“That’s the way it was in those days.” Emma DiRenzo, whom Sally knew as Emma Annibale, agreed. “No matter how you looked at it, she was a slut, a total whore,” Carol said. Nice girls were supposed to be pure until marriage. That she was not a virgin was enough to taint her. It didn’t matter to Sally’s classmates that she had been abducted and raped. Where she was viciously mocked by boys and girls alike. How that seemed impossible in Camden, where too many people knew about her kidnapping. Sally had confided in Carol throughout their year-long friendship, and especially over that summer, about her loneliness and longing for a boyfriend. Sally had no one but Carol, who didn’t care a whit what anyone else thought of her friend. Carol came from a large family - she was one of ten siblings, a far cry from Sally’s smaller pool of immediate relatives. Carol lived two blocks away from the junior high while Sally had a longer daily walk of four to five blocks. Carol had street smarts Sally did too, but she wanted to close the door on how she got them, and escaped into the land of books. The girls met in eighth-grade homeroom at Burrough Junior High, from which Sally graduated in June 1952 with honors.

Sally underwent no psychological examinations nor did she see a therapist.Īfter had a bright spot in Carol Starts (her maiden name). “She never said she was sad and depressed,” Al told me in 2014, “but you knew something was wrong.” The family discouraged discussion of her kidnapping, and she almost never spoke of her ordeal with anyone. A light would shine, and then flicker out. Sally adopted a mask of good-natured resilience, but her brother-in-law, Al Panaro, recalled something different. La Salle would serve the rest of his life in prison Sally was supposed to resume her own life. Sally had endured a terrifying cross-country nightmare, moving her from Atlantic City to Baltimore, then on to Dallas and finally, San Jose, California, where she was rescued in March 1950 and brought back to Camden. It was a possible refuge from the melancholy and loneliness that had built up in the wake of her 1948 kidnapping by Frank La Salle from Camden, New Jersey - a story that helped inspire Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Why not head down to Wildwood for a quick getaway?įor Sally, going down to the Jersey Shore was more than mere vacation. They were just a few weeks away from their first freshman class at Woodrow Wilson High. Nobody had air conditioning and heading to the Jersey Shore was an easy way to find some relief.Ĭarol and Sally were both working summer jobs as waitresses at the Sun Ray drugstore in nearby Haddonfield. It was mid-August, a time of relentless heat and humidity in Camden, New Jersey. Carol Taylor no longer remembers why she and Sally Horner decided to go down to Wildwood for that summer weekend in 1952.

The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman