Florence "Sally" Horner[2] (April 18, 1937 – August 18, 1952) was an American girl who, at the age of 11, was abducted by serial child molester Frank La Salle in June 1948 and held captive for twenty-one months.

Her father, David Dare, tried to have La Salle arrested when he discovered his false identity and the fact that he was still legally married, but the charges were dropped by police when he provided a marriage certificate.

[9] In March 1948, 10-year-old Horner attempted to steal a five-cent notebook from a local Woolworths as part of a dare by schoolmates[11] and was caught in the act by Frank La Salle.

[13] La Salle instructed her to tell her mother he was "Frank Warner", the father of two of her school friends, and she had been invited on their week-long family vacation to Atlantic City to see the Jersey Shore.

At this point, Ella contacted the police, who investigated the sender address in Atlantic City on August 4, but found the home empty, except for two packed suitcases and a studio photo of Horner sitting on a swing.

[14] In April, 1949, La Salle relocated them to a trailer park in Dallas, Texas, having Horner attend a school as "Florence Planette", where she confided her secret to a friend.

[14] Eventually, Horner began to open up to a neighbor, Ruth Janisch, who had become suspicious of La Salle's demeanor and possessive tendencies towards his supposed daughter, but she would not fully admit to the true circumstances.

[20] As the Associated Press reported on August 20, 1952: "Florence Sally Horner, a 15-year-old Camden, N.J., girl who spent 21 months as the captive of a middle-aged morals offender a few years ago, was killed in a highway accident when the car in which she was riding plowed into the rear of a parked truck.

[23][24] Although Nabokov had already used the same basic idea—that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as father and daughter—in his then unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik (Волшебник),[25] it is still possible that he drew on the details of the Horner case in writing Lolita.