The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

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A couple of years before her life changed course forever, Sally Horner posed for a photograph. Nine years old at the time, she stands in front of the back fence of her house, a thin, leafless tree disappearing into the top right-hand corner of the frame. Tendrils of Sally’s hair brush her face and the top shoulder of her coat. She looks straight ahead at the photographer, her sister’s husband, trust and love for him evident in her expression. The photo has a ghostly quality, enhanced by the sepia color and the blurred focus.

This wasn’t the first photograph of Sally Horner that I saw, and I’ve seen a great many more since. But this is the one I think of the most. Because it’s the only photo where Sally has a child’s utter lack of guile, without any idea of what horrors lie ahead. Here was evidence of one future she might have had. Sally didn’t have a chance to live that one out.

FLORENCE “SALLY” HORNER disappeared from Camden, New Jersey, in mid-June 1948, in the company of a man calling himself Frank La Salle. Twenty-one months later, in March 1950, with the help of a concerned neighbor, Sally telephoned her family from San Jose, California, begging for someone to send the FBI to rescue her. Sensational coverage and La Salle’s hasty guilty plea ensued, and the man spent the remainder of his life in prison.

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