The girls saved up their pennies for bus fare and headed south on Friday, August 15, an hour-and-a-half-long ride covering just over eighty-six miles. They got there in the late afternoon. Wildwood bustled with the energy of all the young people making similar weekend pilgrimages for sun, sand, beach, and nightlife. Carol and Sally also carried fake identification cards saying they were twenty-one years old. This would lead to confusion later on.
Sally and Carol weren’t drinkers. Sally did not touch alcohol at all, while Carol only occasionally sipped some beer or wine. The fake IDs weren’t about boozing. If you wanted to dance, you had to go to clubs like the Bamboo Room, the Riptide, or the Bolero, and you needed to be over the age of twenty-one to get in. Every other Camden high school kid had a fake ID. Plus it was so easy: go to City Hall, get a card-sized version of your birth certificate, adjust the birth date, bleach it out then dye it green with vegetable food coloring, get it laminated, and voilà, a genuine-looking false identification card.
Sally and Carol hit the beach, and after that danced the night away. Then, on Saturday, the friends’ plans split apart. For that was when Eddie met Sally.
EDWARD JOHN BAKER drove down to Wildwood nearly every summer weekend in 1952. When Sally Horner met him, he must have seemed like a boy for whom fun was something not just to be had, but to be lived.
In photographs from his high school yearbooks and local newspapers, Baker’s eyes dance with merriment. It’s there even in the classic high school graduation head shot: while other classmates try for seriousness belying their years, Baker, his dark hair tousled and his eyebrows raised, makes the thought of putting away childish things seem eminently unreasonable. The sparkle in his eye lurks in group photos of the many school musical groups he played with, from the senior jazz band to the string orchestra to the treble clef quartet. In all those shots, Baker holds his trusty soprano saxophone like the proverbial piper ready to entice those eager to follow him wherever he may go.
Photographs lie, of course. They are but millisecond-long glimpses of a more complicated set of feelings, emotions, interactions. One should be careful of reading too much into them. But photos are all that remain, since Baker—Eddie in his youth—isn’t around anymore to say what was in his mind at the time. He died in 2014, age eighty-two, still living in his hometown of Vineland, New Jersey.
What is clear from those photos of Baker is why Sally found him attractive at a time when she was finally ready to feel such things. Edward Baker was tall, dark, and twenty to Sally’s mature-not-by-choice fifteen. She didn’t tell Baker her real age; she said she was seventeen, and Baker said later he “thought she probably was. She looked it.” Carol said that Sally was “bananas” for him as soon as she saw him.
Sally had confided in Carol throughout their yearlong friendship, and especially over that summer, about her loneliness and longing for a boyfriend. How that seemed impossible in Camden, where too many people knew about her kidnapping. Where she was viciously mocked by boys and girls alike. Branded a slut. Shunned.
Baker was a tonic to all that. Just the right amount of older, taller, handsomer. She wasn’t about to correct him if he believed she was seventeen, or tell him that the new school she was about to start in the fall was Woodrow Wilson High. Perhaps she hoped Baker could pry her away from the darkness. Or perhaps Sally merely wanted a weekend diversion.
After meeting at the beach on Saturday, they spent the afternoon and evening together, and on Sunday morning they went to church. “She impressed me as a darn nice girl,” said Baker. “She was good-looking, reserved… and was apparently a church-goer.”
If something more happened between Saturday night and Sunday morning, Sally did not confide in Carol. Sally did, however, ask a gigantic favor from her best friend after she and Eddie returned from church: Would Carol be okay heading back to Camden on her own? If she was, Sally would go with Baker in his glossy black Ford sedan to his hometown of Vineland and catch a bus from there.
“She really, really, wanted to go home with him,” recalled Carol. “She thought he was so nice.”
Carol said sure, she didn’t mind. She had no reason to get in the way of her best friend’s infatuation. Baker seemed all right, not someone who would do Sally harm. Besides, other friends of Carol’s were in Wildwood that weekend, too, and they had room for Carol in their car.
The ride home to Camden was tranquil for Carol. The following morning would be nothing of the sort.
ED BAKER PULLED onto the highway with Sally Horner in the passenger seat. Her spirits must have been high as they began the trip to Vineland. They’d spent all of Sunday together, just like they had on Saturday. She was dead gone on him, and he seemed to feel the same way about her. That evening, she’d met Eddie for supper, after which they walked along Wildwood’s bustling boardwalk. Away from the carnival barkers and the screaming children, they spied a free bench and sat down. They talked and talked, and perhaps even kissed, and then headed for his car well after dark. She didn’t want to say goodbye just yet.
The trip from Wildwood to Vineland normally took about forty minutes. Perhaps, given that it was after eleven o’clock at night, Ed Baker wanted to drive a little faster. Perhaps they were rushing to get Sally to the station before the last bus left for Camden. Or maybe their plans were not so innocent, and they didn’t want anyone else to know.
As the clock neared midnight, Ed Baker and Sally Horner were seventeen miles north of Wildwood. A car approached from the opposite direction of the two-lane highway, and Baker shifted his headlights to low beam. He kept both hands on the steering wheel to hold the car in the center of the road. Through the glare, Baker caught a glimpse of something off to the side, but not fast enough to avoid a collision.
Sally never felt a thing.
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on Monday, August 18, 1952, the New Jersey State Police arrived on the scene of a four-vehicle highway accident on lower Woodbine Road where the county line divided North Dennis from Woodbine. (The entire stretch is now part of Highway 78.) Baker had barreled into the back of a parked truck, owned by Jacob Benson, which proceeded to crash into another parked truck, owned by John Rifkin. The impact caused Rifkin’s truck to be thrown into the highway, where it was hit again by the car directly behind Baker’s Ford.
State Trooper Paul Heilfurth told the Wildwood Leader that if the multi-car crash had happened three minutes later, it “would probably have been more serious.” That’s because Benson’s truck was about to be towed by Rifkin’s truck, and both men were safely away from the vehicles when Baker plowed into them.
Those three extra minutes saved the men’s lives. Baker broke his left knee, needed fifteen stitches to close a gash on his right arm, and was cut up and bruised.
The car crash killed Sally Horner instantly.
Rescue crews took more than two hours to free Sally’s body from the wreckage. Her head had been crushed by the truck’s tailgate, which had come through the windshield when the vehicles collided. Police discovered the fake ID that claimed Sally was twenty-one. Initial news reports misreported her age as a result. Once they realized who she was and that she had been in the news before, Sally’s true age emerged.
The death certificate, issued by Cape May County three days later, listed the cause of Sally’s death as a fractured skull from a blow to the right side of her head. She’d broken her neck; other mortal injuries included a crushed chest and internal injuries, as well as a right leg fracture above the knee. The coroner didn’t bother with an autopsy.