Michelle Zajko, a woman linked to the cultlike group that has become known as the Zizians, has now been charged with the murder of her parents three and a half years ago in Pennsylvania.

Zajko was charged Wednesday in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, with the district attorney explaining at a press conference that the investigation has been long and complicated, and there is still no "smoking gun," so to speak.

As NBC News reports, Zajko, 33, who has been in custody since being booked on trespassing charges in nearby Maryland last year, has now been charged with the murders of Richard and Rita Zajko on December 31, 2022 — which also happened to be Zajko's 30th birthday.

"It was an exhaustive investigation, and it took years to pull together, but we are finally at the point where we can say beyond any doubt that Michelle Zajko was at least in part responsible for the death of her parents,” said Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse at the news conference. Rouse added that "She did not act alone," and no other suspects have yet been charged.

Updates have been sporadic in the saga of the Zizians , a small and cultlike group that sprung from the Bay Area and specifically Berkeley's Rationalist scene, who have now been linked to the deaths of six people in different parts of the company. SFist has covered many of the twists and updates in the case, beginning with the brutal stabbing death of Vallejo resident Curtis Lind in January 2025.

The suspect in that case, then 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder, had ties to a young woman who was arrested just a week later in the Vermont shooting of a border patrol agent, and the consequent shooting of a friend and fellow "friend of Ziz" who was in the car with her at the time. 22-year-old Teresa Youngblut was indicted last summer in those kilings.

But prior to those three deaths, there were three others that occurred in late 2022, also on two sides of the country. First, in November 2022, as they were about to be evicted from Lind's Vallejo property, a group that allegedly included suspects Suri Dao, Somni Leatham, and Emma Borhanian, who had all been living together in two box trucks with Jack "Ziz" LaSota, is accused of attacking Lind one morning with knives and a sword. In the ensuing struggle, Lind fatally shot Borhanian, and lost an eye in the stabbing.

A little over a month later, Ziz was in Pennsylvania, and was arrested in January 2023 at an airport motel outside Philadelphia along with Michelle Zajko and an additional suspect, Daniel Blank. Zajko's parents had just been found murdered inside their suburban Philadelphia home, in the town of Chester Heights, and all three would be taken in for questioning as persons of interest and ultimately released — though Ziz was charged with obstruction, and disappeared after being released on bail.

The group then appears to have laid low for nearly two years, with financial help from both Zajko and Ophelia Bauckholt — a trans woman and German math prodigy who had made a significant sum of money by age 28 as a quant trader in New York. Bauckholt cut ties with her friends around the summer of 2023 and began making frequent trips out of town, possibly to Vermont, where Zajko purchased some property in a rural area near the Canadian border. Bauckholt also appears to have funded the rental of two Airbnbs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which they group appears to have used as an outpost in 2024.

Dao and Leatham remained in jail through this time, and the murder of Lind occurred in January 2025 just a day after the Solano County District Attorney gave a statement in the case, identifying the elderly Lind as the only eyewitness to his own stabbing two years earlier.

A second witness who lived on the property, who is also old and infirm, has given sworn testimony about seeing the aftermath of the stabbing and shooting which was reportedly spotty.

Media reports snowballed following the killing of Lind and the border patrol agent, with many trying to understand the motivations and beliefs of Ziz LaSota and the others in the group. Much of the evidence of their mindset came from several blogs that they wrote in the years between 2018 and 2022. LaSota spoke of being a "Sith," referring to the fictional Star Wars religion, and wrote frequently both about being trans and about discomfort around sexual activity.

The group espouses strict veganism, linking this to a belief that AI is going to take control of Earth and we as humans should want to set an example about how we treat innocent animals.

There was also some spurious pseudoscience around left- and right-brain functioning, and a practice of putting one half of one's brain to sleep. And Ziz believed that trans women, in particular, possessed intellectual and moral gifts over other humans. At least half of the identified members of the group identify as trans women.

Zajko denied murdering her parents in an open letter released by her lawyer last year. She also derided coverage of the Zizian group in "the papers," saying, "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."

She added, "I think the truth about my friends and I will make a lot more sense than what you’ve been reading about in the papers."

As the Associated Press reports, he Delaware County DA's office says that it has multiple pieces of evidence to implicate Zajko, including a recording from a neighbor's doorbell camera the morning of the murder that picked up someone yelling "Mom!" and "Oh my God! Oh, God, God!"

Shell casings found at the scene were linked to a gun that Zajko purchased, one of which was used in the Vermont shooting. And prosecutors say Zajko made a handwritten list of "mistakes" in the crime, which included leaving behind the shell casings.

Zajko was reportedly estranged from her parents for about a year before the killings, and investigators found a text message from Rita Zajko to her daughter wishing her a happy birthday and expressing a desire to reconnect, hours before the murders occurred.

Members of the Berkeley Rationalist community had been sounding alarm bells, at least among their cohort, about LaSota for several years before these killings occurred — and they had warned that LaSota seemed to be espousing some sort of intellecutal basis for committing violence.

The group had first made headlines in the Bay Area after LaSota and three others, including Borhanian and Leatham, allegedly stalked a Rationalist retreat in Sonoma County in 2018 and protested there, leading to their arrest.

Youngblut remains in federal custody in Vermont, while LaSota and Blank also remain in custody, as far as we know, following the Maryland arrests — and LaSota is believed to be a person of interest in the Vallejo cases.

Snyder, Dao, and Leatham all remain in custody in California pending trial.

Previously: Threads Connected In Story of Zizian Shot In Vermont Who Was German Math Whiz