Who Killed Tair Rada?

On 6th December 2006, Tair Rada, a 13-year-old Israeli schoolgirl, was found dead, covered in her own blood and her throat sliced, inside a locked bathroom stall in her school, Nofey Golan, in the town of Katzrin.

Initial suspects were Roman Zdorov, a floorer temporarily working at the school and a new immigrant to Israel from Ukraine, as well as Tair’s schoolmates. During the police investigation, Zdorov confessed to the crime but recanted soon after. Zdorov was convicted of the murder on 14th September 2010.

In 2012, Adir Habani told the police that his ex-girlfriend, Ola Kravchenko, had confessed to him on the day of the murder that she had killed Tair, and shown him bloodied clothes and a knife.

Adir’s testimony became public in 2016 with the international release of the documentary series Shadow of Truth and has continued to receive international attention with a true crime podcast in 2021.

Following the emergence of new evidence, and awaiting a rare retrial ordered by the Supreme Court, Zdorov was released on house arrest on 26th August 2021.

During the retrial, which started on 12th October 2021, an old piece of evidence, a hair found at the crime scene, was found to strongly match Adir Habani. This evidence dramatically increases the likelihood that Ola murdered Tair since Habani has an alibi and he claims that Ola wore his clothes while committing the murder. However, this analysis intentionally ignores this evidence, in order to demonstrate what a probabilistic analysis could have found using only the evidence available in 2012.