I appreciate y'all's sense of justice, I really do. But our legal system is just not very well set up to put an end to the behavior of low-level thieves and grifters. I grew up in a very low income neighborhood watching friends and neighbors who engaged in a wide variety of petty property crime and fraud, so I am certain about this.
Sure, maybe the police or DA would investigate "for free," but it would still involve our time and probably cause us more emotional distress. And it would give DotLWaT ammo for her victim narrative to extended family: "I'm getting stuck doing everything and no one is helping me and now they are being greedy and uncooperative and accusatory when I'm just trying to do my job" etc.
Sometimes, when someone shows you who they really are, your best move is just to get far away from them.
It sounds like this is one of those small policies that people forget they even have anyway. If she tried to nick a giant policy, then it would make more sense to pursue justice, but she'd just claim ignorance and go into victim mode. Even then, I still think our legal system wouldn't do anything to her that would change her ways.
@Zamboni sorry you have to deal with this. Unfortunately there's no good options when there's an executor hell bent on doing hinky things.
In summary, my youngest sister and I had to hire an attorney to get our other sister, who was executor on my dad's estate, to finally settle things, namely get her to finally sell our parents' house. It had been 2 years, she was dragging her feet costing money and she had not given us a single accounting on expenditures (which was required by law) plus it turned out she had taken some um, liberties, when it came to those.
In hiring the attorney, my goal was strictly to get her to move on the house which was 95% of the estate. She appointed me, likely under pressure from her own attorney, as special trustee to handle the sale instead, the house sold immediately. There was still the question of what she had done with regard to expenditures but to me the likely amounts were just not worth going after. My youngest sister wanted to continue that but I opted out at that point. Youngest sister quit after a final conversation with the attorney telling her the same, what was left was not worth continuing. We did force an accounting out of executor sister in which we discovered what she did with some of the money, not to mention the costs associated with an empty house sitting around for 2 years and it confirmed that she had spent money for things not related to the estate.
I didn't like having to spend money on getting what basically should have been done without any cost to me, but I weighed the money spent vs. gain (with the house sale) plus the chances of being successful. Had the estate been less or if my sister was the sort who was going to fight to the bitter end, then I would have just walked. It was expensive enough just to get the house sold quickly and that was with me doing the work. Shortly after Dad died, executor sister asked to have have our father's car and having some of our mother's jewelry stating that our nephews would like their grandmother's jewelry and they could use the car. Youngest sister and I agreed but honestly, knowing what we know now, we would have not allowed it. But at the time, we trusted that executor sister would do the right thing. Even at the end there were things that have gone completely unaccounted for, such as items (china/silver) that executor sister said she would sell and split the proceeds but nothing.
So yeah, even when you decide to spend money to push things even the attorneys will tell you it may not be worth it...in terms of money, effort, stress. It certainly played into executor sister's victim narrative to the extended family. In our case, there was enough money bound up in the house sale to be worth it from a cost perspective, we approached this strategically meaning not going after everything (I had to talk youngest sister off the ledge on this one), focus on the house sale during a good housing market (it sold just before Covid hit) and, well, knowing your enemy.
