Santa Clara County had its fair share of crime. Hornbuckle’s own predecessor was indicted on gambling and bribery charges, and more recently the brutal murder of a high school girl had garnered headlines. But this situation was extraordinary. While many in local law enforcement got their hackles up when the FBI called, Hornbuckle did not. The case of a young girl so far from home was no time to get your nose out of joint. The FBI and the sheriff’s office would work together on this.
When Hornbuckle sent his deputies to the trailer park on Monterey Road, federal agents were already on their way. The fleet of cops, local and national, sped to the El Cortez Motor Inn. Three men from the sheriff’s office, Lieutenant John Gibbons and Officers Frank Leva and Douglas Logan, found Sally, alone, in La Salle’s trailer.
“Please get me away from here before he gets back from town,” she said, terror winning out over relief for the moment. What if he returned before she could get away from the trailer park? What if he tried to take her again? And if he did, what if he did things to her she didn’t want to think about?
But this time she was in the hands of the real police and the real FBI, not the pretend agent, Frank La Salle. These cops promised Sally she was safe. La Salle would not be able to take her or touch her again. Three deputies whisked her to a detention center in the city, run by Matron Lillian Nelson. Once she was settled there, the remaining local and federal police waited for La Salle to return.
Lieutenant Gibbons at first held back from questioning Sally. “She’s too shaken up,” he told reporters a few hours later when they pressed him for details. But when Sally calmed down, Sheriff Hornbuckle led her into an interview room where she told him what had happened, and where she had been all this time. Hornbuckle listened, with patience, as Sally told him the whole terrible story. At first she gasped, sobbed, and cried. The hysterics were understandable, and the sheriff did not hurry her.
Then, at last, Sally found her voice. She started at the beginning, describing how La Salle caught her trying to steal a notebook on a dare at the five-and-dime. How he said he was an FBI agent and that she was “under arrest.” How scared she was, and then how relieved when he let her go. How he found her again several months later, coming home from school. And how he told her she could avoid reform school only if she went away to Atlantic City with him, telling her mother he was the father to her friends, “because the government insisted I go there.”
Sally confirmed that she and La Salle had lived in Baltimore for eight months before moving on to Dallas, and had only just arrived in San Jose. The entire time he held on to her, La Salle told Sally “that if I went back home, or they sent for me, or I ran away, I’d go to prison. The government ordered him to keep me and take care of me, that’s what he said.”
Hornbuckle then had to ask Sally the toughest question: whether La Salle had forced her to have sex with him during their nearly two years on the road. He phrased it delicately, asking if Sally had “been intimate” with La Salle. She denied it. But later, after a doctor’s examination, she confessed the truth. “The first time was in Baltimore right after we got there. And ever since, too.” And then in Dallas, she said a “school chum of mine” told her that what she was doing with Frank was “wrong, and I ought to stop. I did stop, too.”
She said La Salle was “mean and scolded me a little, but the rest of the time he treated me like a father.” Sally also said he had carried a gun for a time, in keeping with his pose as an FBI agent, but she thought La Salle had left it behind in Baltimore.
Sally was emphatic that La Salle was not her father. “My real daddy died when I was six and I remember what he looks like. I never saw [La Salle] before that day in the dime store.”
Once she began to talk, she could not stop. Until finally, pausing for breath, she said, “I want to go home as soon as I can.”
IT’S NOT CLEAR if Frank La Salle found gainful employment that morning in San Jose. When he stepped off the bus and walked back to the trailer just after one o’clock in the afternoon, dozens of police officers surrounded him before he could reach his front door. They’d been hiding behind other trailers. Deputies from the sheriff’s office. FBI agents. Local San Jose cops. All present because of a chain of events that began as soon as Sally Horner hung up the phone. La Salle did not fight, but instead surrendered quietly.
At the San Jose jail, La Salle grew more animated. He denied abducting Sally. He insisted he was her father and that her mother “has known where I am and where the girl is every day since I’ve been gone.” La Salle elaborated his alternate reality. “I took her when she was a little thing…. I am the father of six kids, three by this wife (Mrs. Horner) and three by another wife. I didn’t take [Sally] from Camden but from New York. It was four years ago, not two. She kept house for me and she had money and freedom.” The authorities, La Salle claimed, could have found him “at any time.” He had a business in Dallas, after all, and “always had cars registered in my name.” When he was done protesting his innocence, La Salle refused to speak further.
“He’s a tough, vicious character,” said Lieutenant Gibbons.
ELLA HORNER WAS OVERJOYED and overcome by the news that her daughter was alive and had been found. So much so that at first, she could hardly speak. When she composed herself, she told the large crowd of reporters and photographers who had descended upon 944 Linden Street that she was chiefly concerned with Sally’s safety. “I just want her back and to see her again. I am very thankful, and I will be a whole lot more thankful when I really see Sally.”
She also repeated the sentiment she’d expressed to the press—and, perhaps, countless other times in private—back in December 1948, while Sally was still missing. “Whatever she has done, I can forgive her.”
Later that day, a Camden Courier-Post reporter, Jacob Weiner, found Ella clutching a photo of Sally, the one that had been recovered from the Atlantic City boardinghouse in August 1948. “It seems so long ago, Sally, so long ago,” Ella murmured, gazing at the picture of her daughter. In a stronger tone, but with her voice still shaking, Ella said: “I’m so relieved.”
Ella repeated that Sally had been gone for nearly two years. “That’s a long time,” she said. “During that time, I didn’t hear from her. No word. No postcard. No news of any kind.”
About that June day when she allowed Sally to accompany Frank La Salle for a seashore vacation, she said, “I must have been very foolish… at least I know it now.” She picked up the picture of Sally again. “Anyway, I let her go. I haven’t seen her since….”
Weiner asked Ella if she ever gave up hope that Sally would be found alive. There were times, Ella said, where she felt “pretty hopeless” because “I always knew she had enough sense to call me or drop me a line.” And yet Sally hadn’t.
What did Ella think about Frank La Salle? “That man… ,” she began, but her voice broke.
Susan was sitting with her mother during Weiner’s interview, and picked up the thread. “I hope that man La Salle is properly punished. He should receive life imprisonment… or the electric chair.”
Then Susan turned her thoughts to a second telephone conversation she’d just had with her younger sister. “I couldn’t believe it was Sally I was talking to. It was wonderful.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t wait to see her.”
Sally had asked Susan how their mother was faring. She also asked after Susan’s daughter, Diana, now nineteen months old.