Florence Sally Horner

Florence Sally Horner was a girl abducted by serial child molester Frank La Salle in 1948. The kidnapping, captivity and repeated rapes of Horner allegedly made her the prototype for the title character of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Abduction: In March 1948, 10-year-old Horner attempted to steal a five-cent notebook from a Woolworths in Camden, New Jersey. Frank La Salle, a 50-year-old mechanic, caught her stealing, told her that he was an FBI agent, and threatened to have her sent to a reform school unless she reported to him periodically. In June 1948, he abducted Horner. La Salle instructed her to tell her mother he was the father of two of her school friends and she had been invited on their family vacation to the Jersey Shore. He spent 21 months traveling with her in different U.S. states. According to charges later brought against La Salle, it was during this period that he raped her repeatedly. While attending school in Dallas, Texas, Horner confided her secret to a friend. Later she escaped from La Salle, and phoned her sister at home, asking her to send the FBI. When arrested on March 22, 1950, in San Jose, California, La Salle claimed that he was Florence's father. However, authorities in New Jersey confirmed that Horner's father had died seven years previously. La Salle was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison under the Mann Act. Death: Horner died in a car accident near Woodbine, New Jersey, on August 18, 1952. As the Associated Press reported on August 20, 1952: "Florence Sally Horner, a 15-year-old Camden, N.J., girl who spent 21 months as the captive of a middle-aged morals offender a few years ago, was killed in a highway accident when the car in which she was riding plowed into the rear of a parked truck." Cultural references: Critic Alexander Dolinin proposed in 2005 that Frank La Salle and Florence Sally Horner were the real life prototypes of Humbert Humbert and Dolores "Lolita" Haze from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Sarah Weinman's book The Real Lolita also alleges that Horner's ordeal inspired Lolita. Although Nabokov had already used the same basic idea—that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as father and daughter—in his then unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik (Волшебник), it is still possible that he drew on the details of the Horner case in writing Lolita. An English translation of Volshebnik was published in 1985 as The Enchanter. Nabokov explicitly mentions the Horner case in Chapter 33, Part II of Lolita: "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?"