The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  The cases against Baker were over, but Cape May County did not officially close the books until June 30, 1954. Written beside his name on the ledger for that day was “nolle pros”— they declined to prosecute. At last the car crash that killed Sally Horner, in the eyes of the criminal justice system, had been ruled a tragic accident.

  Twenty-Four

  La Salle in Prison

  Frank La Salle’s lengthy prison sentence meant Sally Horner’s family could push her abductor to the back of their minds. The New Jersey court systems, however, weren’t so lucky. La Salle may have pleaded guilty and shrugged off his right to an attorney, but he still thought he could find a way out of prison, banking on an outlandish fantasy about the life he’d led with Sally. Unlike Humbert Humbert, who tried to attach some grander meaning to his delusions of exemplary parenthood, La Salle came up with a rationale that was crude, obvious, and disappointingly banal.

  He applied for, and received, a writ of habeas corpus from the Mercer County Court (Trenton State Prison fell under their jurisdiction). The gist of La Salle’s first appeal was that he’d never waived his right to extradition from California and was thus brought to Camden against his will. In lengthy testimony at the Mercer County Courthouse on September 24, 1951, La Salle also claimed he “did not plead guilty before Judge Palese in Camden” and was thus “deprived of his liberty without due process of law.”

  While the transcript of the proceeding is lost, I discovered the outcome of La Salle’s habeas hearing in a motion filed after the fact by Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen: La Salle perjured himself on the stand by denying he had pleaded guilty to the abduction and kidnapping charges when, in fact, he made that plea in open court in April 1950.

  Future New Jersey governor and chief justice of the State Supreme Court Richard Hughes presided over the case as a county court judge. Hughes was so incensed by La Salle’s lies on the stand that he told the prisoner: “I hardly think you should be able to finish your first [prison] sentence, but in case you should, I am imposing another. You have attempted to subvert and obstruct the proper administration of law by an application for a writ [of habeas corpus] with absolutely no foundation.” Hughes ordered La Salle to serve an additional thirty days in the Mercer County Jail.

  Judge Hughes’s ire toward La Salle was compounded by the recent uptick of prisoners acting as their own jailhouse lawyers who showed no compunction about lying in their filings. “The courts always lend a willing ear where the deprivation of rights are concerned,” Hughes wrote, “but of late there has been a great abuse of this privilege by prisoners who lie when they file sworn statements. It must be broken up.”

  The contempt of court finding did not deter La Salle from his appeals. He kept on, in a lengthy series of motions and affidavits filed in waves between 1952 and 1955. They are the only surviving evidence of La Salle’s state of mind during and after Sally’s abduction, and they are remarkable proof of a false narrative. The authority and control he radiated when he had Sally in his power, his ability to manipulate others into believing in his act, vanished upon his arrest in March 1950. Now he exuded desperation and falsity.

  In his appeals, La Salle refused to acknowledge that Sally was not, and had never been, his daughter. He referred to her repeatedly as “Natural Daughter Florence Horner La Salle,” apparently having convinced himself, through the selective reading of legal precedents, that “a father cannot be convicted of kidnaping his own child.”

  He spun a shambling yarn about living in Camden, but “not with his family,” in January 1948, “doing what he thought right by giving money in sufficient sums to his former common-law wife for the care and maintenance of his [daughter]” and seeing Sally “on the streets by herself as late as 12 AM midnight,” at which point he would “make her go home and give her money.” La Salle neglected to mention his January 15, 1948, parole on the statutory rape charges, or that he never knew, let alone had any domestic relationship with, Ella Horner. And he most certainly never saw Sally out at midnight; nor did he give her money and tell her to go home.

  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 hi
s 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* 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.”

  She reestablished relations with La Salle in the final year of his life, visiting him in Trenton State Prison along with her children, preschoolers at the time. He made model boats for the kids and leather pocket books for Madeline and her husband. When he was up for parole, sick with lung and heart problems, Madeline volunteered to have him live at her house should he be released early. That did not happen.

  “When I looked at him, I could see a lot of myself in his face,” Madeline said. “My husband picked it up right away.” For those last months, Madeline did not clutter her relationship with questions of what La Salle had done to land him in prison. “We talked as father and daughter would talk,” Madeline told me. “There wasn’t a strain. He was just Dad. Truth be told, I never thought about whether he was guilty or not guilty.”

  Just as John Ray, Jr., became the conduit for Humbert Humbert’s so-called confession, Madeline, unwittingly, became the keeper of Frank La Salle’s version of the story. When I mentioned the word “abduction” to Madeline, she interrupted me with some force. “That’s not the way he described it to me,” she said. She then proceeded to parrot the version La Salle had presented in his appeals—a version the court had soundly rejected as fantasy.

  FRANK LA SALLE never saw the outside world again. He appealed his sentence one final time, in 1962, and was again denied. He died of arteriosclerosis in Trenton State Prison on March 22, 1966, sixteen years into his sentence. He was, according to his death certificate, two months shy of turning seventy. The certificate listed him as “Frank La Salle III,” the first time he ever used this sobriquet. That he died with his age shrouded in mystery and under a false name fits with the entire life of a man determined to conceal terrible truths.

  Twenty-Five

  “Gee, Ed, That Was Bad Luck”

  Two weeks after Sally Horner’s death, on September 2, 1952, another sensational crime reported by the Associated Press caught Vladimir Nabokov’s attention, and he filled another of his note cards. Unlike Sally’s story, which merited a single parenthetical in Lolita but was seeded throughout the novel, this case got an entire paragraph at the beginning of chapter thirty-three. Humbert Humbert has returned to Ramsdale. Before making himself known in his former haunt, he stops off at the local cemetery, where he wanders as he ruminates upon his past. During his peregrinations, he stumbles across a particular sight:

  On some of the graves there were pale, transparent little national flags slumped in the windless air under the evergreens. Gee, Ed, that was bad luck—referring to G. Edward Grammar, a thirty-five-year old New York office manager who had just been arrayed on a charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and put her into a car. The case came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new big blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be a routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better.

  Nabokov cleverly phrased it so that the reader isn’t clear if Humbert actually stumbles across the murderer’s grave or if he is merely thinking about the case as he looks at the graves. It has to be the latter, because Ramsdale is supposed to be somewhere in New England, an area Nabokov knew very well. The G. Edward Grammer case happened in Baltimore, a city Nabokov did not know at all. Nabokov’s misspelling of Grammer’s last name was deliberate, an opportunity for the noted literary prankster to sneak in another joke. It was also a sly reference to Humbert’s professed intention, earlier in Lolita, to teach French grammar to Ramsdale’s local children.

  The text of Nabokov’s surviving note card about the G. Edward Grammer case is close to, but not exactly, the final version. It includes the phrases “Gee Ed, that was bad luck” as well as “god bless our good cops!” But another wry aside about “Mrs. Grammar’s new automobile” and Grammer’s murderous actions did not make it into the final t
ext: “ought to have doctored it first, Ed!”

  One could see how this story, in tandem with Sally Horner’s death, served as important inspiration for Nabokov. The Grammer case was a media sensation, capturing public attention for being an almost perfect murder. Grammer very nearly got away with it—except the Baltimore police noticed some details that did not add up, like a pebble jammed underneath the accelerator pedal.

  The crime unfolded much as Nabokov described in Lolita. On the evening of August 19, 1952, Ed Grammer was getting ready to go back to New York City after a weekend with his wife and both of their daughters. Dorothy and the kids had moved to Parkville, a suburb of Baltimore, to care for her bereaved mother, while Ed remained in their Bronx apartment. The Sunday night routine was for Dorothy to drive Ed in their big blue Chrysler to Baltimore Penn Station, where he would give his wife some money for the week and catch the 11:28 P.M. train. For a few days after the “accident,” Grammer insisted that Dorothy had dropped him off as usual, and that the last he’d seen her alive was at the train station.

  But the facts didn’t add up. The witnesses who saw the Chrysler speed down the hill along Taylor Avenue and sideswipe a telephone pole turned out to be patrolmen. For the victim of a car accident, Dorothy was astonishingly little-bruised in the areas they expected to be bruised, whereas her head had clearly been bashed in. There was blood in the driver’s seat but the spatter wasn’t substantial enough to suggest she had been killed on impact. More curious: Dorothy’s purse and glasses were missing. When the pebble was discovered, pushing the accelerator forward, what seemed an accident transformed into murder, confirmed when Grammer confessed, at last, to Baltimore County police.