In the days after Michelle Zajko’s parents were murdered in Pennsylvania, police visited her Vermont residence and inspected a handgun she owned, court documents show. A week later, police obtained a search warrant for the property, located in the Northeast Kingdom town of Coventry, with the goal of seizing that gun.
The court documents, filed in January 2023 in Orleans County Superior criminal court in Newport, shed more light into potential connections between the December 2022 double-homicide of Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania and a fatal shooting last month of a border patrol agent in Coventry.
The investigation into both cases has so far led only to the arrest of one person, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut of Washington, who faces federal weapons charges for allegedly opening fire on law enforcement officials during a traffic stop on Interstate 91 on Jan. 20. U.S. Border Patrol agent David C. Maland was killed in the shootout.
Felix Bauckholt, a German national who had been in the car with Youngblut and also drew a weapon, was shot and killed at the scene, according to authorities.
An alert sent to federally licensed firearm dealers after the shootout described Zajko, 32, as a “person of interest” in the fatal shooting of the border patrol agent.
Youngblut, Bauckholt and Zajko all have ties to a group called the Zizians, a fringe offshoot of the Rationalist movement.
A fourth person linked to that group, Maximilian Snyder, was arrested in the Jan. 17 murder of a Vallejo, California, landlord. Snyder and Youngblut had previously applied for a marriage certificate in Washington state.
Pennsylvania authorities, without naming Zajko, said in a press release last week that the person who purchased the firearms for Youngblut and Bauckholt was also a “person of interest” in the fatal shooting of Richard and Rita Zajko on Dec. 31, 2022.
A search warrant request after that double-homicide indicates that police were interested in a different gun Zajko had purchased in February 2022 from Green Mountain Sporting Goods in Irasburg.
WPTZ and the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the court filings late last week.
The Pennsylvania murders
On Jan. 2, 2023, Pennsylvania State Police were called to a home in the Chester Heights Borough in Delaware County for a welfare check, according to the filings.
Arriving troopers found 72-year-old Richard Zajko and 69-year-old Rita Zajko dead inside an upstairs bedroom. Both had suffered gunshot wounds to the head.
A review of a neighbor’s Ring camera’s footage, according to the filings, showed a vehicle arriving at the Zajkos’ residence at about 11:29 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2022.
Two minutes later, according to the court documents, a “higher pitched voice is heard shouting what sounds like, ‘Mom.’” Seconds later, a “higher pitched voice is heard exclaiming, ‘Oh my God!, God, God!’”
According to the court documents, “movement can be seen at the front door, which appears to be opened then shut, indicating the subjects entered the house” as the interior upstairs lights could be seen turning on. About nine minutes passed before two people were seen leaving the residence out the front door, getting into the vehicle and driving away, the filings stated.
When they arrived on scene two days later, police didn’t find a firearm but did recover two 9mm shell casings near the couple’s bodies in the bedroom, according to the documents.
Police also found a Pennsylvania driver’s license for a person, later identified as the couple’s daughter, Michelle Zajko.
A Vermont visit
Pennsylvania authorities soon learned that Michelle Zajko may have been living in Vermont, according to the court documents, and through Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles records found an address of 1300 Webster Road in Coventry.
On Jan. 5, 2023, Pennsylvania troopers conducted a “voluntary interview” with Michelle Zajko at the Coventry property, the court documents stated.
Zajko told police she had been at the Coventry house, with her roommate Daniel Blank, between Dec. 29, 2022, and Jan. 1, 2023, according to the filings.
She also said that she had not been in Pennsylvania since before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and that she had not spoken to her parents since about January 2022. Zajko acknowledged receiving a Dec. 31 text message from her mother “but only after direct” questioning, according to the filings.
As part of an investigation of Rita Zajko’s phone, court documents stated, authorities in Pennsylvania found a text sent from her to Michelle Zajko about a savings bond “for which it is believed the daughter was the intended recipient of.” The text message was not answered, the fillings added.
During the Jan. 5 questioning in Vermont, Zajko also “confirmed,” the court documents stated, that she owned a firearm and allowed one of the troopers to handle it — a “Smith and Wesson” branded “M&P” model that fires 9mm ammunition.
Sales records revealed that Michelle Zajko purchased a Smith & Wesson model M&P handgun from Green Mountain Sporting Goods on Feb. 3, 2022, according to the filings. Purchase records showed she also bought 9mm ammunition “of the same manufacturer and type as that of the spent casings that were recovered adjacent” to her parents’ deceased bodies at their home in Pennsylvania, the filings stated.
Ballistic analysis revealed that the model of gun Zajko possessed “was capable of producing the striations present on the bullet recovered from one of the victims,” according to the court documents.
Authorities who went back to the Coventry property on Jan. 12, 2023, after obtaining a search warrant seized three 9 mm cartridges but did not report finding the firearm.
That same day, according to reporting from the California news organization Open Vallejo, Pennsylvania troopers went to a hotel near the Philadelphia airport in search of the gun.
Police detained Zajko at the hotel and subsequently found Daniel Blank and Jack “Ziz” LaSota hiding in the bathroom of another room at the same hotel, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
LaSota, 34, the namesake of the Zizian group, had previously faked their own death only to be encountered by California authorities at the scene of an earlier attack on the Vallejo landlord in November 2022, according to Open Vallejo’s reporting.
In Pennsylvania, LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction but later posted bail and failed to show up for subsequent court hearings, Open Vallejo reported.
It wasn’t clear whether authorities found the gun they were seeking in the hotel that day, but the Chronicle reported that the whereabouts of Zajko, LaSota and Blank are not currently known.
According to probate court records in Pennsylvania, Zajko was listed as the sole beneficiary of her parents’ estates.
The last person who reported seeing her, according to those records, which were signed on Feb. 6, 2023, was a funeral director who spotted her on a Ring camera at the facility around 9 p.m on Jan. 12, 2022, the day of her parents’ funeral.
Coventry connections
According to Coventry town records obtained by VTDigger, Zajko and another individual named Alice Monday filed proof of residency forms at the Webster Road home in early 2021.
Monday is an individual mentioned by name several times on a blog attributed to “Ziz.” In one post, dated November 2019, “Ziz” wrote that Monday was a friend and “sort of a mentor to me.”
Both Monday and Zajko had registered to vote in Coventry the previous October, and both remain registered in the town. Zajko voted at the address in 2020, according to Deb Tanguay, the Coventry town clerk. (Tanguay said she had no record of a Daniel Blank living at that address.)
The Coventry property was purchased by a trust in 2021 and then sold again in July 2023, according to property records and Nicholas Maclure, a co-owner and broker of the real estate firm Century 21 Farm & Forest, which handled both transactions. According to public records, Zajko lived there as a tenant while the building was owned by the trust.
In an interview, Maclure said that he was “under the impression that (Zajko) had been gone for quite some time” at the time of the 2023 sale.
“When we sold that house, it was completely vacant,” Maclure said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Court records show police searched Coventry property as part of probe in Pennsylvania double-homicide.