Girl, 12, Says She Lived With Abductor, 56, Two Years Through Fear She’d Be Arrested

Washington Post – March 23, 1950

San Jose, Calif, March 22, 1950, (UP). Twelve-year-old Sally Horner accused a former convict today of forcing her to live with him nearly two years by threatening to send her to prison for the theft of a dime-store notebook.

Mann Act charges were lodged against Frank LaSalle, 56 after the plump, honey-haired youngster from Camden, N.J. told how he held her in his power 21 months by claiming to be an FBI agent. He was held in lieu of $10,000 bond.

LaSalle’s record includes conviction for rape and arrests for bigamy, indecent assault and enticing minors.

Sally, a seventh grader whose second set of teeth have just grown out, said LaSalle abducted her by guile from her Camden home, that she had sexual relations with him out of fear that he would turn her in.

LaSalle, thin-faced and gray-haired, denied her accusations of intimacies or that he held her against her will. He said Sally’s mother, Mrs. Ella Horner, was his second wife. In Camden, Mrs. Horner, a widow, said she had never met LaSalle.

“He told me he was a Federal officer,” Sally related through sobs. She will be 13 April 16.

Officers picked up the pair yesterday after Sally seized a chance when LaSalle went shopping to telephone her older sister, Mrs. Susan Panara, Beverly, N.J., and asked her to “send the FBI right away.”

“To join a girl’s club at school,” Sally related, “I had to steal something from the five-and-dime. I took a little notebook off the five-cent counter and he stopped me. He said, ‘I am an FBI agent. You are under arrest’.”

That was June 1948. She said he told her he would not take her to jail if “I would report to him from time to time.” The next day, she said, he met her coming home from school.

“He said he would have to take me to Atlantic City. He telephoned my mother and said he was taking me and some other girls to Atlantic City. I went with him and a woman, about 25 years old. He called her ‘Miss Robinson’ and said she was his secretary and he paid her $90 a week. Instead of going to Atlantic City we went to Baltimore. Miss Robinson disappeared and I never saw her again.”

“He told me that if I went back home, or they sent for me, or if I ran away I’d go to prison,” she told Sheriff Howard Hornbuckle.

From Baltimore, they moved to Dallas, Texas, where LaSalle worked several months as an automobile mechanic, the FBI reported. Sally posed as his daughter, attending parochial schools in Baltimore, Dallas and finally in San Jose where they arrived three weeks ago.