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 years. 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.