FRANK LA SALLE made his presence known to Sally Horner’s family one final time. On the morning of her funeral, they discovered he had sent a spray of flowers. The Panaros insisted they not be displayed.
THE FIRST COURT HEARING stemming from the accident that killed Sally Horner took place on Tuesday, August 26. It lasted more than two and a half hours. A full record of the proceeding does not exist, but the surviving court docket reported that Baker pleaded not guilty to a count of careless driving and that Judge Thomas Sears found him not guilty of the charge.
New Jersey state law enforcement was not about to let Baker go so easily, and what followed was a complicated series of charges, court hearings, and verdicts. Prosecutors even charged Baker for “operating a car with illegal equipment”—specifically, unapproved headlight shields. Police told the Vineland Daily Journal that Baker’s headlights “were partially obscured by a device he had purchased and attached to other lights.”
The most serious charge came from the Cape May grand jury. On September 3, 1952, they indicted Baker for the “reckless killing by auto” of Sally Horner, stating that he had acted “carelessly and heedlessly, in wilful and wanton disregard of the rights and safety of others… and against the peace of this State, the Government, and dignity of the same.”
The following week, on September 10, Baker pleaded not guilty to that charge in front of Judge Harry Tanenbaum. Carol was called to testify to her friendship with Sally, as well as the whole business with the fake identification cards. Her memory of the experience was hazy, but she had vivid recall of Baker’s attitude.
“He was very arrogant,” Carol told me. “He would make these weird remarks, like how the courtroom was only thirty feet long instead of being a hundred feet as it was supposed to. I didn’t understand what he meant and still don’t.” She was still so worked up about his comment about the courtroom size that she mentioned it to me three times in one conversation. It demonstrated, to her, Baker’s inability to take the hearing seriously: “He snickered a great deal. Acting stupid.” Her reaction to him was visceraclass="underline" “I hated him because he was driving and had the accident that killed my best friend.”
Perhaps Carol was also upset by the court’s decision, delayed until January 15, 1953. Judge Tenenbaum threw out the charge against Baker for reckless killing by auto—the sketchy court records did not give a reason—and also found Baker not guilty of the unapproved headlight shields count.
But Baker’s legal troubles were not done. He faced a cluster of civil actions, too. As with the criminal court proceedings, the surviving civil court documents are light on detail and full of unresolved gaps. But both the Cape May County Gazette and the Camden Courier-Post reported important details on the complicated joint lawsuits.
All five complaints were heard together the week of May 21, 1953. Dominick Caprioni, who owned the car right behind Baker’s on the night Sally Horner died, sued Jacob Benson, owner of the parked truck that both Baker and Caprioni crashed into. Caprioni also sued Baker and his mother, Marie Young, since she owned the Ford Baker was driving, seeking $13,300 in damages in his lawsuits. Benson sued Baker and Caprioni without asking for any money, while Baker and Young in turn sued Benson for $52,500. Lastly—and the civil action that matters most—Ella Horner sued Baker, Young, and Benson for $50,000.
The byzantine nature of the lawsuits, heard by Superior Court judge Elmer B. Woods, may explain why there was a mistrial on the first day, after someone observed a juror talking to one of the witnesses during the noon recess. A new hearing lasted two days before ending in an abrupt settlement on May 28, 1953. It’s not clear how much each of the plaintiffs (some of whom were also doubling as defendants) received.
The cases against Baker were over, but Cape May County did not officially close the books until June 30, 1954. Written beside his name on the ledger for that day was “nolle pros”— they declined to prosecute. At last the car crash that killed Sally Horner, in the eyes of the criminal justice system, had been ruled a tragic accident.
Twenty-Four
La Salle in Prison
Frank La Salle’s lengthy prison sentence meant Sally Horner’s family could push her abductor to the back of their minds. The New Jersey court systems, however, weren’t so lucky. La Salle may have pleaded guilty and shrugged off his right to an attorney, but he still thought he could find a way out of prison, banking on an outlandish fantasy about the life he’d led with Sally. Unlike Humbert Humbert, who tried to attach some grander meaning to his delusions of exemplary parenthood, La Salle came up with a rationale that was crude, obvious, and disappointingly banal.
He applied for, and received, a writ of habeas corpus from the Mercer County Court (Trenton State Prison fell under their jurisdiction). The gist of La Salle’s first appeal was that he’d never waived his right to extradition from California and was thus brought to Camden against his will. In lengthy testimony at the Mercer County Courthouse on September 24, 1951, La Salle also claimed he “did not plead guilty before Judge Palese in Camden” and was thus “deprived of his liberty without due process of law.”
While the transcript of the proceeding is lost, I discovered the outcome of La Salle’s habeas hearing in a motion filed after the fact by Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen: La Salle perjured himself on the stand by denying he had pleaded guilty to the abduction and kidnapping charges when, in fact, he made that plea in open court in April 1950.
Future New Jersey governor and chief justice of the State Supreme Court Richard Hughes presided over the case as a county court judge. Hughes was so incensed by La Salle’s lies on the stand that he told the prisoner: “I hardly think you should be able to finish your first [prison] sentence, but in case you should, I am imposing another. You have attempted to subvert and obstruct the proper administration of law by an application for a writ [of habeas corpus] with absolutely no foundation.” Hughes ordered La Salle to serve an additional thirty days in the Mercer County Jail.
Judge Hughes’s ire toward La Salle was compounded by the recent uptick of prisoners acting as their own jailhouse lawyers who showed no compunction about lying in their filings. “The courts always lend a willing ear where the deprivation of rights are concerned,” Hughes wrote, “but of late there has been a great abuse of this privilege by prisoners who lie when they file sworn statements. It must be broken up.”
The contempt of court finding did not deter La Salle from his appeals. He kept on, in a lengthy series of motions and affidavits filed in waves between 1952 and 1955. They are the only surviving evidence of La Salle’s state of mind during and after Sally’s abduction, and they are remarkable proof of a false narrative. The authority and control he radiated when he had Sally in his power, his ability to manipulate others into believing in his act, vanished upon his arrest in March 1950. Now he exuded desperation and falsity.
In his appeals, La Salle refused to acknowledge that Sally was not, and had never been, his daughter. He referred to her repeatedly as “Natural Daughter Florence Horner La Salle,” apparently having convinced himself, through the selective reading of legal precedents, that “a father cannot be convicted of kidnaping his own child.”