When Susan turned eighteen, they decided not to wait any longer. On his next furlough, she and Al wed in Florence on February 17, 1945. When the war ended, Al received his honorable discharge and he and Susan began married life in earnest, running the greenhouse together. They wanted children, but Susan’s initial pregnancies ended in early miscarriages. Then their luck turned.
In June 1948, Susan and Al Panaro were two months away from the birth of their daughter, Diana, Ella’s first grandchild. But when the baby girl arrived that August, celebration was the furthest thing from the minds of her parents and grandmother. Sally had disappeared and they knew who had taken her. They also now knew what sort of man he was.
Five
The Search for Sally
An eight-state police search for Sally Horner began on August 5, 1948. By then she had been gone from Camden for six weeks. The news wires picked up the story of her abduction, as well as Ella’s delay in reporting her daughter missing. The picture of Sally on the swing went out across the country, appearing in wire reports published from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Rochester, New York, and in local papers like the Camden Courier-Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Robert and Jean Pfeffer were among those who read the news about Sally Horner’s disappearance. How strange, the couple thought. “If [Sally] had wanted to warn us about anything she had every opportunity, but never did so.” Robert picked up the phone, called the Camden police, and told the officer who answered about their encounter in Brigantine Beach. Robert also mentioned his little sister Barbara’s visit to La Salle’s apartment, which had stretched to ninety agonizing minutes of waiting. Perhaps reading about La Salle’s prior incarceration made him wonder what, exactly, might have happened to Barbara during those ninety minutes. He never heard a word back from the police.
The shock of the news about Sally, combined with mundane family matters, delayed Pfeffer from making the two-and-a-half-hour round trip back to Atlantic City to pick up their car for several weeks. He never learned whether La Salle himself or some other mechanic restored it to good working order.
Sally and La Salle, however, were long gone from Atlantic City. Camden police now knew, with queasy certainty, why Sally’s family had ample reason to be fearful of what Frank La Salle might do to their little girl.
AT FIRST MARSHALL THOMPSON worked the Sally Horner case with other Camden police officers. But when the summer of 1948 gave way to fall, he took on the investigation full-time and never stopped. As the months wore on, his colleagues weren’t shy about voicing their opinions. The girl had to be dead. She couldn’t up and vanish like this, no trace, no word, when they knew who had her, what they both looked like, and that they were posing as father and daughter.
Thompson felt otherwise. Sally must be alive. He figured it was likely she was still near enough to Camden. And even if she wasn’t, he would find her. It was his job as detective to care about every case, but the plight of a missing girl really got to him.
He had been promoted to detective only the year before, nearly two decades into his time on the force. Thompson’s appointment in March 1928 happened the same year his only daughter, Caroline, was born, and not long after he and his wife, Emma, moved to the Cramer Hill neighborhood in Northeast Camden. The young couple had long-standing Camden roots, Thompson in particular. His father, George, had served as justice of the peace, and his grandfather John Reeve Thompson was a member of Camden’s first city council.
Tangles with “local pugilists,” raids on illegal speakeasies, breaking up home gambling dens, and other minor crimes littered Thompson’s stretch as a Camden cop. Most of the time he worked with Sergeant Nathan Petit; their names often appeared together in the local papers’ accounts of various notable arrests.
Off duty, Thompson entertained family and friends by playing classical piano, which his mother, Harriette, taught him as a child. His musical ability was called out with hyperbolic flourish by a Courier-Post columnist in 1939: “Marshall Thompson, one of Camden’s finest, is a talented pianist. He never took a music lesson.”
Thompson’s innate tenacity made him the perfect choice to look for Sally Horner and Frank La Salle. Over the course of his investigation Thompson learned much about Sally’s abductor, from his choice of haircut to the “quantity of sugar and cream he desired when drinking coffee.” He chased every lead and followed up on every tip. One phone call came in to say La Salle was holed up in a house on Trenton Avenue and Washington Street in downtown Camden. A state police teletype arrived placing La Salle at a residence on Third and Sumner Avenue in Florence, the same town where Sally lived as a little girl. Neither tip panned out.
Once Thompson was on the case full-time, he let it dictate his entire waking life. He got in touch, in person and by telephone, with the FBI; state and city police at Columbus, Newton, Riverton, and Langhorne, Pennsylvania; state parole offices at Trenton and Camden; detective divisions in Philadelphia; and the Trenton post office. Several months into Sally’s disappearance, Thompson received reports of La Salle being spotted in Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, South Jersey Shore resorts, and at a restaurant in Haddonfield, observed by a waitress working there. He followed each lead to no avail.
Thompson also cast his net farther and deeper in the surrounding states. He checked in regularly with state and city police in Absecon, Pleasantville, Maple Shade, Newark, Orange, and Paterson, New Jersey; parole offices in Atlantic City and the state prison farm in Leesburg; and the Compensation Bureau in Trenton, in case La Salle drew or cashed a paycheck in the state.
There were periods where he worked twenty-four hours or more without taking a break. Finding Sally Horner was more important than sleep. Thompson tracked down La Salle’s first wife in Portland, Maine, but she knew nothing of his whereabouts. The detective also contacted La Salle’s second wife, now living in Delaware Township with her daughter, her new husband, and their baby son. The woman gave Thompson an earful about her wayward, criminal ex-husband’s habits and history, including the dramatic beginning of their marriage and its equally explosive end.
Thompson used his holidays to travel for the case. On one six-day “vacation,” Thompson went to the Trenton State Fair. Each morning, he stood outside the entrance to the grounds, hoping that La Salle might turn up to apply for a job. Or perhaps he would bring Sally with him.
None of the leads amounted to anything. Nor did tips from numerous anonymous phone calls and letters. All had to be followed up on, but none yielded the answer Detective Marshall Thompson craved: the whereabouts of Sally Horner.
It was the nature of a detective’s job to get hopes up and have them crushed. So many of his colleagues believed the girl was dead. But not Thompson. He could not give up. He knew in his bones that he would, someday, find Sally alive and bring her back to Camden, to her mother, her family.
And that he would find Frank La Salle and see justice done.
Six
Seeds of Compulsion
