Pennsylvania prosecutors on Wednesday charged Michelle Zajko with murder in the New Year’s Eve 2022 killings of her parents, Rita and Richard Zajko, at their home in Chester Heights, and Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said investigators do not believe she acted alone.
Zajko, 30, has been in custody in Maryland on separate charges since February 2025. She now faces murder, burglary and conspiracy counts in connection with her parents’ deaths, the latest criminal case tied to the group known as the Zizians.
At a news conference, Rouse said authorities have concluded Zajko was among those responsible for the killings, “to the extent that if she wasn’t the one who actually pulled the trigger, she was certainly aligned with those who did.”
Online court records did not immediately show whether she had a lawyer in the Pennsylvania case as of Wednesday. Her attorney in Maryland did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the Delaware County Public Defender’s office declined to comment.
Investigators said the couple were shot to death inside their suburban Philadelphia home on Dec. 31, 2022. According to police, a neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded a car arriving at the house, a voice yelling “Mom!” and another voice crying out, “Oh my God! Oh, God, God!”
Rouse said Michelle Zajko had been estranged from her parents for about a year before they were killed. He said the shootings happened only hours after Rita Zajko sent her daughter a text message trying to mend their relationship. “Her mother reached out and explained that she was sorry for the rift that had grown between them,” the prosecutor said. “That text went unanswered.”
He said at least two people later entered the house. “The lights go on in the home, and Richard and Rita Zajko are executed,” he said.
Zajko has denied taking part in the killings. In court filings, she suggested her father may have shot her mother and then himself. In an April 2025 “ Open Letter to the World,” she wrote, “I didn’t murder my parents.”
Authorities had long identified Zajko as a person of interest in the double homicide. The deaths are two of six that investigators have linked to the cultlike group known as the Zizians, a circle of young, highly intelligent computer scientists whose beliefs appear to include radical views on veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence.
Since 2022, members of the group have been connected to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord, the landlord’s killing afterward, the deaths of Rita and Richard Zajko in Pennsylvania, and a highway shootout in Vermont that left a border agent and another Zizian dead.
Prosecutors have also charged Zajko with supplying the gun used in the January 2025 killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland. A few weeks later, she was arrested in Maryland with Daniel Blank and Jack “Ziz” LaSota, whom authorities describe as the group’s leader. Police responding to a property owner’s complaint about suspicious people in box trucks said the trio had “ties with the Zizians Cult” and would be questioned in connection with crimes around the country.
Zajko, Blank and LaSota each face Maryland state charges of trespassing and illegal possession of guns and drugs. LaSota also faces a federal charge accusing her of illegally possessing a firearm while a fugitive, and a judge recently approved a defense request for a competency evaluation in that case.
In court filings, LaSota’s lawyers have said she rejects the label Zizian and denies that she and her associates are part of a cult. Zajko has argued that authorities arrested the group in Maryland to stop them from clearing Teresa Youngblut, who has pleaded not guilty in Vermont to murder and could face the death penalty if convicted.
At the time her parents were killed, Zajko was living in Vermont and was questioned there by police soon after their deaths. A few weeks later, she was briefly detained at a Pennsylvania hotel but released without charges. LaSota, who was staying at the same hotel, was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct.