From NASA intern to national fugitive

Michelle Zajko was always ambitious. The Delaware County native‘s resumé was filled with dean’s list honors and accolades, bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and research internships with Pennsylvania’s top children’s hospital and a NASA lab in California.

At Cabrini University, she was a bright, idealistic student who raised money to fight malaria and told friends she wanted to help people live better, healthier lives.

But in February, as Zajko lined up for her mug shot in a rural Maryland jail, arrested for trespassing and wanted for arming the accused killers of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, that onetime dream seemed to belong to a different person.

Gone were the stylish glasses, sleek blond hair, and sharp gaze seen on the LinkedIn profile where Zajko touted her resumé. Instead, the 32-year-old was pale, her once shoulder-length hair buzzed to the scalp. As the camera flashed, she rolled her eyes up toward the back of her head so only the whites were visible.

Zajko was arrested alongside Jack “Ziz” LaSota, the leader of an esoteric Bay Area extremist group known as the Zizians, whose members, police say, are behind a spate of crimes spanning from California to the upper corner of Vermont.

Zajko and LaSota met online years before law enforcement considered them persons of interest in the death of Zajko’s parents, Rita and Richard, who were shot to death in a bedroom of their Chester Heights home in 2022.

Zajko could not be reached for comment for this article. But in an “open letter to the world” from her Maryland jail cell, in 20 pages of neat, blue handwriting, she denied any wrongdoing and portrayed herself and her friends as the defiant victims of a convoluted conspiracy involving the FBI and the media.

“I did not murder my parents,” wrote Zajko, who has not been charged with any crime in connection with her parents’ deaths. “My friends and I aren’t a murder cult and haven’t murdered 6 people.”

Zajko criticized the media for its portrayal of the group, which she said had been falsely portrayed “as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil, and the Manson family all rolled into one.”

Dec. 31, 2022, was Zajko’s 30th birthday, and an unseasonably warm winter evening in Delaware County. Families prepared to watch fireworks and celebrate the new year.

Around 11:30 p.m., Zajko’s parents, Richard and Rita, were shot to death in their only daughter’s childhood bedroom.

Rita Zajko was shot once in the back of the head, and her husband was shot in his right temple, authorities said.

Only two shots were fired, according to police, before the killer left the bodies on the bedroom floor and fled.

Police are still trying to identify the shooter.

But investigators believe that Zajko was at her parents’ home on the night of the killings and that she was not alone. And prosecutors have said they still want to speak with her about that night.

In an interview with police a few days after her parents were killed, Zajko told investigators said she had nothing to do with the crime. She said she was not in Pennsylvania on the night the couple was shot and had not been in touch with them for some time, according to court filings.

Still, in court documents, investigators have described Zajko as a person of interest in the murder case.

Text messages recovered from Zajko’s phone showed that a few hours before the killings, her mother sent her information about a savings bond that was about to mature and Zajko would soon be eligible to collect, court records show.

Shell casings recovered at the scene of the slaying were the same caliber as ammunition Zajko had purchased months earlier in Orleans, Vt., where she had settled during the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities said.

And on the night her parents were killed, court records show, a neighbor’s surveillance camera recorded a car arriving at the home.

Shortly after the car pulled up to the house, the footage showed, someone yelled, “Mom!”

Then, a few seconds later, someone cried out, “Oh, my God!”

Decades earlier, Richard and Rita Zajko longed to bring a child into their lives.

They had been unable to conceive, relatives said, so in the early 1990s, the couple adopted Michelle, a little girl with blond curls. They raised her in their large, stone house, with a pool in the backyard and plenty of room to play.

Richard Zajko was an expert gardener, with carefully tended shrubs and flowers and “never a leaf in his yard,” one neighbor said.

Rita Zajko was friendly and close to some of her neighbors, those who knew the couple said, sharing meals in their homes and confiding in them over the decades.

The Zajkos seemed to be devoted parents, neighbors said, and in recent years, the couple also cared for Rita’s ailing mother, visiting her every day in Brookhaven.

The Zajkos owned several apartments a few miles away in Aston, where Richard Zajko, “an old-school, handshake-and-a-wink kind of guy,” did much of the maintenance himself, a former tenant said.

When one tenant was awaiting the birth of his first child, he said, Richard Zajko offered him his daughter’s baby clothes. The Zajkos had wanted a child for so long, he said, that they cherished the clothes and kept them long after their daughter outgrew them.

By the time Michelle Zajko was a teen, friends said, she began to clash with her parents over some of their views. In blog posts written during her college years, she alluded to having a difficult relationship with them, writing that they argued over religion and her desire to be vegan. She said they had forced her to eat meat and told her animals were “put on this earth by god,” for that purpose.

One of Zajko’s childhood friends, a classmate at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield, said Zajko kept to herself and had few close confidants. She was an “offbeat art kid” who was interested in how best to help others, the woman said.

“She was a nerd. She liked cartoons and that was what she drew,” said the classmate, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. “We were just two kids in high school drawing fantasy artwork.”

Zajko was never violent, the former classmate said, and the allegations against her old friend have shocked her. The portrait of Zajko painted by prosecutors, she said, is nothing like the girl she knew.

The woman recalled that Zajko sometimes used to complain about her parents, saying they were overly strict and had forced her to dye her brown hair blond.

Her aunt, Rosanne Zajko, said her niece seemed to get along fine with her parents, although like any teenager, she said, they sometimes got into disagreements.

As Zajko prepared for college, meanwhile, her writings showed she was becoming increasingly drawn into niche online communities — and, with them, the emerging Zizian mindset.

Zajko arrived at Cabrini University in Radnor in the fall of 2011, planning to study graphic design. Zajko’s blog musings were idealistic, and she wrote of wanting to better the world.

After her sophomore year, Zajko switched her major to biology, writing that she decided to do so after reading a fantasy novel based on the Harry Potter series that introduced her to the philosophical concept of rationalism and drew her into its online community.

The philosophy, popular with Bay Area tech adherents, encourages seeking truth and making decisions through reason as opposed to impulse and intuition.

She worked to bring rationalism to her Main Line campus through the High Impact Network, an extracurricular club promoting “the concept of making the world better for those who inhabit it,” according to the university’s newspaper.

“I want to help save people for my career, but this is a way I can do it now,” Zajko said in an interview at the time.

The language she used in describing the group echoed the talking points of rationalism, which Zajko said she first encountered through online blogs like LessWrong. On the site, she and other users debated hypothetical moral problems and effective altruism, a popular idea among Silicon Valley philanthropists that promotes a utilitarian approach to giving.

Many in the community were also deeply concerned with reining in the rapid developments in artificial intelligence.

It was through these online spaces that Zajko later interacted with LaSota and other members of the group prosecutors say LaSota led.

After graduating from Cabrini, Zajko continued to work toward her goal of becoming a scientist.

One of them was LaSota. In the missive she later wrote from behind bars, Zajko said she loved LaSota, who she said was not a cult leader and had never done anything “evil or selfish.”

“Ziz is not my leader, and I am not hers,” Zajko wrote. “What we have is called friendship, and I love her infinitely more than I could ever express.”

LaSota had spent the last few years cobbling together her own idiosyncratic philosophy.

As the Bay Area rationalist movement grew in the 2010s, the Alaska native split from the scene’s mainstream, espousing wild, often inscrutable concepts on her blog.

She wrote about “turning to the dark side” and “rejecting morality.” Like Zajko, LaSota was drawn to fantasy, referencing Star Wars and aliens in her writing. LaSota was also introduced to rationalism by the same Harry Potter fan fiction as Zajko, and posted on the same message boards, under the username “Ziz.”

LaSota subscribed to a form of veganism that regards eating animals as akin to cannibalism, similar to Zajko’s own beliefs.

And like Zajko, LaSota was well-educated. She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from University of Alaska and pursued, but ultimately didn’t earn, a master’s in that field from the University of Illinois.

Zajko first connected with LaSota in online communities, speaking through lengthy comments left on LaSota’s blog.

In 2021, Zajko purchased a plot of land in rural Vermont for $10,000. In online writings, she said her “complicity in the animal murder industry” and concerns about an infrastructure collapse triggered by “the rise of fascism in the US” motivated her to attempt to move completely off-grid.

Zajko later invited other Zizians to share her rented home, including LaSota and Daniel Blank, a UC Berkeley graduate who was arrested alongside her and LaSota in Maryland earlier this year.

While living in Vermont, Zajko appeared to have little contact with her family and people she grew up with. By her own account, she rarely ventured outside the rural community.

She returned to Pennsylvania in 2023 for her parents’ funeral, days after their New Year’s Eve killings. Police say Zajko, LaSota, and Blank traveled together from the northern outpost to Delaware County in Zajko’s green Subaru Outback.

Along the way, for reasons that are unclear, Blank withdrew $40,000 from an ATM in New Hampshire. And for reasons also unknown to authorities, state police detectives say, the group tried to avoid detection as they traveled by wrapping their cell phones in tinfoil.

During the funeral service, Zajko wore a surgical mask that covered most of her face, according to her aunt, Rosanne Zajko, who said they spoke briefly. She said her niece seemed uneasy, asking her about the identities of guests she didn’t recognize.

Not long after the funeral, Rosanne Zajko said, her niece told her over the phone that she didn’t kill her parents — but knew who did. Her niece didn’t tell her the name of the person who committed the crime, she said.

When state police learned that Zajko was in town for the funeral, they sought her out, hoping to speak to her.

Zajko had spent the nights before the memorial service at the Candlewood Suites in Chester, where state troopers served a search warrant on her hotel room looking for any potential evidence connected to the murder case.

In another room nearby, registered to Blank, troopers found a Smith & Wesson handgun Zajko had purchased that was the same caliber as the weapon they believe killed her parents, according to court documents.

The troopers seized the gun, and it remains in their custody.

They also found another surprise: LaSota was hiding in the bathroom of the hotel room with the shower running, authorities said.

The Zizian leader refused to open her eyes, speak, or move, and police had to carry her out of the building, they said. Zajko would later mimic this tactic in her Maryland mug shot as she rolled her eyes back in front of the camera.

Zajko wrote in her jailhouse letter that LaSota was arrested “for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” and accused police of pressuring LaSota to implicate Zajko in her parents’ killings.

“She said nothing, out of principle; she didn’t believe the police,” Zajko wrote.

LaSota’s Delaware County attorney, Daniel McGarrigle, said in a statement that she is “wholly and unequivocally innocent of the charges” she faces in the suburb.

After leaving Pennsylvania, Zajko, along with LaSota and Blank, entered what Zajko described in her open letter as “homebrewed witness protection.”

There was, she said, a conspiracy among other rationalists to discredit — and even kill — her and her friends after they attempted to “blow the whistle” on a pedophilia and sex-assault ring involving members of the federal government and California tech entrepreneurs.

While in that self-imposed exile, in February 2024, Zajko contacted a Delaware County lawyer to inquire about her inheritance and seek to settle her parents’ estate, and that of her grandmother, who died in January 2023.

Neither estate case has been settled, and the size of any inheritance Zajko might be due has not been listed in court documents.

The same month she inquired about the money, Zajko purchased four handguns from two different gun stores not far from her home in Vermont, according to court filings.

Two of those guns eventually found their way into the hands of two Zizians, who authorities say later used them in a fatal shootout with Border Patrol Agent David Maland in January.

Maland, 44, was wounded and died not long afterward at a nearby hospital.

Youngblut was taken into custody and charged with assaulting a federal agent with a deadly weapon.

Weeks later, Zajko’s travels ended on a spartan patch of Maryland wilderness far from the suburban house she once called home.

In mid-February, a homeowner discovered two box trucks parked at the edge of his property along a remote mountain access road in Frostburg, Md., a rural community near the West Virginia border, according to the affidavit of probable cause for Zajko’s arrest.

The trucks’ occupants, clad in all black and wearing ammo belts, asked him if they could camp on his property for a month.

The homeowner said no and asked them to leave — they were strangers to him, and he said he found them suspicious. Maryland State Police arrived to investigate and found Zajko, LaSota, and Blank living in the trucks, armed with a military-grade, .50-caliber sniper rifle, body armor, and one of the two missing handguns from the batch Zajko had purchased a year earlier in Vermont.

All three were arrested and charged with trespassing, resisting arrest, and possession of a weapon.

They refused to answer the troopers’ questions, identify themselves, or even sign their arrest paperwork — another sign of the group’s consistent reluctance to comply with law enforcement. Zajko gave the troopers a false name, Alex Clark, before her true identity and those of her traveling companions were confirmed with the help of federal investigators.

Days after the three were arrested, when an Inquirer reporter visited the property where they had sought to set up camp, the homeowner refused to open his door. A neighbor asked the reporter to leave, saying the entire community was “tired of all the strange [expletive] that’s been going on.”

Earlier that day, in the stark confines of a Maryland courtroom, LaSota and her followers seemed weary, but defiant.

LaSota looked frail yet talked nonstop, interrupting a judge to complain about being denied vegan food while incarcerated. Zajko, on the other hand, said practically nothing, answering the judge’s questions in brief, clipped responses.

Zajko’s public defender told the judge that while Zajko and her companions were now effectively homeless — reduced to rugged camping — they were all “brilliant,” highly educated young people with backgrounds in science and technology.

The lawyer urged Allegany County District Court Judge Erich Bean to release them on bail. Bean denied the request, saying setting them free was “simply not an option” given their lack of ties to Maryland and their connections to other alleged crimes.

Zajko remains in custody, her trial in the Maryland case set for mid-August. She predicts that it will not be a fair prosecution.

“I will face a show trial, where I will be pressured to make a false confession, or to lie about my friends,” she wrote from her jail cell. “I will refuse, and I will plead innocent.”

But even behind bars, under the weight of national scrutiny, there were still signs of the former graduate student who spoke so forcefully of helping others.

In her open letter, Zajko advocated for her friends and other inmates in the Maryland jail, saying their needs were being ignored and their constitutional rights denied.

“We are all co-creating the world together through our choices,” she wrote. “No one who chooses always to do the right thing in the face of evil ever regrets it.”

Staff writer Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.