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 Zajko. 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.
New information obtained in the last few months, including ballistics evidence and an extensive download of text messages and other data from Zajko’s cell phone, allowed prosecutors to piece together the case against her, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest.
Rouse, in announcing the charges Wednesday, said he believes that while Zajko planned and carried out the killings, she likely did not act alone. The investigation is continuing, he said.
Building the case against her, he said, took years of skilled and disciplined police work as investigators interviewed dozens of people and connected threads of information in several states.
“I want to emphasize — I cannot stress this enough — this is just about as exhaustive of an investigation that I’ve been a part of in my 16 years as an attorney,” Rouse said. “We don’t have a smoking gun. It is piece after piece after piece of evidence that has been collected painstakingly over many years.”
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 Rita 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 imdoing 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 she was killed, 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.
On Wednesday, Rosanne Zajko, the wife of Richard Zajko’s brother, stood alongside the prosecutor as he announced the charges against her niece. Losing her brother- and sister-in-law, she said, was “like the lights going out of our lives.”
“We don’t know yet if the trial will begin to heal the void in our lives and the ache in our hearts,” she said. “But we do know that the detectives, the DA’s office, and we, the family, have done everything possible to achieve justice for Rick and Rita.”
Michelle Zajko, for her part, has said she had been unjustly accused.
In a sprawling, handwritten letter sent to The Inquirer and other news outlets last year, Zajko insisted she did not kill her parents. Rosanne Zajko said Michelle 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.
“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,” Michelle Zajko said in the letter, written in a jail cell in Maryland, where she is awaiting trial on trespassing, gun, and drug charges. “The papers are lying. … I did not murder my parents.”
Sources familiar with the investigation say it is 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 had 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 cultlike 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.
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 killings 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 had been 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 had moved out of the house decades earlier, the affidavit said.
The gun used to kill the couple was the same caliber as, 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 was not enough evidence to prove she had committed the crime.
That changed this week, prosecutors said.
When investigators spoke with Zajko at her home in Vermont after her parents’ killings, she showed them a different type of ammunition from 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 they were unable to determine if the shell casings found near Rita and Richard Zajko’s bodies had been fired from their daughter’s gun. But late last fall, other casings found near trees behind Michelle Zajko’s home in Vermont, which she had used for target practice, had been fired by the same gun that killed her parents, authorities said.
Another crucial piece of evidence, investigators said, was a list found on Zajko’s cell phone titled “There are so many things we f— up” that detailed missteps, including not taking shell casings from the homicide 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 Zizian 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 that she rejects the characterization of LaSota as her “leader” and that the group does not refer to themselves as Zizians. Instead, she said that 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, traveled to Chester Heights together on the day Zajko’s parents were killed, and intentionally left their cell phones 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.
As Zajko awaits trial in both cases, Rouse, the prosecutor, said her crimes “go beyond comprehension and circumstance.”
“This is a child who killed her parents, who walked into her childhood home, took her mother to her childhood playroom, and executed her,” Rouse said. “There aren’t words or emotions that can capture it.”
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