Police worked to allay neighbors’ concerns with assurances that the murder was not “a random act,” hinting they had leads on prospective killers.
Indeed, in the days after the bodies were found, Pennsylvania State Police tracked down the couple’s daughter, Michelle. The Ring footage revealed the suspicious New Year’s Eve visit. A recent text from Rita to Michelle made note of a savings bond about to mature. And months earlier, Michelle had purchased a handgun and ammunition in Vermont of the same type used to kill her parents.
Even so, Pennsylvania authorities have never charged anyone with the murders — though Michelle Zajko is considered a “person of interest,” and her parents’ estate remains in limbo. A lawyer has invoked the state’s “Slayer Statute,” which says that “no slayer shall …. receive any benefit as the result of the death of the decedent.”
Zajko, who has denied any role in the killings, did not respond to messages from the Globe.
The unsolved double homicide was starting to fade from local memory until a shootout on the Vermont border three weeks ago, in which a 21-year-old Washington woman was charged in the killing of a US Border Patrol agent. The weapon the woman used was traced back to Michelle Zajko.
It was only then that the apparent outlines of a grander conspiracy started to reveal themselves to the public and also, seemingly, law enforcement. It is a bizarre tale of extremism, delusion, and violence with details that feel hatched by a far-right meme factory, with lead characters that espouse rational thinking but leave a senseless path of violence in their wake. A circle of whiz kids turned bad.
For years, people within a niche Bay Area philosophical circle had warned about the volatility of a splinter group led by an Alaskan transplant, whose adherents included Zajko. The so-called “Rationalist Movement” — which aims to rid individual minds of illogical thought in a bid to save the world — had watched the charismatic thought leader, who calls herself Ziz, warp their tenets into something mesmeric and sinister.
Weeks after the Zajko murders, an anonymous rationalist published a lengthy post titled “A Community Warning.” The document seems prescient, bringing two of the tangled threads of this story into close proximity. Michelle Zajko is described as harboring “very strong hatred” toward her parents and the writer references the fearsome reputation of Ziz and her disciples, the Zizians.
“Some people in the rationalist community are concerned about risks of physical violence from Ziz and some of her associates,” the author wrote.
Now, the Vermont slaying and another killing in California have been linked to associates of Ziz, reviving interest in the dormant Zajko murders and exposing this fringe ideology to wider notoriety.
Ziz and her associates appear to be mostly trans women who attended elite universities, drive Priuses and Subarus, and approach veganism with religious fervor. Many are tech and math wizards. Their hardline ideas — that eating animals is genocide, that blackmail is a necessary tool to create a moral future, that the brain has two hemispheres that belong to separate persons — deviate erratically from the rationalist norm.
A Globe investigation into Ziz and her associates draws from a dozen interviews with people who in many cases know them or are part of the larger rationalist movement, as well a review of police reports, court records, and the essays of some Zizians. Reporters visited marinas on the outskirts of San Francisco and the woods of Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom to piece together a tale of paranoid and fragile young adults who embraced fringe ideas, isolated themselves from loved ones, and ultimately spiraled into violence.
The Zizians’ saga is mystifying and violent. Incidents linked to the group have left a body count of six so far, including two of their own members and excluding at least two falsely reported deaths and two presumed suicides.
If the story is a gothic one, its origins couldn’t be more mundane: It all started with a post-college job search and a quest for affordable housing.
Like many other young digital savants, Jack LaSota found his way to the Bay Area in the mid-2010s. The Alaska native had just graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a degree in computer engineering.
His father, Daniel, a professor there who specializes in artificial intelligence, originally hails from Beverly. Daniel’s father, Robert LaSota, was a professor at Salem State University.
It was a family of big brains — and not a little trouble.
In a highly publicized case in the late 1980s, Robert LaSota was convicted of molesting his younger daughter, Jack LaSota’s aunt, over a period of years. The conviction was thrown out over a piece of evidence an appeals court deemed prejudicial. Prosecutors tried the case two more times but it ended in mistrial.
Robert LaSota, who now lives in Merrimac, declined to comment for this story, as did his daughter.
As a child, Jack LaSota was precocious but struggled socially. In middle school, the teen was among a group of students who managed to infiltrate the school district’s payroll system and award huge paychecks to teachers they admired while slashing the salaries of those they despised, according to one teacher. LaSota, the teacher said, struggled to regulate strong emotions, often erupting in tantrums.
LaSota arrived in the Bay Area after completing an internship at NASA. She began to use female pronouns. She also struggled to stay employed, chafing against the overtime expectations of a gaming startup, according to her blog. Instead, she found community in Berkeley’s esoteric rationalist scene, which numbered in the hundreds and sought to use decision theory and mathematical reasoning to tackle what they viewed as existential threats to the world. The philosophical circle congregated online in a forum called LessWrong and in person at Bay Area coffee shops and house parties.
The movement sees technology and artificial intelligence, with its huge analytical power and vulnerability to abuse, as both the enemy and an inspiration.
“The idea is that the mind is full of software and hardware that can be improved, and you can eliminate the assumptions and cultural scripts that are not serving you,” explained a former rationalist, who hosted meetups in the Bay Area and spoke on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of LaSota. “It is a group that is aggressively worshipful of truth and clarity.”
LaSota was often aloof and a critical presence at these gatherings.
“Jack LaSota is a wannabe Sith lord,” declared the former rationalist, equating LaSota to the “Star Wars” villains who draw strength from the dark side. Perpetually clad in a hooded black robe, she looked the part.
Rationalists pride themselves on inclusivity, and LaSota’s quirks raised few alarms among the motley assemblage of bohemians, goths, and nerds looking to better themselves and the world.
The movement considered it paramount that its work be done in the shadows of some of the world’s most influential tech companies.
“The Bay Area was the Schelling point of the movement,” rationalist Octavia Nouzen explained, using a popular game theory term for ground zero. “It’s the place to be if you want to make an impact and interact with the movers and shakers.”
It is also extremely expensive.
LaSota’s first grand idea was that the Bay Area’s rationalist community should live aboard boats in the region’s many marinas. Paying rent, after all, was “bad praxis,” in her words. If everybody moved onto boats, the community could stop forking over huge sums to landlords, remain in the epicenter of rationalism, and get to the real work of saving the world from the abuses of artificial intelligence.
LaSota, who by then had begun blogging under the name Ziz, described the effort in an early post.
“We rejected the name ‘Bay Area Rationalist Fleet’ because of the acronym,” she wrote, in a rare flash of humor.
LaSota and a companion, Gwen Danielson, went on a hunt for cheap boats. They settled on the Caleb, a rusty 94-foot World War II-era tugboat, which they piloted down from Alaska in 2017 and anchored in Northern California’s Half Moon Bay.
Curtis Lind was soon drawn into this eccentric circle. He happened to be at the docks one day and fell for the aging tugboat at first glance.
“He was a shipping magnet. Mind you, ‘magnet,’ not ‘magnate,’” said Lind’s closest friend, Thomas Young. “Big boats were always a bit of a problem for him.”
Lind, then in his late 70s, mentioned to Danielson that he had property in Vallejo that he was hoping to turn into a trailer park of sorts for young artists. By then, the Caleb had begun leaking crude oil and its crew was spending a lot of time onshore, living in box trucks. Danielson expressed interest in moving into the Vallejo property.
Within weeks, a whole cast of characters — including LaSota – took up residence in Lind’s lot. LaSota, as Ziz, had attracted a small yet fervent following. Her essays were dense and otherworldly.
“Ziz’s tendency towards inscrutable metaphors and loaded jargon serve [sic] essentially the same purpose as typos in a spam email – it’s meant to filter you out,” one rationalist wrote online. “If the hypnotic language made more literal sense, it would bring in people who weren’t especially susceptible in particular to Ziz’s brand of rhetoric.”
Among Ziz’s favorite targets for online criticism were the institutions that had first introduced her to rationalism years earlier, including the Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley, Calif., a nonprofit that leads workshops on cognitive bias.
In 2019, LaSota upped the ante, taking her critique from cyberspace into the public square.
That November, Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies responded to a strange call from Westminster Woods, a 200-acre camping property north of San Francisco, where the center was holding its annual retreat. Protesters wearing the sinister black-and-white Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the “Anonymous” hacktivist group had blocked the exits to the property with their vehicles. A SWAT team and armored vehicle arrived.
Police arrested and unmasked the protesters: LaSota and Danielson, as well as two other acquaintances: 28-year-old Emma Borhanian and 24-year-old Alexander Leatham. They were charged with felony child endangerment, false imprisonment, and conspiracy as well as misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest, wearing a mask while committing a crime and trespassing.
At the time, the episode was merely a mysterious blip on the Bay Area radar. But the moment would mark the group’s first run-in with the law, and cement a deep distrust of authorities.
“The cops want it to be the case that a person who doesn’t do whatever they say is a criminal,” wrote Ziz days before the protest.
It was a crisp November morning in 2022 when Lind ambled over to one of the group’s trailers to fix a reported water leak.
The tenants had grown in number to about two dozen, according to court documents filed that fall. They’d also stopped paying rent after lawmakers gave tenants special protections during the pandemic. The day Lind filed suit to evict the group, one of the tenants unsheathed a pocket knife and smiled menacingly at him, according to an interview Lind gave last year to a documentary filmmaker. The next day, Lind bought a pistol.
He carried it the day of the leak, as he walked to the rear of a trailer to turn off the water supply. When he leaned over, he was hit on the head. When he came to, three tenants were towering over him.
“The right side of my skull was shattered. My nose was shoved over flat. And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds, I think around 50,” recalled Lind. “The back of my neck had some severe cuts, like somebody was trying to cut my head off.”
He looked down to see a samurai sword protruding from his chest. He reached for the pistol and fired wildly, killing Emma Borhanian and injuring Alexander Leatham. Lind then shuffled to a neighbor, who called an ambulance that ferried him, sword and all, to a nearby hospital.
Police charged Leatham and another tenant, Suri Dao, then 21, with the murder of Borhanian and the attempted murder of Lind. The other attackers — who Lind said numbered four or five — were allowed to leave.
When Lind’s family visited the trailers after the attacks, they reportedly discovered massive amounts of tech equipment, including troves of solar panels. They also discovered large pots of lye capable of dissolving a human body.
“Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes,” mused Lind in the documentary interview, acquired by the Globe.
Indeed, in the days after the stabbing, a defense lawyer who had represented LaSota in a civil suit over the Sonoma County protest in the woods received a puzzling email. He’d come to believe his client had died after falling into San Francisco Bay while sailing in August 2022. There was an obituary with gushing tributes and a Coast Guard report with testimony from Borhanian and LaSota’s sister to prove it.
But in reality, LaSota was there at the scene of the stabbing three months later, “alive and well,” according to the email. She was not, however, arrested.
Michelle Zajko, the daughter of the slain Pennsylvania couple, used to live about 30 miles south of the trailers, in a hillside apartment building in Albany. Her roommate, Alice Monday, was another figure on the far fringes of the rationalist community.
When a Globe reporter visited the apartment in Albany, the current tenant said Zajko and Monday had moved out a few years ago. But signs of their time there remained.
Mail addressed to them arrived often. A sticker pasted inside in the fridge, inside the butter compartment, repeated a single line five times: “Assume this phone is tapped.” The white curtains in the living room were stained with what looked like blood.
After leaving the apartment, Zajko and Monday apparently moved to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where they settled in a spartan cabin in the woods of Coventry. Despite the distance, Zajko stayed in touch with Ziz, who demanded she take action against Monday, according to a February 2022 post on Zajko’s blog.
“Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust … was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon,” the blog post said. “Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye, and then told me that after I should video call Ziz and show her the body before I destroy it so she could get proof positive that I’d really done it.”
Zajko, in the blog, added: “And if I didn’t do it, Ziz planned to drive across the entire continental United States to murder me.”
Efforts to reach Monday were unsuccessful.
Ziz did eventually make her way to the East Coast. A year after the Lind stabbing, on the day Rita and Richard Zajko were laid to rest, she surfaced at a hotel in Pennsylvania, ten miles from the murdered couple’s home.
Pennsylvania state troopers weren’t certain what they’d find inside Room 111 of the Candlewood Suites in Chester, Pa.. They had arrived there a day earlier with a warrant, to detain Michelle Zajko and search her room. As they took her out, she made a telling exclamation to the hotel clerk: “Notify Daniel Blank of my detainment! He’s staying in Room 111!”
Now, on the night of Jan. 12, 2023, police were at the room with a second warrant in hand. At first, it seemed there was no one inside. But the shower was running and steam poured out of the bathroom.
Inside were two people: one with thick glasses, the other with long blond hair.
The first person was Blank, then 24, who had been living of late with Zajko in Coventry. He obeyed police commands, according to an affidavit, putting his hands behind his back and walking out of the room, according to a trooper’s testimony.
The other was LaSota, who would neither speak nor move. She lay limp on the floor, as if dead. A phone wrapped in tin foil spilled out of her pocket. It took four troopers to convey her 6-foot-2-inch body to a chair in the lobby. Even then, she didn’t flinch; she sat upright with her eyes closed and body still. Uncertain if she was having a medical emergency, police escorted her to the hospital.
Eventually, LaSota, as troopers called her, was jailed and charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct, court records show. Initially, she was held on $500,000 bail. Five months passed with little development in the case. The judge let her free on the condition that she would have to pay $10,000 if she missed court. The case was set to go to trial in December 2023. By then, LaSota was long gone.
During a search of Zajko’s Subaru, meanwhile, police found an envelope with $40,000 in cash tucked under the front seat. She’d also obtained several prepaid cellphones, using pseudonyms.
In the months before the Zajkos were killed, Rita Zajko seemed stressed and worried, according to a caregiver who helped look after her aging mother. Recently, she’d asked: “Why do kids act this way?”
After the Zajkos’ bodies were found, the caregiver spoke to Michelle, who claimed she couldn’t travel to Pennsylvania because she said she didn’t have a car.
One evening around the time of the funeral, Zajko showed up at her grandmother’s home and asked if she could come inside, the caregiver said. The two conversed in Italian. And then Zajko slipped into English.
“I’m sorry, Nonna,” she said. Her eyes looked lifeless, the caregiver recalled.
Introducing herself as Connie, a woman called a real estate office in northern Vermont last month, hoping to see a particular property as soon as possible — within the next few hours, preferably. The agent made an appointment to show it the next morning, Jan. 14.
The house was located in a particularly remote slice of the Northeast Kingdom. It was so off the beaten path that the road leading back to it is not maintained by the town, and recent snowfall had rendered the property inaccessible by car.
The agent said she canceled the showing, but the woman showed up anyway. Confused neighbors spotted people wandering the property and called the agency.
“Connie” was actually Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old Seattle woman who had been reported missing by her parents a year earlier. They told police that Youngblut had emptied her bedroom and moved out of their home, broken off friendships, changed her phone number, and sent an email saying goodbye to her mother. The behavior was “very unlike” her, the parents said, making them fear she was in “a controlling relationship,” according to the Seattle Times.
In November 2024, Youngblut applied for a marriage license with Maxmilian Snyder, 22, a former classmate of Youngblut’s at a venerable private high school in Seattle. Both were computer whizzes and very active online.
Snyder was sympathetic to the Zizian philosophy, according to acquaintances. He did not object to using violence in service of his ideals, wrote a friend, but those discussions were always abstract.
The jump from abstraction to action may have come last month, when Curtis Lind, now 82, was stabbed again — this time to death.
The case against Lind’s former tenants had been languishing. Prosecutors were getting antsy, noting Lind’s elderly age and fading memory.
“Mr. Lind is the only eye-witness to this case and his testimony is critical for the People to have the ability to prove their case,” prosecutors wrote in a Jan. 16 motion to speed up the court proceedings. “These defendants are extremely dangerous, they have both tried to escape from custody.”
The very next day, Jan. 17, Lind’s throat was slit outside his Vallejo lot. He bled out in broad daylight, under the winter California sun, steps from the lot he once envisioned as an enclave for Bay Area artists.
In a recent interview from jail with the San Francisco Chronicle, Snyder did not address whether he killed Lind. Instead, he shared a 1,500-word manifesto with the newspaper that stressed his desire to end the killing of animals, which he called “my little brothers and sisters and siblings.”
Youngblut’s correspondence with the Vermont real estate agent was becoming increasingly frenzied. In a rambling missive, she said men were stalking her. The agent, unnerved, canceled another showing she had rescheduled for Jan. 20.
That afternoon, border agents stopped Youngblut and a friend named Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt in their Prius on Interstate 91, just outside Coventry. Their black tactical gear, along with a visible holstered firearm, had prompted law enforcement to watch them closely over the week they’d been staying at area motels.
Prosecutors allege Youngblut got out of the car and opened fire on the officers without provocation. During an exchange of gunfire, both Bauckholt and Border Patrol Agent David Maland were killed. Youngblut was arrested at the scene. Maland’s family described him as a devoted agent who was engaged to be married and “truly embodied service over self.”
After the shootout, investigators who searched the car found a ballistic helmet, a night-vision device, face respirators, two-way radios, and dozens of hollow-point bullets.
Four days later, authorities made an arrest in the murder of Curtis Lind. The suspect was a young mathematical genius with long black hair, a sterling academic resume and an application out of Washington to marry Youngblut. Maximilian Snyder was taken into custody three hours north of the Bay Area.
Soon after, a trace of a gun found in Youngblut’s Prius returned a match. It belonged to Michelle Zajko.
For years, the evolving philosophies of Ziz and her associates could be followed in painstaking detail in blogs. Everyone had a vibrant online persona — Ziz, plumofdiscord, Audere, GwennDragonness, Somnulence Logencia — and a public diary that interwove debates on rationality with tales of personal drama.
In the beginning, there was deep concern with the rise of artificial intelligence and a focus on logical, unemotional thought processes, in tandem with the grander rationalist movement. But over time, the Zizians’ dispatches became increasingly insular and centered on revenge.
This troubling transition was visible to anyone who cared to notice. Many in the rationalist community did, and a few sounded a warning.
But the arena of rationalist debate is marked by its fluidity — a person’s thoughts, they believe, are always changing and, hopefully, improving — and fantasy: One of the seminal texts of the rationalist movement is a set of fan fiction books based on the Harry Potter series. The resulting environment is one where extremist undercurrents tend to go unchecked.
“The rationalist community is not very good at de-escalating, or even noticing brewing radical extremism,” said the rationalist Nouzen, who regularly reads Zizian essays. “There’s this tendency to be dispassionate and divorce the emotional tone of a text from its actual philosophical content.”
Friends of Lind told the Globe that the local police were no more effective in comprehending the threat posed by the Zizians.
“We have, as in Curt’s family and friends, all known about the wider connections for two or three years, and have given documentation of that to the [Solano County] district attorney and to the police,” said Young, Lind’s friend. “So they all knew well in advance that there was a violent group out there who was plotting revenge against Curt. At the time of the first stabbing, the idea of the others being free to go is beyond the pale.”
Given that Lind can no longer testify, it’s possible Leatham and Dao could now walk, too.
Vallejo police and the Solano County district attorney’s office didn’t respond to inquiries from the Globe about Young’s criticism.
Pennsylvania State Police continue to investigate the Zajko killings, according to the Delaware County district attorney’s office, which would oversee any prosecutions if an arrest is made. The whereabouts of Zajko, who is considered a person of interest, are unknown.
“When we have been presented with legally sufficient evidence to prosecute the perpetrator(s) we will do so,” Margie McAboy, a spokesperson for the office said.
LaSota has not been named a person of interest in any of the murders. She has outstanding warrants in California and Pennsylvania for the CFAR protest and the obstruction charge, respectively. Her whereabouts today are unknown. Her blog has been dormant since 2022.
In a post from 2019, days before the masked protest, Ziz gave insight into her approach to the law: She wrote: “The anarchist flag is the inversion of the surrender flag.”
Globe researcher Jeremiah Manion and staff writer Dan Glaun contributed to this story.
Hanna Krueger can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at +1 339 242 0289. Follow her @hannaskrueger. Laura Crimaldi can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @lauracrimaldi. Sean Cotter can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @cotterreporter.
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