A Middle Eastern brute has been jailed for beating his Russian ex-girlfriend to death in her southwest Sydney apartment and claiming she killed herself.
Danny Zayat, 31, was sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court on Friday to to 24 years’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of 18 years after last month being found guilty by a jury of murdering Tatiana Dokhotaru, 34, in her Liverpool home in May 2023.
The court heard Zayat viciously beat, choked, spat at and threatened to kill Ms Dokhotaru for years before the murder, and her mother testified that she heard him racially abuse her daughter “almost every single day”, calling her a “White fucking bitch”.
Justice Desmond Fagan found in sentencing that Zayat robbed Ms Dokhotaru of tens of thousands of dollars in cash, which she earned from selling imitation luxury goods, after inflicting three significant and fatal blunt force injuries to her head.
Ms Dokhotaru called Triple-Zero on the night of the attack, telling the operator her ex was trying to kill her and “stealing my money”, but the call was cut off after 89 seconds and Zayat threw the phone off the balcony of the 22nd floor apartment.
Emergency services turned up but were unable to find her as they did not know her apartment number.
Zayat, a bodybuilder who claimed his use of steroids and testosterone made him “short-tempered”, was caught on CCTV leaving three minutes after the call, and he returned 20 hours later, called Triple-Zero and pretended to cry while blaming her death on suicide.
“Oh fuck, I shouldn’t have left her, she’s been depressed, man, she’s been depressed. She’s been so depressed, I shouldn’t have left her,” he was recorded on body-worn camera telling police officers at the scene.
“I can’t believe she’s done that to herself.”
Justice Fagan found that Zayat was “pathologically jealous” after Ms Dokhotaru left him, and that the murder was the culmination of years of violent abuse, including an attack in the week beforehand where he stood over her filming and saying “get up” after he had beaten her so badly she was “incapacitated and distressed” and unable to speak without slurring her words.
“There was ample time for [Zayat] to get a grip, to recognise that he was routinely assaulting, injuring and frightening a defenceless woman, and that his actions were wrong by any human standard,” Justice Fagan said.
“Instead, he pressed on with the final lethal assault on 26 May.”
Weeks before her murder Ms Dokhotaru, who was born in Russia but emigrated to Canada with her mother at age 11 and then moved to Australia in 2011, sent her mother, Olya, a photo of her bruised neck after Zayat had strangled her.
Olya urged her daughter to call the police, saying: “This is not a man, and such people do not stop.”
Ms Dokhotaru’s stepfather Denis Thievin said he and her Canada-based family would forever regret not helping her hide after she said during a 2022 visit that she wanted to stay rather then “return to the monster who awaited … back in Australia”, ABC News reported.
“We will carry that guilt for the rest of our lives,” he said.
“Never had we fathomed that any human being could be so inhumane and so heartless with someone that we loved so much.”
Header image: Left, Danny Zayat. Right, Tatiana Dokhotaru (Instagram).
