Authorities claim Michelle "Jamie" Zajko, a friend of Ziz Lasota, was responsible for the New Year's Eve killings

Authorities in Pennsylvania’s Delaware County have charged Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, who is alleged to have ties to a cult-like group called the Zizians, with the murder of her parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, in 2022. CBS News reports that investigators had questioned Michelle, who is 33 and reportedly nonbinary, but did not charge them previously. Now, court documents indicate the authorities changed their minds. Jamie is now in custody in Maryland, where they are awaiting trial on unrelated charges alongside two others: Jack “Ziz” LaSota (the “Ziz” of the Zizians) and Daniel Blank.

Police found the elder Zajkos dead during a wellness check at their Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, home on Jan. 2, 2023. Fox29 reports the Zajkos had gunshot wounds in their heads. Police ruled they’d died on New Year’s Eve — Jamie’s birthday — and the medical examiner ruled the deaths a homicide. In April 2025, Jamie’s lawyer released a handwritten letter from them in which they said they’d been wrongly accused of their parents’ murders.

In the weeks before the killings, police claim Jamie had purchased a gun and burner phones, according to Fox. They also allegedly moved large amounts of cash. Investigators claim they confirmed that Jamie was among the people who entered her parents’ home the night of the killing using digital and ballistic evidence. Fox reports that someone yelled “mom” before the lights went on in their house, and the intruders left after nine minutes.

“These charges did not come quickly or easily. They are the product of years of careful investigative work,” Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said, according to Fox.

Rolling Stone reported in 2025 that police sought to interview Jamie on Jan. 12, 2023 at an airport hotel near Philadelphia where they hoped to obtain a 9 mm Smith & Wesson MP — the same model used in the killings — and a DNA sample from Jamie. Jamie, Rolling Stone reported, had a master’s degree in bioinformatics and had interned for NASA. Police arrested Blank and LaSota alongside Zajko.

Zajko became acquainted with LaSota and Blank through the Rationalist community — an insular community that formed online in the early aughts with the goal of “raising the sanity waterline.” Many people, including Zajko, were introduced to the community via Harry Potter fan fiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in hopes of finding others who would join his efforts to stop superhuman AI, which he believed could destroy its human creators, before it was too late.