Thirteen
Dallas
Frank La Salle took Sally Horner aside one day in March 1949 and broke the news that they were leaving Baltimore. He told her that the FBI had assigned him a new case, one that required him to move southwest to investigate. By then she’d been with him for nine months. Sally did not know, and could not know, that the real reason they were leaving Baltimore was that Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen had indicted La Salle on the more serious charge of kidnapping on March 17. The new indictment meant La Salle could face between thirty and thirty-five years for taking Sally. Police had not located the pair, but this charge, on top of the original indictment, promised greater scrutiny, more resources for the hunt, and a better probability of arrest. Baltimore was no longer safe, nor was the entire East Coast. Instead of flushing La Salle out, the new charge caused him to run.
The journey from Baltimore to Dallas is approximately 1,366 miles. Today, by car, it would take about twenty hours to drive, on I-81 and I-40. Neither of those highways existed in 1949. La Salle and Sally likely drove south on U.S. 11, traveling all the way to the highway’s end in New Orleans, Louisiana, before switching over to U.S. 80, arriving in Dallas less than two hundred miles later. However they traveled, Sally and La Salle got to Dallas around April 22, 1949. For the next eleven months, she and Frank continued to play father and daughter, sticking to the cover story that he had taken Sally away from her wayward mother to provide her with a more stable upbringing. None of their new neighbors seemed to question this. At least, not right away.
They moved into a quiet, well-kept trailer park on West Commerce Street, about four hundred feet from Dallas’s bustling downtown core. The park was designed like a horseshoe, with trailers—including one that La Salle bought on the premises—dotted all along the curve. The park could hold as many as a hundred motor homes. The mothers mostly stayed home and the fathers worked as farmhands, for steel companies, or at gas stations. Neighbors were closer in the trailer park than they had been in Baltimore. They could pay more attention to the pair, and get to know Sally—or think they did.
La Salle had changed their names again. Sally was no longer known as Madeline LaPlante, but as Florence Planette. Oddly, it isn’t clear whether La Salle also used the “Planette” alias. One of their new neighbors, Dale Kagamaster, who ended up working with La Salle, knew him as LaPlante. Frank also told people that he was widowed, a change from the divorced father cover story he used in Atlantic City and Baltimore.
The trailer park was owned by Nelrose and Charles Pfeil, who’d bought it a year earlier, after moving to Dallas from Akron, Ohio, with their three sons. Tom, the eldest, was nine years old when Frank and Sally arrived at the trailer park. He did not recall the name “LaPlante,” but thought “La Salle” seemed familiar. He also remembered “Florence’s” father as aloof, cold, standoffish. “I understand why, now,” Pfeil told me. “He had to be suspicious of everyone around him.” Tom had dim memories of Sally. “I don’t know if I could tell you I remember much of her except for talking a time or two. I was nine. I just wanted to play ball.”
As in Baltimore, La Salle got a job as a mechanic, but kept Sally in the dark about what he was really doing all day. He also enrolled Sally in another Catholic school. This time it was Our Lady of Good Counsel Academy at 210 Marsalis Avenue in the neighborhood of Oak Cliff, about a seven-minute drive away from West Commerce Street. Like Saint Ann’s in Baltimore, Our Lady of Good Counsel no longer exists, having been absorbed into Bishop Dunne Catholic School in 1961. None of its records have survived. And also like Saint Ann’s, the school was in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood that is no longer so, thanks to suburban migration, systemic inequality, and poverty.
Sally likely kept to a routine similar to the one she had in Baltimore. A bus ride to Our Lady of Good Counsel, where she began the day with morning prayers. Schoolwork wasn’t a breeze, but her grades were generally good: a copy of Sally’s report card from between September 1949 and February 1950, which La Salle kept after she brought it home, showed she received primarily As and A-minuses, with the occasional B, in geography and writing. The only time she received a lower grade—a C-plus, in languages—was in her final month at the school.
At first their Commerce Street neighbors didn’t see anything amiss. Sally appeared to be a typical twelve-year-old living with her widowed father, albeit one he never let out of his sight except to go to school. Sally never displayed despair or asked for help. La Salle wouldn’t let her.
Her neighbors thought Sally seemed to enjoy taking care of her home. She would bake every once in a while. She had a dog, one she apparently spoiled. La Salle provided her with a generous allowance for clothes and sweets. She would go shopping, swimming, and to her neighbors’ trailers for dinner— sometimes with La Salle, and other times by herself, when he told her he was working the case for the FBI.
Dale Kagamaster’s wife, Josephine, thought Sally was a well-adjusted girl. “There were several times we noticed the need for the love and care of a mother but we both felt that the father was doing a good job of providing better living conditions for [her].” The consensus about Sally and her “father” was that they “seemed happy and entirely devoted to each other.” Maude Smillie, who was living in a nearby trailer, seemed bewildered by the idea that Sally had been a virtual prisoner: “[Sally] spent one day at the beauty parlor with me. I gave her a permanent and she never mentioned a thing. She should have known she could have confided in me.”
Nelrose Pfeil was quoted in a court document several years later saying something similar: “Sally was in my home many times a day and she had access to several phones should she choose to use one. Sally had plenty of time to talk to me about being kidnaped [sic] if she had wanted to and I am sure she knew me well enough to know if she had said anything like that I would have helped her.” The only time La Salle kept Sally from playing with other children, according to Pfeil’s statement, “was when the person’s character was in question.”
It appears the Pfeils, the Kagamasters, and other neighbors bought La Salle’s cover story about Sally. They did not notice anything amiss, even for the ten-day period when Sally dropped off the radar and didn’t attend school. She’d suffered an appendicitis attack, one that required her to undergo an operation and spend three nights at the Texas Crippled Children’s Hospital (now the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children). The other seven days, presumably, she spent at home, recuperating.
Something did change in Sally, though, after the operation. She grew more pensive. Josephine Kagamaster observed that the girl did not move like a “healthy, light-hearted youngster.” She’d heard La Salle say the girl “walks like an old woman.”
ON THE SURFACE, Sally acted as free as she had been in Camden, before Frank La Salle took her away from everyone she loved. She might have been left alone for long stretches at a time, stayed late at a neighbor’s house watching television, and been on her own in the hospital for several nights. But if she told the truth, who would believe her story? Who would believe she had been abducted when, to all appearances, Frank La Salle was her father, and a loving one at that? And even if someone did believe her, could they help, or would they put Sally in greater peril?
Later, Josephine Kagamaster, Nelrose Pfeil, Maude Smillie, and others said they would have helped Sally had she chosen to confide in them. But they made such declarations with the benefit of hindsight, months or years after Frank La Salle’s diabolical crimes were exposed to the public. At the time, they were living ordinary and happy lives. The idea that a young girl and an older man would be in a cruel parody of a father-daughter relationship seemed inconceivable, unimaginable. And no matter what they believed about what they would have done, Sally did not confide in these neighbors. She did not feel she could trust them.