One December afternoon in 2006, Tair Rada failed to come home from school. The normally diligent 13-year-old Israeli girl had skipped her final lesson of the day and was due to go to a dance class that evening. As time went on and she failed to appear, however, her mother Ilana began to panic.

At 7pm Tair’s body was found inside a locked bathroom stall at her school in the Golan Heights. Her throat had been slit, her body had several wounds, and the seat and floor were covered with her blood.

For several days afterwards, Ilana Rada says, she could not accept that her daughter had been killed.

“I was convinced that Tair was going to step in through the door any moment and that it was just false news, and that she’s OK,” she tells the JC.

“But that didn’t happen.”

Within days the police had arrested Roman Zdorov, a skinny Ukrainian immigrant in his late twenties with a poor grasp of Hebrew who worked as a maintenance man at Tair’s school.

He soon confessed to the killing before re-enacting it for investigators and providing a motive: Tair had mocked him after he declined her request for a cigarette.

Thanks to this admission, Zdorov was sentenced to life in prison. The evidence, judges said in a 450-page verdict, “left no doubt” of his guilt. But in March this year, 17 years after the murder, he was acquitted of any guilt.

screengrab- 0009 Roman Zadorov

Cleared: Roman Zdorov today (Photo: BBC)

A case that became a national obsession in Israel and then a cause célèbre had collapsed into farce, with Ilana left no closer to knowing who killed her daughter.

Next week, Shadow of Truth — a four-part Israeli documentary series that did much to clear Zdorov — is due to premiere on British television, with a new fifth episode covering Zdorov’s acquittal.

The moment he was finally cleared, Zdorov says, made him feel “like a bomb went off”.

“I gave all I had to [prove] my innocence in this case and spent so much time on it and finally I could be reunited with my family and be a free man.”

He insists that when he was first arrested, he was anxious to cooperate with the police because he knew he was innocent.

“I was trying to help the police as much as I could,” he claims, “and suddenly they were accusing me and I didn’t understand why they were trying to pin this murder on me of all people.

“I kept asking myself that, and I couldn’t find an answer.”

Held in police custody, Zdorov found solace talking to his Russian-speaking cellmate, Artur. Over the course of several days he discussed the case with him and sought his advice.

What Zdorov did not know is that his cellmate was a police informant. Convinced that the authorities had enough evidence to convict him anyway, and under the false impression that — as in Ukraine — a confession would guarantee a lighter sentence, the janitor made a false admission of guilt.

“On the one hand you know you didn’t do anything and you know that you’re innocent, but on the other hand they keep telling you they have more and more evidence for you,” he says. “The police were lying to me but I didn’t know they were lying because I always trusted the police.

“I would come back to my cell and the informant was there and I didn’t know [he] was an informant.

“For me, [he] was my mentor. I would ask him and he said ‘the police do not lie, they do not make up evidence’ and so I didn’t know what to do.”

Tair 34

Tair with her mother (Photo: BBC)

Certain they had Tair’s killer, the police held a press conference to announce
Zdorov’s confession before he had even completed a flawed attempt to re-enact the murder.

But Ilana Rada had doubts.

“The cops came to my house on the 19th of December about two weeks after the murder and told me that they have their suspect in custody,” she says.

“I started asking some hard questions. I didn’t know anything about investigations outside of what I saw on TV, but I was asking whether they have any forensic evidence or DNA. I understood they had nothing.”

In September 2010, Zdorov was convicted, despite a lack of physical evidence and the fact that he retracted his confession the day after he gave it.

Though her husband Schmuel (who has since died) accepted Zdorov’s guilt, Ilana did not.

The day he was convicted the pair wept in court, and she declared her loss of faith in Israel’s justice system.

“Usually, families of victims are focused on the grief and the pain,” she says.

“They don’t get involved in the investigation. Once I started to have doubts and to feel like I’ve been left out of the judicial process, no one really takes me into account, that’s when I decided I’m going to collect my own data to get to the truth to find out who really murdered Tair.”

Her fight, she adds, was never to acquit Zdorov.

“My fight was to find out who murdered my daughter."

Shadow of Truth, which premiered in Israel in 2016 before reaching Netflix a year later, was “the biggest turning point,” she claims. The documentary, which presented the case from four different angles and revealed evidence previously unseen by the public, became one of the most-viewed shows in Israeli history.

Fans hailed it as a gripping exposé of police incompetence, while detractors such as state attorney Shai Nitzan condemned it as a sensationalised account that threatened democracy.

A retrial conducted this year by the Nazareth District Court vindicated Rada’s doubts. Zdorov’s supposed admission of guilt was full of contradictions, and his motive made no sense, the court found.

“The findings at the scene did not match the defendant’s confession,” one judge declared.

Rada’s support helped him immensely, Zdorov said.

“Mother knows best… she realised that I didn’t murder her daughter. I thank her very much for that.”

While Zdorov is now back with his family, he and Rada feel cheated by the justice system’s failure, and both suggest that Israelis can no longer trust the police or the courts.

“I was happy when Zdorov was freed,” Rada says.

“Not because of Roman’s exoneration, this is not my business — I really treasured that the judges said now they need to open a new investigation. Now I know that the police and prosecution will have to listen to the judges and look for the real killer.”

Episode one of ‘Shadow of Truth’ will air on BBC4 on Monday (July 31) at 10pm