Headscratchers / Dolores Claiborne

• Why do the police let Dolores go free at the end of the book, despite the fact that she admitted to murdering her husband years beforehand?
  • It's not really explained in the book, but maybe they figured enough time had passed that it wasn't worth it to prosecute her. They may also have weighed the extenuating circumstances and her otherwise completely spotless record. It's also possible she paid them off. That's what's neat about fiction: sometimes the ending can be left up to the reader. They side-stepped the question in the film version, wherein she only confessed to her daughter, not anyone else.
    • There's no statute of limitations on murder. No one simply decides that it's thirty years too late to prosecute a murderer. By Real Life law, confessing to a crime is not adequate cause to convict someone of a crime...but in this case the original suspect voluntarily handed over a detailed confession complete with motive and method. The case would have been reopened and Dolores jailed or held on bond until someone could at least determine whether or not her confession could be true.
  • It's possible that they understood that while Dolores may have never spent a day in jail for her husband's murder, she's spent the past thirty years being punished by the rest of Little Tall, including becoming estranged from her own children, for whom she sacrificed nearly everything. Considering how one of the themes of the book is how people in small towns keep secrets, perhaps the police privately decided that they only heard the part where Dolores didn't murder Vera.
  • WMG: Maybe she paid them off.
    • She didn't have any money to pay them off. She was a broke housekeeper living off Social Security. She might have paid them off with her inheritance from Vera before giving the rest of the money to charity but it doesn't seem likely considering how vehement she was about not accepting a cent of that money.
  • I'm amazed anyone's confused about this. Obviously they sympathized so much with her story that they decided not to pursue the case any further, and basically pretend the entirety of her confession never happened.
  • While there is no statute of limitations for murder, it's pretty hard to actually convict someone for it. Especially in this case, where a) they don't have any real proof (her confession alone isn't enough) and b) probably know no jury worth their salt would actually convict her after hearing WHY she did it. So they probably knew in advance prosecuting her for Joe's death would be next to impossible so they didn't even bother. The fact that Joe was an ass, who very much deserved it, probably played a huge part in why they didn't even try.
  • They almost certainly realised that the chances of actually convicting her of a thirty-year-old murder of an Asshole Victim credibly accused of Domestic Abuse and molesting his own daughter were slim-to-nil. Any jury that heard Dolores Claiborne's story would likely be lining up to shake her hand, bake her a cake and throw her a party, much less acquit her. So there's no point in wasting the public resources as far as they're concerned.