MEDIA, Pa. — A member of the “Zizian” trans death cult has been charged with double murder more than three years after the shocking execution-style shooting of her parents inside a suburban Pennsylvania home.
Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, 33, was charged in Delaware County, Pa., with multiple counts of first-degree murder, criminal homicide, conspiracy to commit murder, burglary and firearms offenses. In total, 15 felonies and one misdemeanor.
She is accused of driving hours to the home of her parents Richard and Rita Zajko on the night of New Year’s Eve 2022—the night of her 30th birthday—and murdering them. The victims were found shot in the head in Zajko’s childhood bedroom near her stuffed toys.
“It is piece after piece after piece of evidence that has been collected painstakingly over years,” Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said Wednesday at a press conference, standing beside Zajko’s aunt, Rosanne Zajko, and investigators from the Pennsylvania State Police.
The case went cold for years as Zajko disappeared with members of the Zizians after she was arrested, questioned and released without charge in January 2023 near Philadelphia.
The group’s leader is Jack LaSota, a man who identifies as a woman and uses the name “Ziz,” among numerous other aliases. Its members are vegan left-wing transgender rationalists, many with elite educational backgrounds in science and mathematics. The group has frequently been compared to the Charles Manson cult.
……….Investigators say text messages recovered from the victims’ phones revealed Rita Zajko had reached out to her daughter on the afternoon of Dec. 31, 2022, in an attempt to mend their strained relationship. Zajko never responded. Approximately nine hours later, Rita and her husband were dead.
“It should be noted that it takes approximately 7.5 hours to drive from the defendant’s residence located in Orleans, VT to … Chester Heights Borough, Delaware County, PA,” an investigator wrote in the affidavit.
Zajko, a former bioinformatics researcher who interned for NASA in the Bay Area, wrote extensively on blogs about her hatred of “transphobes,” right-wingers and Christianity. She posted frequently about “trans genocide” and how “fascists” were being empowered.
“This is a child who killed her parents, who walked into her childhood home, took her mother to her childhood playroom, and executed her,” Rouse said.
Staff at a Lyndonville, Vermont, motel alerted authorities about seeing the duo with a firearm and black tactical clothing.
When law enforcement visited them, the pair claimed to be looking at property in the area and promptly checked out of the motel on Jan. 14, according to court documents.
Youngblut allegedly shot at Maland, who was killed, and border agents returned fire, killing Bauckholt. Youngblut is in custody.
Authorities now say the guns used by Youngblut and Bauckholt are owned by a person of interest in other murders — and connected to a mysterious cult of transgender “geniuses” who follow a trans leader named Jack LaSota, also known by the alias “Ziz.”
Bauckholt was a biological male who identified as trans and used feminine pronouns. He was an award-winning youth math genius from Freiburg, Germany, who later graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Around 2021, he was hired as a quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital in New York. It is believed Bauckholt was in the US on an H-1B visa. The Department of Justice says he was armed in the car and tried to aim his firearm before being shot dead.
Youngblut, who is accused of firing the surprise shots that killed Air Force veteran Maland, was injured by return fire.
Youngblut is a biological female who identifies as trans and lists having neo-pronouns as “xe/xem/xyrs” on social media. Youngblut was a University of Washington student studying computer science.
Youngblut graduated from the prestigious and woke north Seattle private institution Lakeside School, which Bill Gates also attended.
Youngblut’s family had reported her missing to Seattle police in May 2024. Her family said she was in a controlling relationship and cut off contact, according to the police report. Her social media account on BlueSky shows she followed some Antifa-aligned far-left accounts.
……..That group, the “Zizians,” are highly educated trans vegan “rationalists” who hold fringe, esoteric ideological beliefs about transhumanism and animal rights.
Their leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, is a biological male who identifies as a woman. He also used the name Andrea Phelps, and is accused of influencing followers to kill. LaSota’s archived prolific blog writings ramble about the use of violence and radical anarchist tactics to achieve various ends.
LaSota has a warrant for an arrest in Delaware County, Pa., after skipping out on court hearings on an open criminal case. His supporters say he died in 2022, but that appears to be based on a fake online obituary to try to escape the law.
On Inauguration Day, the shocking news that a US Border Patrol officer had been shot dead near the Canadian border in Vermont in an incident involving a now-deceased foreign national was overshadowed by coverage of Donald Trump’s events in the nation’s capital.
One week later, a 21-year-old Washington woman was charged over the deadly incident, but little has been reported about her and her deceased accomplice, a German man.
The Post Millennial can report that the mysterious duo who were pulled over in Coventry, Vt. in the deadly shootout are leftist trans militants with alleged ties to a trans terror cell.
Around a week before the Jan. 20 attack, federal law enforcement had been surveilling German man Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt and Seattle woman Teresa “Milo” Consuelo Youngblut, after staff at a Lyndonville, Vt. motel reported seeing them with black tactical clothing, weapons and protective militia-style equipment.
When law enforcement contacted them, they claimed to be looking to purchase property in the area. They promptly checked out of the motel afterward on Jan. 14.
Bauckholt was a biological male who identified as trans and used feminine pronouns. He was an award-winning youth math genius who later graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. German media reports that he comes from the Freiburg area.
Around 2021, he was hired as a quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital in New York. He lived in New Jersey. It is believed Bauckholt was in the US on an H-1B visa. The DOJ alleges he was armed in the car and tried to aim his firearm before being shot dead.
Youngblut, who is accused of firing the surprise shots that killed Air Force Veteran and border agent David Maland, was injured by returning fire. She is a biological female who identifies as trans and lists her neo-pronouns as “xe/xem/xyrs” on social media. She was a University of Washington student.
Youngblut’s family had reported her missing to Seattle Police in May 2024. Her family said she was in a controlling relationship and cut off contact, according to the police report. Youngblut filed a marriage application with a man named Maximilian Snyder in November 2024, though it doesn’t appear they actually followed through, according to public records.
Court filings by prosecutors say Youngblut was estranged from her family and traveled internationally in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Her social media account on BlueSky shows she followed Antifa and far-left accounts.
While receiving in-patient medical care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, Youngblut was charged with one count of using a deadly weapon while assaulting a Border Patrol agent and one count of using and discharging a firearm during the assault.
“I did not think it was likely Ophelia would be involved in direct violence—she was not aggressive and I didn’t know about her having weapons,” Jessica Taylor, a friend of Bauckholt, says.
Taylor, a 32-year-old trans woman in Berkeley, Calif., has met Bauckholt repeatedly over the years and was the first person to confirm his identity as “Ophelia.” Bauckholt was known online among trans networks in the artificial intelligence fields.
“[Ophelia] may have been radicalized by some person or group,” Taylor speculates.
Taylor showed TPM written communications Taylor had with Bauckholt in 2022 where he discussed being in contact with members of the “Ziz” group. The group was or is a California Bay Area-based violent trans commune centered around a cult of personality of leader, “Ziz,” whose real name is Jack LaSota.
“Her [Youngblut] associations with other individuals suspected of violent acts also warrants caution,” a prosecutor wrote in a court filing on Jan. 27. “The individual who purchased the firearms the defendant and Bauckholt possessed on January 20, 2025, is a person of interest in a dual-homicide investigation in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.”
Alleged members of the “Ziz” group are under investigation for a double homicide of an elderly couple in January 2022 in Pennsylvania and the murder of an 82-year-old in Vallejo, Calif.. The court filing strongly suggests Youngblut and Bauckholt were in contact with that group.
“Both the defendant and the person who purchased the firearms in Vermont that the defendant and her companion possessed on January 20, 2025, are acquainted with and have been in frequent contact with an individual who was detained by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during that homicide investigation; that individual is also a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.”
…….After the shooting, a bomb squad investigated Bauckholt and Youngblut’s Toyota Prius Hatchback. Investigators found two pistols, ammunition clips, night-vision goggles, two full-face respirators, a ballistic helmet, 48 rounds of hollow point ammunition, shooting range targets, interstate lodging information, two-way radios and a dozen electronic devices, some of which were wrapped in foil.
