared she was, and then how relieved when he let her go. How he found her again several months later, coming home from school. And how he told her she could avoid reform school only if she went away to Atlantic City with him, telling her mother he was the father to her friends, “because the government insisted I go there.”

  Sally confirmed that she and La Salle had lived in Baltimore for eight months before moving on to Dallas, and had only just arrived in San Jose. The entire time he held on to her, La Salle told Sally “that if I went back home, or they sent for me, or I ran away, I’d go to prison. The government ordered him to keep me and take care of me, that’s what he said.”

  Hornbuckle then had to ask Sally the toughest question: whether La Salle had forced her to have sex with him during their nearly two years on the road. He phrased it delicately, asking if Sally had “been intimate” with La Salle. She denied it. But later, after a doctor’s examination, she confessed the truth. “The first time was in Baltimore right after we got there. And ever since, too.” And then in Dallas, she said a “school chum of mine” told her that what she was doing with Frank was “wrong, and I ought to stop. I did stop, too.”

  She said La Salle was “mean and scolded me a little, but the rest of the time he treated me like a father.” Sally also said he had carried a gun for a time, in keeping with his pose as an FBI agent, but she thought La Salle had left it behind in Baltimore.

  Sally was emphatic that La Salle was not her father. “My real daddy died when I was six and I remember what he looks like. I never saw [La Salle] before that day in the dime store.”

  Once she began to talk, she could not stop. Until finally, pausing for breath, she said, “I want to go home as soon as I can.”

  IT’S NOT CLEAR if Frank La Salle found gainful employment that morning in San Jose. When he stepped off the bus and walked back to the trailer just after one o’clock in the afternoon, dozens of police officers surrounded him before he could reach his front door. They’d been hiding behind other trailers. Deputies from the sheriff’s office. FBI agents. Local San Jose cops. All present because of a chain of events that began as soon as Sally Horner hung up the phone. La Salle did not fight, but instead surrendered quietly.

  At the San Jose jail, La Salle grew more animated. He denied abducting Sally. He insisted he was her father and that her mother “has known where I am and where the girl is every day since I’ve been gone.” La Salle elaborated his alternate reality. “I took her when she was a li
ttle thing. . . . I am the father of six kids, three by this wife (Mrs. Horner) and three by another wife. I didn’t take [Sally] from Camden but from New York. It was four years ago, not two. She kept house for me and she had money and freedom.” The authorities, La Salle claimed, could have found him “at any time.” He had a business in Dallas, after all, and “always had cars registered in my name.” When he was done protesting his innocence, La Salle refused to speak further.

  “He’s a tough, vicious character,” said Lieutenant Gibbons.

  ELLA HORNER WAS OVERJOYED and overcome by the news that her daughter was alive and had been found. So much so that at first, she could hardly speak. When she composed herself, she told the large crowd of reporters and photographers who had descended upon 944 Linden Street that she was chiefly concerned with Sally’s safety. “I just want her back and to see her again. I am very thankful, and I will be a whole lot more thankful when I really see Sally.”

  She also repeated the sentiment she’d expressed to the press—and, perhaps, countless other times in private—back in December 1948, while Sally was still missing. “Whatever she has done, I can forgive her.”

  Later that day, a Camden Courier-Post reporter, Jacob Weiner, found Ella clutching a photo of Sally, the one that had been recovered from the Atlantic City boardinghouse in August 1948. “It seems so long ago, Sally, so long ago,” Ella murmured, gazing at the picture of her daughter. In a stronger tone, but with her voice still shaking, Ella said: “I’m so relieved.”

  Ella repeated that Sally had been gone for nearly two years. “That’s a long time,” she said. “During that time, I didn’t hear from her. No word. No postcard. No news of any kind.”

  About that June day when she allowed Sally to accompany Frank La Salle for a seashore vacation, she said, “I must have been very foolish . . . at least I know it now.” She picked up the picture of Sally again. “Anyway, I let her go. I haven’t seen her since. . . .”