Shadow of Truth was first shown in 2016 in Israel, where the murder case it examines is notorious, before being bought a year later by Netflix for global streaming. Now it arrives on the BBC, with the addition of a fifth and final episode to include new information and more recent events. There is a lot to digest. What begins as a seemingly straightforward, if horrifying, true-crime documentary takes flight at the end of the first episode, where it transforms into a much wider story about corruption, conspiracy and justice in Israel.
Tair Rada was 13 when she was found dead at school in Katzrin, a town of 8,000 people, in the Golan Heights area between Israel and Syria. The documentary starts with a nightmarish interview with Tair’s mother, Ilana, who describes returning home and noticing her daughter’s backpack was not there. Initially, the head of the investigation, retired commander Avi Shai, said there were “no particularly worrisome signs” – after all, children are sometimes late home after school. But after a frantic search into the night, Tair’s body was found behind a locked cubicle door in the school toilets. Official photographs, thankfully shown sparingly, indicate a distressing and gruesome crime scene.
The first episode pieces together the day of Tair’s disappearance and the various avenues investigators initially pursued. Unsurprisingly, a girl murdered at school during the day became an enormous story and, as Shai explains, it had all the makings of a “public fiasco”. Kids were afraid to go to school, while their parents were scared to let them. There was intense media interest, which began less than an hour after Tair’s body was discovered, to the great disgust of her father, Shmuel, who only learned details of the “brutal violence” of his daughter’s death from a news reporter.
The initial stages of the investigation took place, then, against a backdrop of national interest, it was ordered that every lead, no matter how unlikely, should be fully investigated. From guilty-seeming hitchhikers, to an agitated school gardener and a psychic who claimed to have had a vision of blood on the banks of the River Jordan, every red herring had to be explored. Eventually, the gardener tip led police to Roman Zadorov – a man who resembled the gardener. He was a Ukrainian contractor at the school, working under a questionable permit, against whom a pile of circumstantial evidence began to build up.
Until the last few moments of the first episode, it looks like an open-and-shut case. The question of guilt is straightforward and the details are truly chilling. Yet it pulls a clever about-turn in the closing minutes, showing footage not previously seen, suggesting that Zadorov was coached into re-enacting the events of the murder despite insisting that he did not know what had taken place.
Now it becomes utterly gripping. There is an astonishing amount of film presented in this series, from contemporaneous news reports to the taped police interviews with Zadorov, to the filming of Zadorov in his holding cell in prison, as a paid informant attempts to coerce him into a confession. Often, particularly with older crimes, documentaries fall back on re-enactments, a necessary reliance in the absence of recordings of what happened. Here, that is not called for. So much of what we need to see in order to piece together the story is already there.
There is footage, too, of Tair as a child, and this never loses sight of the victim at the centre of a horribly thorny, deeply upsetting crime. The number of interviewees is vast, which suggests a thorough and meticulous approach from the beginning. Tair’s mother and her late father talk about their daughter and what they endured in the aftermath of her death. Zadorov’s wife, Olga, gives her account of events. Prosecutors, pathologists, investigators, regional military commanders, school friends and reporters are interviewed, as are Zadorov’s lawyers, who begin to carefully unravel the many knots in the prosecution’s case against him.
True crime documentaries often tread a fine line. There are the cheap ones which foreground sensationalism over any sense of respect for the victims and their families, and then there are the rare examples conducted with decency, insofar as decency is possible. Given that Shadow of Truth has so many questions to address and to attempt to answer, there are clearly reasons for its existence, other than to titillate or entertain. The involvement of Tair’s mother and father underlines its case. This is upsetting, riveting and far broader than it initially seems.
• Shadow of Truth is available on BBC iPlayer
