Florence Sally Horner
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Florence Sally Horner (1937–1952) was a girl abducted by a child molester. In 1948, at the age of 11, she stole a 5-cent notebook in Hamden, New Jersey. Frank La Salle, a 50 year-old-mechanic, caught her stealing, told her that he was an FBI agent, and threatened to send her to "a place for girls like you". Then he abducted the girl and spent 21 months traveling with her over different American states and raping her. While attending school in Dallas, Texas, she confided her secret to a friend. Later she managed to escape from La Salle and phone her sister at home asking her to send the FBI. La Salle was arrested and claimed that he was Florence's father, however, FBI found that her father had died seven years previously. La Salle was sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison. Florence Horner died in 1952 in a car accident.
Frank La Salle and Florence Sally Horner are believed by some to have been the real life prototypes of Humbert Humbert and Dolores "Lolita" Haze from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The problem with this suggestion is that Nabokov had already used the same basic idea — that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as man and daughter — in his then unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik (Волшебник). Which isn't to say, of course, that he didn't draw on the details of the Florence Horner case in writing Lolita. An English translation of Volshebnik was published in 1985 as The Enchanter.
External links
- [What happened to Sally Horner?], by Alexander Dolinin.
- [1940s sex kidnap inspired Lolita], by Ben Dowell. Sunday Times, September 11, 2005.
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