Chapter 3: The Playroom

On New Year's Eve 2022, Rick and Rita Zajko were shot to death in their Chester Heights, Pennsylvania home, in what used to be their daughter's childhood playroom. The only suspect law enforcement could find was the couple's own child, Michelle "Jamie" Zajko, who claimed they hadn't set foot in the state in over a year.

This episode traces the investigation from a neighbor's Ring doorbell footage, to a Vermont cabin, to a Philadelphia airport hotel bathroom, where police found a fugitive Ziz LaSota lying motionless on the floor, playing dead. Along the way: a gun purchase blocked by the wrong driver's license, forty thousand dollars stuffed under a car seat, an alias with exactly one letter changed, and a family fortune that might explain all of it - and, oh yes, plenty of beet juice.

We also go back further, to how a Harry Potter fan-fiction forum turned into an on-ramp for a woman accused of orchestrating her parents' murder, and what her aunt has to say about the family she left behind.

Sources:

• ‘Rationalist Fleet’: Before killings linked to fringe group, ‘Ziz’ led fateful tugboat voyage to California
• ‘Mom!’ Shouts were heard on night of unsolved double killing now linked to Bay Area fringe group
• Who is ‘Ziz’? How a mysterious group with roots in the Bay Area is linked to six deaths
• Leader of ‘Zizians’ arrested; father of associate fears son ‘under the influence of the cult’
• A member of the cultlike Zizians group is charged in the killings of her parents in Pennsylvania
• A Vermont border agent’s death was the latest violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group
• Troopers searched Vermont home in connection with Delco murders: Court docs
• How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?
• The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians
• Timeline of the violence surrounding the so-called Zizians
• Inside the Zizians, a radical California-based vegan cult now linked to 6 violent deaths
• Fringe vegan activist group appears linked to fatal border patrol shooting in Vermont, other murders
• Here’s what we know about the connections between a Delaware County double homicide and the killing of a border agent in Vermont
• Former Vermont resident faces federal firearm charge related to killing of border patrol agent
• ‘Zizian’ namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states
• Soluble Dilemma: How long does it take to dissolve a human body?
• Alleged Zizian Cult Follower Charged With Murdering Parents
• Plum of Discord (Michelle's blog)
• Sinceriously (Ziz's blog)