A former Delco woman tied to the Zizians extremist group has been charged with her parents’ murder

A former Delaware County woman tied to an extremist group known as the Zizians has been charged with killing her parents, execution-style, inside their Chester Heights home in December 2022.

Michelle Zajko, 33, has long been a person of interest in the slayings of her parents, Richard and Rita. After years of investigation, Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse filed first-degree murder charges Wednesday and accused her of shooting the couple on her 30th birthday.

Rouse plans to announce the charges at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

» READ MORE: Inquirer special report: From NASA intern to national fugitive

New information obtained in the last few months, including ballistic evidence and an extensive download of text messages and other data from Zajko’s cellphone, allowed prosecutors to piece together the case against her, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest.

Investigators say Zajko, an alumna of Cardinal O’Hara High School and Cabrini University, drove to her childhood home on Highland Circle in Chester Heights with a plan to kill her parents. She shot them both in the head, leaving their bodies for police to find days later after a concerned friend reported they had missed an appointment to care for Richard Zajko’s elderly mother.

The motive for the killings remains unclear.

Zajko told friends she had a difficult relationship with her mother, and accused her of years of emotional abuse. In online writings, Zajko said her mother criticized her constantly, arguing with her over religion and her desire to be vegan.

That strained relationship was detailed in the final text messages Zajko sent her father days before authorities say she killed him, according to the affidavit.

“Every time I interact with mom in a nonsuperficial way she spends the time insulting a life she knows nothing about, makes assumptions that im doing nothing, etc,” Zajko wrote, the document said. “Its uncalled for. I don’t want to speak to someone who treats me like that.”

But Rita Zajko, just nine hours before her murder, attempted to reconcile with her daughter, sending her a happy birthday text and apologizing for whatever she had done to alienate her, according to the affidavit.

In a sprawling, handwritten letter sent to The Inquirer and other news outlets last year, Zajko insisted she did not kill her parents. Her aunt, Roseanne Zajko, said Zajko told her at the couple’s funeral in January 2023 that she had not killed her parents, but said she knew who did. She would not name the killer, her aunt said.

Zajko, for her part, said she had been unjustly accused.

“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,” she said in the letter written in a jail cell in Maryland, where she’s awaiting trial on trespassing and gun and drug charges. “The papers are lying. … I did not murder my parents.”

Sources familiar with the investigation say it’s possible that as an only child, Zajko may have expected to inherit her parents’ substantial estate. The value of the estate has not been made public, but the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case, say it is worth several million dollars.

A person close to Zajko said she contacted an attorney in the weeks after her parents were killed to discuss how she could access her parents estate.

Zajko remains in custody in western Maryland with two other members of the Zizians, including the cult-like group’s leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, who identifies as female.

They were arrested in February 2025 while trying to illegally camp on a swath of private property in a secluded mountain town. Police said they were armed with multiple guns, and carrying military tactical gear as well as LSD.

Zajko is also charged with illegally supplying the guns used by other members of the Zizians in a fatal shootout with a U.S. Border Patrol agent weeks before her arrest in Maryland.

» READ MORE: A former Delco woman wanted for questioning in the death of her parents will remain in custody with other cult members

In her letter from jail, Zajko said she and her friends were innocent of all criminal charges they face. She said they were being targeted by other members of the Bay Area tech community seeking to discredit them.

Members of the Zizians — a group whose philosophy encourages making decisions through reason and logic, rather than emotion — are connected to six murders across the country, authorities say. Prosecutors have denounced the group as extremists and accused them of using violence when their worldview is challenged.

For years, the deaths of Richard and Rita Zajko remained the only ones tied to the Zizians that remained unsolved.

Almost immediately after the killings, investigators in Delaware County learned that Zajko was at her parents’ home on the night they were shot – a neighbor’s Ring security camera recorded someone screaming “Mom!” shortly before police believe the fatal shots were fired.

The couple were found in their daughter’s childhood bedroom, which had remained virtually unchanged since she moved out of the house decades earlier, the affidavit said.

The gun used to kill the couple was the same caliber, and a similar model, to one Zajko had purchased in Vermont weeks earlier, investigators said. She was labeled a person of interest in the case as a consequence. But authorities said there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that she committed the crime.

That changed this week, prosecutors said.

When investigators spoke with Zajko at her home in Vermont after her parents’ murders, she showed them a different type of ammunition than the kind found at the Chester Heights home, the affidavit said. However, while serving a subsequent search warrant there, detectives found cartridges that were an exact match — and that they said Zajko had hidden from them.

Initially, forensic investigators said the bullet fragments pulled from Rita and Richard Zajko’s bodies were too damaged to determine if they had been fired from their daughter’s gun. But late last fall, other bullets pulled from trees behind Michelle Zajko’s home in Vermont, which she had used for target practice, were identical to the ones used to kill her parents, authorities said, and were found to have been fired from her gun.

Another crucial piece of evidence, investigators said, was a list found on Zajko’s cellphone titled “There are so many things we f— up" that detailed missteps including not taking shell casings from the murder scene, according to the affidavit.

The murder charges mark an unexpected turn for Zajko, whom friends and loved ones described as an ambitious, accomplished young woman with a keen interest in science. In her early 20s, Zajko pursued a career in bioinformatics and conducted research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania.

At the same time, Zajko became immersed in the Zizan movement through online message boards, and met some of the group’s members while interning with NASA in California.

In 2021, partly in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zajko abandoned her scientific research and moved to rural Vermont, where she lived with other Zizians and grew close to LaSota, the group’s leader.

Zajko, in her prison letter, said she rejects the characterization of LaSota as her “leader,” and said the group does not refer to themselves as Zizians. Instead, she said she and LaSota are close friends, and that she loves LaSota “infinitely more than I could ever express.”

Investigators now believe that Zajko, LaSota and Daniel Blank, another Zizian, travelled to Chester Heights together on the day Zajko’s parents were killed, and intentionally left their cellphones in Vermont to prevent authorities from tracking their movements, according to the affidavit.

The three made that trip a second time weeks later, in January 2023, so Zajko could attend her parents’ funeral in Marple Township. Pennsylvania State Police troopers investigating her parents’ killings briefly detained Zajko and Blank at a hotel where they were staying in Chester.

LaSota, however, refused to answer the troopers’ questions, was charged with obstruction of justice, and remained in custody in Delaware County for months before being released on unsecured bail.

LaSota did not show up for subsequent hearings, and a bench warrant for her arrest was still active when Maryland State Police took her into custody last year alongside Zajko and Blank.

Their criminal trial on the trespassing, gun and drug charges is scheduled to begin in October in Maryland.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.