A member of an alleged murderous cultlike group with links to Northern California dubbed “the Zizians” says she’s being falsely accused of killing her parents.
“I didn’t murder my parents,” Michelle Zajko said in a handwritten letter her attorney provided to the Associated Press on Tuesday.
The 32-year-old’s parents, Rita and Richard Zajko, were fatally shot in their Chester Heights, Pa. home on New Year’s Eve 2022.
In the 20-page document, titled “Open Letter to the World,” Zajko blames news outlets for misinforming the public, accuses the police of lying and defends the alleged leader of the group, an Alaska-born woman named Jack LaSota, who sometimes writes in a blog under the name “Ziz.”
The Zizians, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as a “cultlike group of vegan ‘rationalists,’” are believed to be connected to the killings of at least six people in Vermont, Pennsylvania and California — including the slaying of Zajko’s parents and the shooting of a U.S. border patrol agent near U.S.-Canada border in Vermont earlier this year.
“You, the public, are being lied to,” Zajko wrote in the letter dated March 9. “And while I don’t promise to answer all your questions, I think the truth about my friends and I will make a lot more sense than what you’ve been reading about in the papers.”
Investigators say Zajko supplied the firearm used in the killing of the border patrol agent. She was also questioned in connection with her parents’ deaths, though no charges were filed.
LaSota was later charged with disorderly conduct after she refused to cooperate with the investigation.
In her letter, Zajko defended her friend, saying she was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“The police lied to her and told her that I had confessed (to something I didn’t do),” she wrote.
“My friends and I are being described as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil & the Manson family all rolled into one,” Zajko continued. “These papers are flagrantly lying. For instance, there were no truck-fulls of guns, no machine gun, and I didn’t murder my parents.”
LaSota, a transgender woman, is a 33-year-old former computer programmer who once worked in Berkeley.
She was said to have died in a boating accident nearly three years ago, NBC News reported, citing an August 2022 obituary that ran in her hometown newspaper in Alaska.
Zajko, LaSota and another associate, 26-year-old Daniel Arthur Blank, were arrested in February for allegedly trespassing on private property.
Zajko next court date is scheduled for Aug. 19.
With News Wire Services
