Dorothea Jarrow is the posthumous main antagonist of Agatha Christie's novel Elephants Can Remember. She was Molly's mentally ill sister, who killed her to get her husband Alistair.
Biography[]
One day, writer Ariadne Oliver is approached by her goddaughter, Celia Ravenscroft. Celia wants to marry her fiancé, Desmond, who recently proposed. The problem is that Desmond was left a large sum of money, and his greedy adoptive mother doesn't want him to marry Celia (Poirot later assumes she wants Desmond to marry someone more obedient and stupid than Celia). The problem is that Celia's parents, Margaret (better known as Molly) and Alistair Ravenscroft, allegedly shot themselves. No one has ever determined whether they shot themselves or were shot by a third party (and if so, who it was), even though many years have passed. Ariadne suggests that Celia and Desmond contact her friend, the renowned private detective Hercule Poirot. Hercule decides to question everyone who knows anything about the story. Ariadne decides to help him with this. Questioning people about this, Poirot discovers that Molly had a twin sister, Dorothea, whom everyone called Dolly. Dolly was mentally ill. At least twice, the children she looked after had fatal accidents. Nothing indicated Dolly's involvement in these deaths, but her hatred for children was more than obvious. She was also obsessed with Alistair and was angry at her sister for taking him away from her. After she went into remission, Dolly was released from the mental hospital into the care of her relatives (that is, Molly and Alistair). Soon after, she fell from a height and died. And even later, Molly and Alistair died. But between these two events, Molly began to behave strangely. She bought a bunch of wigs, but wore only one, and also withdrew into herself. The servants also noticed something was wrong with her. Everyone attributed it to the shock of her sister's death, but Molly, the dog, who had previously adored her, now attacked her and even bit her at least once. Poirot surmises (and one of the Ravenscroft family friends even confirms his suspicions) that Molly acted as if she had been switched because she had indeed been switched. It wasn't Dolly who fell to her death, but Molly, and Dolly had pushed her. Alistair learned of this and found his wife dying. Before she died, Molly asked her husband not to harm her sister or betray her. Alistair did just that. He arranged for everyone to think Dolly had fallen to her death. Fearing that the mentally ill Dolly would harm him or his children (or anyone, really), Alistair decided to kill her and commit suicide (after all, life without his beloved wife had no meaning for him, and he couldn’t help but answer for Dolly’s murder anyway), which is what he did.
