Fifty-one years after the death of five-year-old Sa’ar Goldstein was pronounced by authorities, ostensibly from drowning, the boy’s father, 88-year-old Asher Goldstein, arrived at the Eilat police station on Saturday and admitted that his son didn’t die from drowning, but rather that he had killed him.
His arrest was extended at the Eilat Magistrate’s Court on Sunday until Wednesday.
The child died in 1974 after seemingly drowning off the Migdalor Beach in Eilat. Police interrogators took testimony on Saturday from Goldstein, who named the precise date of the murder, and offered as an explanation that the boy had a brain injury that led to a lifelong movement and muscle disorder, and that he “took mercy on him.”
A news article from Yediot Aharonot dated April 15, 1974, noted that Goldstein “suddenly noticed that his son was floating above the water. The father immediately pulled the boy out, and brought him to the Yoseftal Medical Center.”
Goldstein himself is terminally ill, which he said is what convinced him to come forward with the truth now, to “clear his conscience.”
Goldstein serves 11 years for killing his wife
About two years after the murder, in 1976, he killed his wife, Levana, staging it to look like a car crash.
Her body was found scorched inside his burnt car. At the time though, circumstances gave way to a reasonable suspicion that he was behind her death, including a metal rod that he used to fatally strike her across the head. He then drove her body from Eilat up through the Arava, where she was eventually found.
Goldstein was sentenced to life in prison in 1977. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal two years later, and he was sentenced to 16 years in prison, serving 11 of them.
What remains to be seen is how the case will be treated within the legal system, as the statute of limitations does not go this far back. However, if a new case is opened, it may have the opportunity to reach trial.