Ex-Delco woman linked to extremist group denies killing her parents in 20-page statement
“The papers are lying," Michelle Zajko wrote in a handwritten statement from a jail cell in Maryland. "I did not murder my parents.”
A former Delaware County woman who prosecutors say has ties to an “extremist group” accused of a number of violent crimes, and is a person of interest in the 2022 deaths of her parents in their Chester Heights home, denied killing the couple in a statement released Tuesday.
Michelle Zajko, 32, said she had nothing to do with the shooting deaths of her parents. In a 20-page memo she wrote while incarcerated in Maryland awaiting trial on trespassing and gun charges, Zajko accused the media of reporting “speculation as fact.”
Rita and Richard Zajko were found shot in the head, execution-style, in their home on Dec. 31, 2022. Their only daughter has long been considered a person of interest in the investigation of their slayings, but she has not been charged with any crime related to their deaths.
In her sprawling statement, Zajko denied that she and her associates are violent, and blamed rivals in a Bay Area philosophical movement of being out to discredit her.
“I’m viscerally reminded of the witch hunts, of the Satanic Panic, of the mob that burned Joan of Arc at the stake, and of the mob that ripped apart Hippolyta,” Zajko wrote. “The papers are lying … I did not murder my parents.”
Zajko was arrested in rural Maryland in February after police said she was found illegally camping on private property in a box truck. The Cabrini and Temple University graduate was clad in all black and carrying body armor, ammunition, and two weapons, a .50-caliber sniper rifle and a .380-caliber handgun, when she was taken into custody.
She was arrested alongside Jack “Ziz” LaSota, an associate of hers whom prosecutors have described as the leader of the Zizians, a cultlike group of California activists whose members prosecutors say are suspects in several murders.
The Zizians are an offshoot of the Rationalist movement, whose members encourage seeking truth and making decisions through reason and hyperlogical decision-making, as opposed to impulse and intuition.
In her statement, however, Zajko denied that the group used the moniker “Zizians” and disputed the characterization that they are extremists. She said other Rationalists are seeking to discredit them, and even physically harm them.
Zajko wrote that she and LaSota were in Maryland in a form of self-imposed witness protection, fearful of those other Rationalists.
“Ziz is not my leader and I am not hers,” Zajko wrote of LaSota, who identifies as female. “What we have is called friendship, and I love her infinitely more than I could ever express.”
Two other members of the group, Felix Bauckholt and Theresa Youngblut, are accused of engaging U.S. Border Patrol agents in a deadly gunfight earlier this year in Vermont, in which an agent and Bauckholt were killed.
Zajko was charged with illegally providing the couple with the guns used in that shooting, weapons that federal investigators say she purchased last year in Vermont. Zajko did not address those allegations in her statement, saying only that if called to testify against Youngblut, she would refuse to do so.
Meanwhile, she is awaiting trial in Maryland in the trespassing case, which is scheduled to be heard before a judge in mid-August.
Zajko said she and LaSota are innocent, and are being treated unfairly by the authorities in Maryland. She said she was denied medical attention after hitting her head during her arrest, has been given very little to eat, and has been kept in unsanitary conditions at the local jail.
“Everyone here is being subjected to our injustice system designed to grab people off of the streets and coerce confessions and declarations of guilt (in the form of plea deals) out of them, with little to no regard for whether their captives are actually guilty,” she wrote.
She and LaSota are not criminals, she said, and their only plans for their time in Maryland were camping peacefully, “eating (vegan) soft pretzels with guacamole” and repairing a diesel engine.
“The news media has terrified this small town into thinking we are here to hurt them, as opposed to the truth,” she said.