The former home of murder victims Richard and Rita Zajko in Chester Heights, Pa., photographed in 2025. Matt Rourke/Associated Press
The fallout from the “Zizians” saga has been extensive.
Seven young people with links to the cultlike band of devout vegans and math whizzes — centered around former Bay Area resident Ziz LaSota — are now jailed in California, Maryland and Vermont. Authorities have connected the group to six violent deaths, including the stabbing of a Vallejo landlord and the shooting of a Border Patrol agent in a traffic-stop shootout in Vermont.
Another two people with ties to the Zizians died by suicide. And some former associates of the group, and their loved ones, have lived in fear.
Yet more than four months after the Zizians and a trail of carnage began to make headlines, a central mystery remains: Who killed Richard and Rita Zajko?
On New Year’s Eve of 2022, someone shot the couple in their stately two-story home in Chester Heights, Pa., west of Philadelphia, then slipped away. That night, someone inside or near the home shouted “Mom!” Two days later, after no one had heard from the couple, police officers checked on them and found their bodies — in the onetime bedroom of their daughter, Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, a close associate of LaSota. Each had been shot once in the head.
Today, the investigation is ongoing. Police have focused on Michelle Zajko, who turned 30 the day of the double slaying, calling her a “person of interest” in the case while referring to the Zizians as an “extremist group.” They say Zajko bought guns found at the scene of the Jan. 20 Vermont shootout, as well as a pistol of the same type used to murder her parents. Zajko had also been in frequent contact with an unnamed person of interest in the Jan. 17 Vallejo homicide.
But detectives in Pennsylvania have not only made no arrests, but also have revealed nothing about a potential motive.
Left unanswered is whether the point-blank execution was another by-product of the strange and varied missions of the Zizians, who years ago broke away from a Berkeley-based “rationalist” community that is seeking to save humanity from being wiped out by runaway artificial intelligence. LaSota and those around her wanted to end the consumption of meat, believed transgender women like Ziz had special intellectual gifts, and tried to live cheaply off the grid — on rural property or in boats or box trucks.
Zajko has denied killing her parents, who, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, adopted her at a young age because they had been unable to conceive. As a teenager, the newspaper reported, she began to argue with her parents over some of their views, and she later wrote in blog posts that they clashed over her veganism.
“My friends and I are being described as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil & the Manson family all rolled into one. These papers are flagrantly lying. For instance, there were no truck-fulls of guns, no machine gun, & I didn’t murder my parents,” Zajko wrote in a 20-page “Open Letter to the World” that her attorney provided to the Associated Press.
Michelle “Jamie” Zajko is seen in a law enforcement mugshot. She says she did not kill her parents on New Year's Eve of 2022. Law enforcement photo
She handwrote the letter from the Allegany County Detention Center in Cumberland, Md., where the former honors student — who once interned at a prestigious children’s hospital and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View — has been held since mid-February.
That’s when Zajko, along with LaSota, 33, and Daniel Blank, 26, were arrested and accused of trespassing onto a rural Maryland property in an attempt to camp in a pair of box trucks. Responding officers found the trio wearing all black, with three guns and ammunition in the vehicles, according to court records. After the arrests, federal prosecutors filed charges as well, accusing Zajko of lying about her residence while purchasing guns.
Whether the three Zizians had visited the home of Richard and Rita Zajko on New Year’s Eve of 2022 remains unknown.
Court records provide a glimpse into the Chester Heights investigation: On the night of the killing, at 11:29 p.m., a neighbor’s doorbell camera captured an unknown vehicle pulling into the Zajkos’ curved driveway and turning off its headlights.
At 11:31 p.m., Vermont State Police Sgt. David Robillard said in a court affidavit, a neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded a higher-pitched voice shouting what sounded to investigators like “Mom!” and then, less than 30 seconds later, “Oh, my God! Oh, God, God!”
After the shouts, Robillard said that “movement can be seen at the front door,” which appeared to open and then shut, “indicating the subjects entered the house.” An upstairs light inside the house turned on and, about nine minutes later, two subjects could be seen exiting the front door, he wrote. The pair entered the car and pulled out of the driveway.
According to the court affidavit, Rita Zajko had texted her daughter hours earlier using the encrypted app Signal, referring to “savings bonds for which it is believed the daughter was the intended recipient.” Michelle Zajko did not respond.
After the bodies were discovered two days later, state troopers went to see Michelle Zajko at her home in Orleans, Vt. She offered an alibi: She had been at home with her roommate — Blank — from Dec. 29, 2022, to Jan. 1, 2023. Zajko reportedly allowed Robillard to handle a gun she owned, a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol that fired 9mm rounds, but he had no warrant to seize the weapon.
Later, a ballistic lab analyzed the bullet that killed Richard Zajko and determined that his daughter’s handgun was “one firearm manufacturer type capable of producing” the markings on the projectile, Robillard wrote. He said the daughter had bought the handgun 11 months earlier at a Vermont sporting goods store, along with bullets “of the same manufacturer and type as that of the spent casings that were recovered.”
On Jan. 12, 2023, investigators obtained a warrant and raided Michelle Zajko’s home in Vermont, but could not find the gun, which would have allowed for ballistic tests to see if it was the murder weapon. That same day, Pennsylvania state troopers raided a hotel near the Philadelphia airport where Zajko was staying while in town for her parents’ funeral. LaSota and Blank were staying at the same hotel, in a separate room.
While Blank cooperated with authorities, LaSota allegedly lay on the floor of her room, motionless. She had to be carried out. Police also briefly detained Zajko, who vanished as soon as she was released from custody.
Authorities said Ziz LaSota refused to cooperate and went limp after a 2023 arrest at a Pennsylvania hotel. Delaware County District Attorney’s Office
“She left the State Police Barracks despite being asked to wait in the lobby so her vehicle could be returned to her,” James Loomis, an agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, wrote in a report. “She departed, abandoning her vehicle and approximately $40,000 in cash that was found in the vehicle.”
Police returned to the hotel where the trio had been staying and executed another search warrant for the room where LaSota and Blank had been staying. There, officers reported seizing a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm pistol that Zajko had bought in Vermont in February 2022.
Investigators did not say then — and have not said since — whether they believe that gun was used to kill Zajko’s parents.
