The inside story of a schoolgirl’s brutal murder that changed lives — and the future of television.

It was just after breaktime when Tair Rada decided to skip her drama lesson to hang around in the school courtyard with her friends. The Israeli middle school buzzed with children and teachers. About 30 minutes later, she went back inside to get some water from the girls’ toilets, watched by a couple of pupils sitting on a bench. The door closed behind her — and she was never seen alive again.

Tair’s body was found that evening, slumped inside the locked third cubicle. Her throat had been slit. She had received seven blows to the head and been slashed on the chest and hands. Tair was 13 and all of 4ft 9in. The local police chief said that, of more than 200 murders he’d investigated, Tair’s case was the most horrifying.

Israelis are accustomed to living with the threat of attack — it was December 2006 and the Second Lebanon War was still fresh. But the murder of a girl in her own school shocked the country. The media descended on Katzrin, a town of 8000 that sits near the Syrian border in the Golan Heights, surrounded by vineyards and fruit farms. “It is every parent’s worst fear,” Tair’s mother, Ilana, 63, tells me over coffee. “Your child goes to school and never comes back. Everything fell away the moment I heard Tair was dead.”

The murder was as brazen as it was brutal. It was daylight and a police station is just metres away from the gated school. Ten girls told the police they went to the same toilets around the time Tair was killed. How could no one have noticed anything suspicious? How did no one hear anything?

Seven years later a four-part documentary series about the case aired on a small-fry cable channel. Nothing like Shadow of Truth existed then; true crime was “niche, the preserve of small film festivals”, says the co-director Yotam Guendelman. But it immediately became a smash hit, one of the most watched Israeli programmes of all.

A Facebook group dedicated to Tair’s murder swelled to 200,000 after its release. The series’ impact was so seismic that it would eventually upend the conviction of the man who received a life sentence for the murder, shake up the country’s justice system and trigger a tsunami of true crime documentaries all over the world.

Shmuel, Tair and Ilana Rada.

In Katzrin, in the immediate aftermath of Tair’s killing, the police had neither a lead nor a murder weapon. Pressure to find the murderer soon began to pinch. Rumours and theories abounded. Locals spoke of a satanic cult at the nearby cemetery and psychics sprouted quack theories about rivers crying blood.

After a week, it looked as if there had been a breakthrough: police arrested Roman Zadorov, a 28-year-old immigrant from Ukraine who had been doing repairs at Tair’s school. When questioned, he told the police he had thrown away the trousers he wore on the day of the murder because they were too small and had chucked away his utility knife’s blade. He had no alibi.

He confessed, twice

Initially, Zadorov protested his innocence. He had become a father the very week of the murder and had no motive or history of violence. But after three days in prison, he twice confessed to the murder and even re-enacted it at the school for the evening news.

Parents across Israel breathed a sigh of relief. The school killer had been found.

However, not everyone was convinced: Ilana never stopped questioning Zadorov. And within a fortnight he recanted his confession, saying he was tricked into giving it. Yet four years later in 2010 Zadorov was convicted unanimously. Over the next five years he appealed twice and lost.

Doubts over Zadorov’s guilt still niggled with some people. Social media was just taking off and a small Facebook group of self-appointed detectives and citizen sleuths pored over leaked footage of his interrogations and identified inconsistencies in witness statements and evidence. Zadorov had said Tair asked him for a cigarette — but her family and friends all said she couldn’t stand smoking. Then there was the knife — experts said the murder weapon was serrated, but utility knives such as Zadorov’s are smooth.

By all accounts, Zadorov was an unlikely cause célèbre: an immigrant without a valid permit to work, he was Jewish only on his father’s side and barely spoke Hebrew. Yet in 2013 three young film-makers looking into the case’s Facebook activist group smelt a story and began working on a docu-series. It took three years for their work to be broadcast.

Shadow of Truth’s revelations were punchy: footage from the interrogations showed police lying to Zadorov, telling him that they had found Tair’s blood on his tools and placing him in a cell with a Russian-speaking informant whom they were paying to extract a confession. It suggested strongly that the police had coached Zadorov into giving a false confession by dangling the prospect of a reduced sentence in front of him.

It also blew open inconsistencies in the evidence: the trail of three bloody shoe prints in Tair’s cubicle didn’t match Zadorov’s, so who did they belong to? Crucially and controversially, it even brought another suspect to the public’s attention, a woman.

“Shadow of Truth was a cultural phenomenon. It made the Zadorov case a national obsession. It crossed from screen to reality,” recalls the Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. “There were two matters everyone had an opinion on: our controversial prime minister Bibi [Netanyahu] and the Zadorov case. For the first time, many Israelis realised that the state could get things wrong.”

The series was such a hit it was bought by Netflix and made available globally. Its impact was huge in Israel and in 2021 the Supreme Court ordered Zadorov a full retrial. When he was acquitted of Tair’s murder in March this year, the moment was live-streamed to the nation. “It was like the World Cup final: the country stopped breathing,” Gundar-Goshen says. At the same time, the Shadow of Truth team released a fifth episode of the documentary covering the retrial.

A key figure in all this is Ilana. She long refused to accept that Zadorov had killed her daughter. “The police didn’t answer my questions. Where was the forensic evidence linking Roman Zadorov? Where was the murder weapon?” she says. “For a long time I felt like I was screaming and no one was listening. Then came Shadow of Truth.”

Shadow of Truth seemingly proved the power of true crime documentaries to make the justice system accountable. But in fanning murder fandom, it also brought out the worst of armchair detectives. Tair’s school friends were abused for years by strangers publicly accusing them of being the real killers. People obsessed with the case showed up at Ilana’s home; one man burst into her house screaming that he had done it.

Since Tair’s murder, Ilana has become fêted. As we talk, strangers interrupt to hug her. She has never stopped campaigning for Tair. “She was lovely, fun, smart, a perfectionist, a nerd really. In many ways Tair raised me more than I raised her. She was a fighter, even in her short life,” she says, her voice cracking. She lost her husband, Shmuel, a former military worker, to cancer in 2016. Her sons, Tair’s older brothers, still live in Katzrin, but avoid the media.

A missing father

A few hundred metres from Ilana’s home is Zadorov’s small flat, on the top floor of a run-down block. There are few photos on the walls. One is of him with his wife Olga on their wedding day in 2005; another shows them with their two sons when they were young. “Roman was photoshopped in; he was still in prison,” Olga explains.

Zadorov, 45, was jailed as a skinny, fair-haired man. Today he is stocky and broad with a weathered tan. The world changed while he spent 14 years behind bars, he says. “My sons had to teach me how to use a smartphone.”

On the sofa, Olga sits close to him, her hand on his knee. Their elder son Leon is now 17 — for a while he attended the same middle school where Tair was murdered. Israeli law allows well-behaved prisoners “conjugal visits” and in 2017 the couple had another son, Idan, seven, who today runs in and out of the living room with a plastic bow and arrow.

“The day I was let out was the first time I understood what it meant to be a father,” Zadorov says quietly. “I hadn’t been a dad to Leon. He started off calling me ‘Roman’, but now he says ‘Dad’.”

For someone who is the victim of an almighty miscarriage of justice, Zadorov is remarkably phlegmatic. “The police and prosecution dropped everything on me. I was the fall guy, the scapegoat, but I held on to something my mother told me as a child: ‘You can try to hide the truth, but it will always come out.’ It doesn’t help for me to be angry. They took my life: what good can anger do? I’m not the vengeful type,” he says.

Who is guilty?

Yet there’s still a question hounding the many Shadow of Truth viewers who remain obsessed with the case: if he didn’t do it, who did? Some Israelis believe someone brought to their attention by the documentary is the killer. Olga Kravchenko, 40, a former pupil at Tair’s school, who denies any involvement in the murder, had not previously been named to the public by the police. The film-makers preserved her anonymity, but, in the age of the internet, citizen sleuths revealed her identity online.

So a new chapter in the story of Tair Rada’s murder was opened. Just as the documentary helped to prove a man’s innocence, so it thrust a woman with a history of mental illness into the frame.

In interviews Kravchenko has talked of how Shadow of Truth has destroyed her life. She has made a documentary about what it is like to live with mental illness and is suing Guendelman, his co-director, Ari Pines, and Zadorov’s lawyer, Yarom Halevy, for defamation. This is now a case that plays out on television as much as it does in court.

Zadorov has meanwhile become a symbol of injustice in Israel. Everywhere he goes, people want selfies. He and Ilana have yet to bump into each other in Katzrin, but it won’t be long. For her part, she is still angry that he gave a false confession. She wants justice, but so does Zadorov. The one time he speaks with force is when I ask if he wants the murderer to be found.

The case is open again. For Ilana, the pain does not go away. People forget that at the story’s heart is a murdered schoolgirl. “People come and congratulate me, tell me Tair’s case became a symbol and brought change to the system, but I lost my daughter, the gift I was given.”

Written by: Francesca Angelini

© The Times of London