Transcript: 51. Murdered at School (Tair Rada) | Israel

You are listening to: The Evidence Locker.

Our cases have been researched using open source and archive materials. It deals with true crimes and real people. Each episode is produced with the utmost respect to the victims, their families and loved ones. 

Ilana Rada came home on Wednesday afternoon, the 6th of December 2006. The Rada family lived in Katzrin. A green and prosperous area with sizeable family homes and wide roads lined with tall palm trees. The neighbourhood is surrounded by fields and hills. It was a new town, established in the early 1980s as a community settlement.

Ilana could see that her 13-year-old daughter, Tair, had not been home from school. There were none of the tell-tale signs, like a discarded school bag or a dirty plate after having an afternoon snack.

This was unusual. Tair walked home from school with friends from the neighborhood every day. At first, Ilana thought that Tair must have stopped off at a friend’s place on her way home, but then again, her friends would usually come to the Rada home. She called Tair’s cell phone, but there was no answer. She called Tair’s friends, but nobody had seen Tair since the last period of the day at school.

Ilana panicked as minutes turned into hours and there was still no sign of Tair. Her husband, Shmuel and their grown sons rushed home when Ilana called and told them about the situation. The family alerted everyone they knew and the people of Katzrin took to the streets and the surrounding fields, calling Tair’s name.  

Night was falling and it was getting colder and colder out.

At 7pm Shmuel received the call he had been dreading since he heard his daughter was missing. At first, he was told that they had found Tair and that she was unconscious. But Shmuel knew she was no longer alive. His neighbours found Tair’s brutalized body inside the girls’ restroom at her school. 

How could this have happened? That morning Shmuel and Ilana sent their daughter to school, not doubting her safety for a minute. The community was up in arms. The police were baffled. What happened to Tair Rada? Who was the monster that committed this heinous murder?

Intro Music

Tair Rada was the youngest child of Shmuel and Ilana Rada and they lived in Katzrin, less than an hour’s drive from Haifa. There were a couple of years between Tair and her older brothers Roy and Ohad and they were very protective of their little sister.

Since she was a baby, people were drawn to her. She lived out the meaning of her name, which is ‘she will light up’. She was often the centre of attention who loved music and drama and she was a very good dancer. Her friends called her the Queen Bee of the group. Tair did and others followed. Being gorgeous, bright and talented meant that other girls were often jealous of her. This sometimes brought about conflict in her circle of friends, but things always settled down as most of the girls she knew grew up together.

Tair attended Nofey Golan High School in Golan Heights. She walked to school and back home, like most kids in the area did. She would usually call her mother once she arrived home, to let her know that everything was OK.

The day of

On the 6th of December 2006, it was a normal school day, like any other. Tair skipped the last period of the day, as she wanted to hang out with her friends. The group remained on school grounds and nothing about Tair’s actions indicated that anything was the matter. Around 1:20pm, she said that she was thirsty and heading into the main building of the school to get a drink of water. 

Several students saw her going upstairs to the mid-floor where all the 10th grade classes were located. 

Tair’s mother, Ilana Rada was concerned when Tair did not call her at the usual time in the afternoon. She assumed that her daughter had probably stopped off at a friend’s house, but when she arrived home and there was no sign of Tair, she immediately called her cell phone, but there was no answer. Ilana knew something wasn’t right. She raised the alarm and left the family home to go and look for her daughter, together with friends of the family: neighbours, colleagues, anyone who would help. Shmuel came home straight away and frantically took to the streets. It was already dark outside, and it was very cold. Panic overcame Tair’s parents.

Searchers contacted all of Tair’s friends, but nobody had seen her since she entered the school building earlier that day. Police were called to the school and launched an extensive search. 

At 7pm, a search party made up of friends and neighbours of the Rada family entered the school. They searched the dark and empty hallways and classrooms and ended up in the girls’ bathroom on the 10th grade floor. All the stalls were empty, except for one: the door was locked. Underneath the door, they could see someone was in there, but when they called out, there was no reply. Using the adjacent stall for access, they looked over the top and the worst was confirmed. Tair’s mutilated little body was slumped over the closed toilet in a grisly scene. Blood was everywhere: the walls, the floor... Her throat had been cut twice and she had multiple stab-wounds across her whole body. 

They notified police and within minutes a large crowd had formed at the school gates. Shmuel rushed to the school, but police would not let him in. He tried to force his way through: he needed to see his daughter to believe that she was no longer alive. But they refused, the scene was simply too horrific. One of Tair’s brothers reacted so strongly, police threatened to sedate him.

The community was up in arms: how could a young girl be murdered at her school? Were all the children at risk? Parents didn’t want to send their children to school anymore. And as the building was essentially still a crime scene, classes were cancelled for a couple of days. 

In the days following the murder, police searched the wider area of Golan Heights and Galilee. The community was confused about the strategy as they thought police would have focussed on the school and the direct area. 

When police got around to questioning students, they tried to gain a better understanding of Tair’s last movements. Two witnesses, both students who knew Tair, stated that they saw Tair go upstairs, but no one was following her.

Many students stated that they were in the restroom around the same time as Tair had been there and even mentioned suspicious details. In fact, between 10 to 12 girls were in and out of the bathroom between 1:30 and 2:10. But police only questioned five of them. It was strange that in that short period of time, with so many girls in and out, none of them heard the violent struggle that ended in murder. Some said there was something suspicious, like the presence of an unknown girl with curly hair. The witness was one of Tair’s friends, Nofar Ben David. She claimed to know most people in the school and said that she had never seen the girl before or since. She assumed it was a new student, as the girl was wearing a school shirt.

One student said she was in the girls’ restroom that afternoon and saw two pairs of feet in the stall where Tair was found. One was Tair’s Puma shoes, the other one was a pair of youth-size Allstar shoes. But she didn’t think anything of it at the time and left as she thought there was a bad smell in the toilets. Another girl, Tair’s friend Lee, knocked on the locked door and a voice replied that it was occupied. According to Lee, police kept asking her if the voice was that of a man, or that of a woman. She always maintained it was a female but felt that police was not satisfied with that answer. 

The Rada family was reeling in shock. Despite community support, they felt overwhelmed and confused. It was simply too terrible to be true… Private investigator, Haim Sadovsky, heard about Tair’s murder on the radio. At the time, his daughter was the same age as Tair, and he was personally angered by the event. He contacted the Rada family and offered his services to them. 

Shmuel and Ilana were grateful for the offer and told Haim everything they knew. There was one incident that stood out in Ilana’s mind. When a bunch of Tair’s friends visited her to offer condolences, two of the girls acted strangely. Ilana saw them move to one side and whispering something to each other – it seemed like they were hiding something serious. She gave their names to the PI and he followed up.

When he read the two girls’ statements to police, he found some inconsistencies. The PI learnt that her friends saw Tair’s backpack in class but did not find it strange that she wasn’t there. In contradiction to her friends saying that Tair was her usual self on that dreadful Wednesday, her teacher remembered Tair being withdrawn and sad during Theatre class. This was her favourite class and it was unusual for her not to participate. When the teacher asked her what the matter was, she made a strange remark: 

“Because I am afraid of death.”

Did Tair know she was in danger?

Her school mates also reported a strange story: that Tair had a stalker. His name was Avi, an 18-year-old teen from Tiberias. He called her all the time and sent her many text messages. A month before her murder he said that if Tair didn’t want to be his girlfriend he would kill her. Then he called to let her know he was coming to Katzrin and he wanted to see her. She said she didn’t want to see him and hung up. Later that day he sent a message saying that if she wouldn’t be with him, he would kill her. When police looked into this, there was no evidence of any contact between Tair and so-called Avi. None of this never happened. Why would her friends fabricate this story – was it to draw attention away from them?

Looking at the evidence, PI Haim Sadovsky felt that, if an adult had killed the 4ft9 (or 1.45 metre) girl, they would not have used such excessive force. It simply wouldn’t take that much for an adult to inflict harm. Sadovsky felt that two people, the same age and height as Tair were most probably responsible for her murder.

Besides the two girls, there was also another one of Tair’s friends that piqued the PI’s interest. Tair had an arch rival, someone equally as beautiful and talented as her, but they hated each other. At the beginning of the school year, Tair told her mother that she was afraid. In the days after the murder, she left town for a couple of days. Yet, she neglected to tell police about this, when they pointedly asked her: Do you know of any kid who left Katzrin after the murder?” She said no. Knowing full well that she had left town.

Although police wondered about the involvement of Tair’s school friends at the start, no DNA, fingerprints or shoeprints were ever taken in the investigation. 

Instead of traumatising young girls any further, police felt they had a suspect that could be the murderer. He was employed as the school’s gardener. Police became suspicious of him after the school psychologist made a statement that she saw him in the teachers’ lounge on the afternoon of the murder. In her opinion he looked disturbed and bewildered. However, the man had an air-tight alibi and police could not detain him.

The psychologist’s testimony was compelling, and police were not ready to dismiss it completely. That is when another man came onto their radar. The man bore a striking resemblance to the gardener and police wondered if the psychologist may have confused the two men.

On December 11th – less than a week after the murder, Roman Zadorov, a construction worker at the school, was taken in for questioning.  

Zadorov migrated to Israel from the Ukraine two years before and made a living by doing odd jobs in construction. He met his wife, Olga, in the Ukraine – they were high school sweethearts. When Olga’s family moved to Israel, Romans followed her there.  and soon after they were married the couple moved to Katzrin. Their son was born in November 2016, less than a month before Tair’s death.

At the time Zadorov was employed by a contractor as a handyman in the refurbishment of Nofey Golan school. He could not work legally, so was paid in cash and stayed out of trouble. When his wife realised his visa did not permit him to work legally, she encouraged him to apply for Israeli citizenship, which he was in the process of doing at the time of his arrest. He spoke very little Hebrew and mostly conversed in Russian, his first language. 

Police wanted to cease the clothes he was wearing on the day of Tair’s murder. When, he told them that he had thrown it out, suspicion rose even further.

Roman Zadorov was grilled in interrogation for many hours on end. He denied killing Tair and was confused as to why police arrested him. While he was at the police station, investigators searched his home. They found pornography on his computer, which was classified by investigators to be of underaged girls. But a closer look revealed that all of the women on the website were of appropriate age, albeit young. The Ukrainian migrant was also an avid knife collector, with knives on display throughout his home. Police found this incriminating, seeing as most of Tair’s injuries were made by a knife.  

With the knives and possible witness statement from the school psychologist who confused Roman for the gardener, he was kept in custody. 

Police leaked some information to the media, that had not been confirmed at the time. They said that Zadorov’s DNA matched DNA found at the crime scene. This was not true. The DNA samples were sent to America for testing, the results had not come it. Interrogators bluffed and told Zadorov that his DNA was at the scene. It was an effort to get him to confess.

At first Zadorov insisted that it was impossible. But his interrogators wouldn’t budge. They kept pushing for a confession, saying that it was there, it was a scientific fact. He may as well come clean. Zadorov’s guess was that they framed him, falsified the evidence. The interrogators laughed it off and said that they weren’t the KGB, he was in Israel and that kind of thing was not done. Zadorov said that the only way that could have happened is if he had stepped in blood he saw in the boys' toilet at the school. He remembered seeing blood but did not realise he had stepped in it. 

Roman Zadorov was told to sleep on it and was sent to a holding cell, which he shared with another man. The man was an informant who was contracted by police to entice him into making a confession. He was paid a good daily wage and promised more than 3,000 US Dollars if he managed to get Zadorov to speak. 

It was not an easy task, as Zadorov was adamant that he did not kill Tair. He had a newborn son at home and would not risk losing his family by doing something so meaningless. After eight long days, Zadorov still hadn’t confessed, so the informant changed his tactic. He told him that, because police found blood, Zadorov would get sentenced to life in prison, for sure. But if he confessed, he would only get six to seven years for manslaughter. The informant then proceeded to help Zadorov craft a confession that would be believable. 

The informant pressured him and made him admit that he was an angry immigrant. And living as an outsider in Israel made anger grow inside of him. On the day of Tair’s murder, he lost it. It wasn’t aimed at Tair, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. His victim could just as easily have been a boy or one of the staff members. He blacked out.

Zadorov agreed and said that he sometimes did bad things that he couldn’t remember. He told the story that he once beat his brother so badly but couldn’t remember actually doing it. Then he said: 

“Maybe I did kill her. It is possible.”

He felt that if everyone said that he did it, and if his DNA was found at the scene, perhaps he did kill Tair after all. He started believing what he was being told over and over again. But he was still puzzled, though, and said that he remembered finishing his day’s work late into the afternoon, which was after Tair was last seen. There was no blood on him. His trousers were annoying him, because they were too short, which was why he threw them out, not because there was  blood on them.

What Zadorov did not know, was that the jail cell conversation was caught on video. Interrogators told him that they knew he was the murderer and convinced him to re-enact the events of December 6th. A group of investigators took Zadorov to Golan Heights High School and filmed him as he walked them through the murder. 

This case was a slam-dunk for prosecution and police were pleased to call a press conference to announce that they had Tair Zada’s killer in custody. They said that Zadorov confessed and re-enacted the crime. According to police, Tair had insulted Zadorov after he wouldn’t give her a cigarette and he snapped. He followed her into the bathroom where he slaughtered her.

Tair’s family said they wanted more evidence, concrete forensic evidence. They had a gut feeling that Zadorov was not the man who had killed Tair. Her family and friends also made it clear that Tair never smoked, in fact she hated cigarettes and the smell of smoke. It was unlike her to insult anyone, let alone someone older than her. So for police to suggest that Tair taunted Zadorov for not sharing his cigarettes, was ridiculous.

Ilana Rada insisted from early on that she believed her daughter’s killer was someone from ‘Tair’s world’. She pieced bits of information together, that came to her over the years and realised that something in Tair’s close-knit circle of friends was not quite right in the time before her death. Ilana found out that some students at the school were part of a Satanic cult and feared that Tair might have been the victim of a ritualistic killing.

Roman Zadorov’s wife contacted dynamic defence duo, Gail and David Spiegel. Once they looked into the case, they were convinced that Zadorov was an innocent man who was forced to confess to a murder he did not commit. 

The day after the press conference, Zadorov’s attorneys stated that he recanted his confession. Still, he was to remain in remand until his trial the following year. 

The trial of Roman Zadorov started on the 2nd of July 2007. Prosecution had changed some of the theories about the motive for the murder. They claimed that Zadorov had suffered sexual abuse when he was 8 years old, growing up in the Ukraine. This trauma came back to him at his job, working at a school. So when the kids kept pestering him, he snapped. 

According to a police witness, they had DNA placing the accused at the scene. This was an outright lie, as they had not received the results yet. When it came out that the DNA did not match Zadorov, his defence attorneys, Gail and David Spiegel argued: the crime scene was 28 by 55 inches (70 by 140cm), a small, enclosed space, with an abundance of evidence: blood, hair, footprints… It would be close to impossible for anyone to have been inside the small space, commit a violent and physical murder, without leaving any traces behind. Yet, no traces of Zadorov were found.

In addition, clothes and household items were taken from the Zadorov home and tested thoroughly, but nothing linked Roman to Tair or the crime scene. They even took apart the washing machine, looking for traces of blood, but there was nothing. 

There were three hairs found on Tair’s body, belonging to three different people. When the DNA test results came back from the US, it proved to be inconclusive. None of the hairs belonged to Zadorov. Of the 60 fingerprints found at the scene, nothing matched Tair NOR did it match Zadorov.

Zadorov’s defence team claimed that, if one were to look at the timeline, he had a solid alibi. He was at the school gate, speaking to his employer on his cell phone at 1:23pm. Two security guards saw him and could verify it. He waited for a delivery of tile cement and only returned to the school yard at 1:30pm. Pathologists estimated that the time of death was between 1:30pm and 2pm. Zadorov was seen in the canteen, just after 2pm, acting normal, without any dirt or blood on his clothes. After that, he continued work, tiling the basement in the course of the afternoon and returned home at 5:30pm. 

Prosecution pointed out that nobody could confirm if he was in the basement or not. Besides, he confessed, so the case was open and shut. But David and Gail Spiegel were not about to back down. They pointed out all the problems with, what they believed to be, 

Zadorov’s false confession:

There were so many facts that Zadorov got wrong during the re-enactment, and from interrogation tapes it is clear that investigators were asking leading questions. Police said that he knew things that only the murderer would know; like where he stood when he killed her. Also, Zadorov is right-handed, but evidence showed that the stab wounds were inflicted by a left-handed person. But in reviewing the interrogation tapes, Zadorov’s legal team were able to see, that every single piece of privileged information was given to him by police.

For instance, his interrogator asked him, in what position he left the body. Zadorov showed them, by lying down on the floor. This was incorrect, the body was slumped over the closed toilet, her body leaning against the wall. But the officers guided him till he got it right. Zadorov also could not say where she was cut, eventually guessing that it was on the torso, beneath the waist. Police were hoping to hear about the wrist, as it was a deep and significant cut. He showed how he slashed his victim’s throat, but the autopsy concluded that it had been cut from the other side. He also stated that he used a smooth blade knife, his utility knife but the post-mortem clearly showed that the knife used was – without a doubt – serrated. 

The confession gets even more muddled. During the re-enactment at the school, he led investigators to the wrong bathroom. After officers guided him to stop for a while, in front of the correct bathroom, did he take them there. There was still crime scene tape on the door, and anyone could see that it was where the crime took place.

Once inside, Zadorov was asked to show them how he got out of the locked stall. Without hesitation he climbed out, by bracing both sides of the stall before he jumped over the locked door. BUT partial footprints at the scene (NOT matching Zadorov’s) were found on the toilet seat, on top of the tank and on the wall to the adjacent stall. The killer climbed to the stall next door, not over the locked door.

Prosecution presented evidence that a bloody footprint on Tair’s jeans was consistent with Zadorov’s Salamander shoes. Significantly, there was no blood on the shoes. The scene was so bloody, there is no way he could have been in that bathroom stall and NOT get blood on his shoes. 

Despite no evidence linking Zadorov to the crime conclusively, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The court felt that his statements were full of lies and manipulation. Because of this he was also charged with and convicted of obstructing police investigation.

Tair’s mother made her peace with the fact that Zadorov was guilty after the trial. His confession along with the footprint evidence convinced her that he was. However, in the months that followed, she would change her opinion. Later that same year, Ilana Rada filed a petition, asking authorities to re-open the investigation into her daughter’s death. It was denied.

In 2010, four years after he was arrested, Zadorov was sentenced to life in prison. A three-judge panel, headed by Judge Yitzshak Cohen, stated that there still was no doubt that Roman Zadorov was responsible for Tair’s death. Shortly after, Ilana Rada openly stated her distrust in the court, prosecution and police. She felt that the students at her daughter’s school were to blame. She had reason to believe that Tair was killed as part of a Satanic ritual. She said she would not rest until she found her daughter’s murderer. That is a clear indication that she no longer believed that Zadorov, the man convicted of the murder, was the one who killed Tair.

Zadorov’s legal team had not given up the fight. In March 2013 the court agreed to hear expert testimony for Zadorov’s defence. Pathologist Dr Maya Forman-Reznik testified about the murder weapon and trauma injuries to her head. She said that the marks on Tair's face was indisputably made by a serrated knife and not a utility knife as Zadorov claimed in his confession.

The second witness was footprint expert Bill Bozniak – you might remember him from Evidence Locker Episode 8 – the Inge Lotz case. Bodziak was flown in to the forensics lab to study the bloody footprint on Tair’s jeans. He concluded that it was not a footprint at all but the imprint of her cell phone inside the jeans pocket.

At the scene were three footprints, all made in Tair’s blood. One on the top of the toilet seat, one on the tank and one on the wall. As a precaution, all prints were taken from rescuers and paramedics at the scene. None of theirs matched. Also to reiterate: the footprints did not match Zadorov’s Salamander shoes. 

Despite all the evidence proving that Zadorov did NOT commit the murder, he was convicted yet again. The court did not find the expert testimony credible. The judge said that in his estimation, he could see from merely looking at the mark that it was in fact a footprint.

The case had major repercussions in legal circles in Israel. Law professors and the media criticised the fact that a man was sent to prison with no evidence linking him to the crime scene. Forensic medical expert, Dr Chen Kugel was asked by prosecution to give an affidavit, supporting Zadorov’s testimony that he used a utility knife to kill Tair. Instead, he told the truth, stating that he agreed with the conclusion that the murder weapon was a serrated knife. After this, he was not called to testify. Instead, during the trial, prosecution implied that Dr Kugel’s report supported the prosecution’s case. 

Another issue that tainted decision makers in this case was a scandal involving presiding judge, Yitzhak Cohen. He was forced to step down, after he was charged with sex crimes against minors. 

Fight for justice

Public support for Roman Zadorov grew since a Facebook Group was started in 2011, seeking justice for Tair Rada. It was a social protest for convicting the wrong man and a plight to find the actual killer.

Two of Tair’s classmates were made to look guilty, Nofar Ben David and Lee Lahyani. The trolls came at them, accusing them, believing they had murdered their friend. Or rather, their frenemy. Although Nofar is right-handed, everyone was saying that she was left-handed. Accusations were made that Nofar’s father, a high-ranking officer, was protecting his daughter and Zadorov was brought in to take the fall. Both Nofar and Lee received threats and no matter how they tried to defend themselves, the trolls kept coming at them.

Then there was one man who came to their defence. He had an anonymous profile and he called himself ‘Knowing Guy’. He reached out to the girls and said that he knew they were innocent. At first Tair’s friends thought he was simply a kind person, coming to their defence, but there was a lot more to ‘Knowing Guy’. Eventually, he came out with a chilling story…

A four-part documentary series about the case, called ‘Shadow of Truth’ was released in 2016. The series published the confession of an anonymous man who only called himself AH. He said that his high school girlfriend had confessed to him that she was the one who killed Tair. They both attended the same school as Tair but had graduated already at the time of the murder. On the day of the killing, his ex showed him her bloodied clothes, a wig and the murder weapon – a serrated hunting knife. 

And the story gets strange… The girlfriend, only identified as AK, had an obsession with blood and believed that she was possessed by a she-wolf. This she-wolf encouraged her to kill people and disembowel them. She would fantasize about this to the point of obsession.

AK had a troubled past. As a child her grandfather took her to a battlefield in progress. She witnessed murder and unspeakable violence. When it was cold her grandfather hid her inside the carcass of a wolf. Or, she thought, it could even have been inside the disembowelled body of a deceased human. As she grew up, she would often visualise herself floating in a sea of blood and found the thought soothing.

After AK showed her boyfriend the bloodied clothes she told him what happened to Tair. She said that she put on her old, Golan Heights High School shirt, so she would blend in. Then she went to the school and waited in the girls’ restroom with the intention of killing the first girl who walked in by herself. She waited for two hours, then, when she was sure Tair was by herself, she forced her into the toilet stall at knife point. She killed her then stuffed toilet paper under the opening to the door so the blood wouldn’t flow out. Someone knocked at the door and she said that it was occupied (remember, this was in the statement of Lee Lahyani gave to police at the beginning of the investigation). Once again AK waited, this time next to Tair’s body, till it was quiet again. She stepped onto the toilet and climbed over the side wall, changed out of her bloodied clothes before she simply walked out and made her escape. She went home, had a shower, cleaned up, then called AH.

Roman Zadorov’s defence team was eager to speak to the boyfriend and asked him to take a lie detector test on three separate occasions. None of the tests showed any signs of deception.

As a result of this statement, police arrested AK. She was blonde with fine features and denied any involvement in Tair’s violent murder. She said that her ex-boyfriend did not take their break-up well at all and to her it was obvious that he was trying to frame her. She turned everything back to AH and said the HE was the one who fantasised about blood and taking out people’s intestines. She also accused him of domestic and sexual abuse.

While she was under house arrest, AK broke out of her home and attempted to kill her new boyfriend. She was drunk when she showed up at his dorm and demanded sex, he said no. She then held a shard of glass to his throat, applying a lot of force. Luckily, because of his living situation in a dorm, there were many people around and they jumped in to help him.

When police arrived at the scene, they took her kicking and screaming. Once in custody, she calmed down and confirmed that everything her ex had said about her was true. AK was found to be unfit to stand trial in the attempted murder case and sent to a psychiatric hospital, but never charged.

The ex-boyfriend, AH, was arrested for obstruction of justice and also charged with sexual assault against AK. While in custody, police pushed him to retract his testimony about Tair’s murder. If he did that, they would drop the charges against him. He refused and police let him go after 11 days. 

According to AH, interrogators told him if he retracted his statement, they would drop the charges of rape against him. His response was passionate:

“I am going to kill myself and write in my blood that AK killed Tair Rada. If it takes an explosion to let the public know that AK murdered Tair Rada, I’m willing to be that explosion.’

Sadly, Tair’s father, Shmuel Rada died of cancer in January 2016. Tair’s death changed his life completely, the grief and anger made him a shadow of the man he used to be, broken by sadness. He passed away the day after unveiling a synagogue named after Tair in Katzrin. At his funeral, Ilana Rada said:

“[Shmuel] is a king going to join his queen. I also don’t want to stay here, take me to them too. Tair, daddy is coming to protect you.”

In 2017 Netflix bought the rights to the documentary, “Shadow of Truth”, making it available worldwide. The series caused an uproar and has been called ‘Making a Murderer – Israel’ due to similarities in the Steven Avery case.

Human Rights Alert, an NGO, sent in a report to the Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights in Israel, titled: “Incompetence and/or corruption of the courts and the legal profession and discrimination by law enforcement in Israel.” The report uses Roman Zadorov’s case as one of many examples of the miscarriage of justice in the Israeli judicial system, citing it as a violation of human rights.

In an incredible twist, at the end of 2018, new forensic evidence came to light. One of the foreign hairs found on Tair’s body, specifically on her stomach, matched the DNA of AH, the man who blew the whistle on his ex-girlfriend. Could he be the actual killer? Or has he been right all along? He lived with AK at the time of the murder, it’s not impossible that one of his hairs was on AK’s clothing when she committed the crime. Either way, it is not unusual for killers to insert themselves into a murder investigation. Perhaps he thought that this would be the perfect angle, to blame his mentally unstable ex-girlfriend, getting revenge on her because she left him.

Currently, prosecutors are waiting for further tests to confirm if the hair did in fact belong to AH. Only then will they consider a retrial in the case. In the meanwhile, Roman Zadorov’s son is turning 13 this year, the same age Tair was when she died. His father has been in prison since he was two weeks old, his childhood gone, without a dad. Olga can only see her husband once a month, sometimes even that privilege is denied. They are not interested in the political scandals surrounding the prosecution and police, all they want is justice, not only for Roman, but also for Tair.

If you’d like to read more about this case, have a look at the resources used for this episode in the show notes. 

Also visit and like our Facebook Page at facebook.com/evidencelockerpodcast/” to see more about today’s case.

If you like our podcast, please subscribe in Apple Podcast or Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. We would also appreciate if you could review the episodes, as it gives us some street cred in the world of podcasting. 

This was The Evidence Locker. Thank you for listening!

©2019 Evidence Locker Podcast

All rights reserved. This podcast or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a podcast review.

‍