They were determined to have died two days earlier, on New Year’s Eve. The Pennsylvania State Police has said it is believed “not to be a random act of violence.”
Ten days after the Zajkos’ bodies were discovered, Pennsylvania state troopers showed up to a Candlewood Suites near the Philadelphia airport with a warrant to search the room and car of the dead couple’s daughter, Michelle Zajko. One of the troopers later testified in court that they were looking for the handgun believed to have been used in the killings.
The troopers knocked on Zajko’s hotel room door and took her into custody. As they were leading her out of the hotel, she called out to staff at the front desk and told them to tell a Daniel Blank that she was being detained, a trooper, Matthew Gibson, said in court, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News.
The troopers knew Blank. They had previously interviewed him in connection with the double homicide, Gibson later testified.
The troopers made their way to Blank’s room and banged on the door. Blank answered but refused to open it, Gibson said, prompting the troopers to return to their barracks to seek a search warrant for his hotel room.
When they returned with the warrant, no one responded to an order to open the door. So the troopers forced it open and found Blank and a second person in the bathroom, Gibson said in court.
The troopers arrested Blank and marched him out of the room. Things did not go as smoothly with the second person, identified in court papers as LaSota, the person also known as Ziz.
Troopers issued commands to LaSota, but LaSota “did not do anything,” Gibson later testified, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News.
“He had his eyes closed. He would not speak,” Gibson added. “He was just laying almost unconscious as if he was dead on the ground.”
LaSota was ultimately charged with obstructing the investigation and disorderly conduct, according to a criminal complaint. The Alaskan native continued to play dead when a mugshot was taken.
In June 2023, LaSota was released from custody after posting $10,000 bail, but then failed to return to court, leading the judge to issue a bench warrant. Her whereabouts are unknown.
Friedman said he hadn’t heard from LaSota since 2022, and he had no idea where his former client might be.
“I represent vegans. We believe in nonviolence,” Friedman said. “All of this is just crazy.”
Neither Blank nor Zajko, the dead couple’s daughter, has been charged in connection with the killing of her parents. But Zajko’s name would soon pop up in a separate murder investigation.
In January of this year, an employee of a hotel in the northern Vermont town of Lyndonville contacted law enforcement to report concerns about two guests.
The pair were dressed in “all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment,” according to an FBI affidavit, and the woman was carrying a gun in an exposed holster. They were later identified as Bauckholt, the German national, and her traveling companion, Teresa Youngblut.
By then, Bauckholt had been gone for over a year, and her friends in the New York area had stopped trying to contact her.
As a high school student in Freiburg, Germany, Bauckholt had been a national math champion. In 2014, she won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the most prestigious high school coding contest in the world, and later earned a scholarship to study pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Two of Bauckholt’s college friends said in interviews that she was a “passionate math student” who was also “fun” and “very positive.” She was an enthusiastic member of several college groups, including the computer science club and pure math club, according to the two former classmates.
“These are the kinds of people who read math textbooks for fun and do math problems on the chalkboard for fun,” said Lily Horne, who graduated with Bauckholt in 2019.
While still in college, Bauckholt interned at Jane Street Capital in New York, an elite quantitative trading firm, according to her LinkedIn page.
After graduating from Waterloo with honors, she landed a job as a quantitative trader, leveraging complex mathematical models to identify investment opportunities, with a different New York firm, Tower Research Capital.
Bauckholt was making more money than most of her friends, but she didn’t live large. She made sure to spend no more than 10% of her pretax income, her friends said, and donated a significant amount to charity. She considered herself an effective altruist, a person who believed in donating much of what she earned to causes that will have the largest impact on the most number of people.
In 2018, she posted on Facebook that she donated $5,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation. She said that she had just finished her first tech internship and wanted to “pay some of it forward.”
“The money will be used to distribute ~1100 nets, which is estimated to save ~1.4 lives,” Bauckholt wrote in the post, which was shared with NBC News. “If you too are earning more money than you’ll need, I urge you to consider giving some of it away to cost-effective charities as well.”
Bauckholt was highly calculating in other aspects of her life as well. She approached it like a math problem, deducing the precise number of hours of sleep she needed and what to avoid — soda, coffee — to be at her best.
Astra Kolomatskaia, Bauckholt’s former roommate, said Bauckholt’s day revolved around “super micromanaged decisions to make sure her state of mind was in the right place to perform as well as possible at work.”
Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who was involved in the Berkeley rationalist scene, met Bauckholt at an event in New York City in 2022. Bauckholt struck Taylor as bright but a bit weird and socially awkward, which wasn’t an unusual set of characteristics at rationalist events.
They hung out several times over the course of that year. At some point, their discussions became centered on Ziz. Taylor said it was clear that Bauckholt was enthralled with certain Zizian tenets, such as the importance of altruism and ethical veganism.
And Bauckholt seemed to not be bothered by some of the more extreme positions Ziz took, like the “importance of retribution under some circumstances,” Taylor said.
“It seemed like she considered the group more legit than other people did,” Taylor said.
Taylor said she warned Bauckholt to steer clear of Ziz and the Zizians, whom she considered to be part of a “death cult.”
That was sometime in late 2022. Taylor now knows that Bauckholt failed to heed her advice.
Bauckholt and her traveling companion, Teresa Youngblut, had been under surveillance for several days this past January before U.S. Border Patrol agents pulled over their Toyota Prius for an immigration check, according to federal prosecutors in Vermont.
The circumstances of the shooting that followed are still under investigation. Prosecutors have not said whether they believe David Maland, the fallen agent, was struck by one of the bullets Youngblut allegedly fired or by a shot from a fellow agent.
Youngblut, 21, has pleaded not guilty to two federal weapons counts. Her lawyer has declined to comment.
Prosecutors have said that Youngblut and Bauckholt were traveling with a large collection of weapons and tactical gear, including 48 rounds of .380-caliber jacketed hollow point ammunition, a ballistic helmet and night vision equipment.
In seeking to convince a judge that Youngblut should remain in jail, prosecutors said in court papers that she had been associating with people “suspected of violent acts.” The handguns possessed by Bauckholt and Youngblut were purchased by a “person of interest” in a double homicide in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
That appears to be a reference to Michelle Zajko, the daughter of the dead couple.
An alert sent to licensed firearms dealers in Vermont by the U.S. Bureau of Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, said the agency was “asking for your assistance in identifying any firearms purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, a person of interest in the shooting of a Customs and Border Protection Officer on Jan. 20, 2025.”
The alert was first reported by a local news outlet, VTDigger.
According to property records and court documents, Zajko owned land in Orleans, Vermont — located about 10 miles from the scene of the border agent shootout.
Vermont prosecutors said in Youngblut’s detention memo that she and the person who bought her gun have been in “frequent contact” with an individual who was detained in Pennsylvania during the double homicide investigation — a possible reference to LaSota.
Prosecutors also noted that this same individual was a “person of interest” in yet another crime: a murder in California.
The two people charged in the sword attack on Lind, the older California landlord, are slated to go on trial this April, and Lind was set to be a key witness.
But on Jan. 17, Lind was stabbed to death on his property in Vallejo, police said. A Seattle man, Maximilian Snyder, 22, was arrested a week later and charged with murdering Lind. Prosecutors said in court papers that Lind was killed to prevent him from testifying against the suspects accused of attacking him with a sword.
The murder occurred three days before the border agent shootout. Snyder was well known to one of the suspects, Youngblut. The pair, who had gone to the same elite private high school, had filed a marriage application in November.
Snyder was set to be arraigned Thursday, but the hearing was postponed after his attorney told the court she was no longer representing him. The court docket indicates that he has yet to hire a new lawyer.
Back in Vermont, residents are trying to come to grips with the dizzying revelations of coast-to-coast crimes that prosecutors say are linked to associates of the two people involved in the border agent shootout.
“It’s just a shocking situation,” said Vincent Illuzzi, a longtime prosecutor and former state senator for Essex County, Vermont, which neighbors the county where the border agent shooting took place.
Illuzzi said he suspects the individuals involved in the border shootout and their associates saw his rural and remote corner of the country as an ideal place to hide out.
“It’s not off the grid, but it’s the next best thing to it,” Illuzzi said. “Rural people leave you alone. There’s no one down the street watching you come and go.”
In the days and weeks after the shooting, Bauckholt’s friends have spent hours digging deeper into the so-called Zizians and comparing notes on conversations they had with the person they knew as Ophelia.
They suspect that she didn’t recognize the warning signs as she gradually became more entangled in the group’s nefarious activities.
“I know Ophelia well enough to know that she would not have voluntarily ended up in the situation that she did,” said Kolomatskaia, her former roommate.
“This came as a result of a long string of bad decisions that were made on the basis of her falsely thinking that she didn’t have other options.
“She is very naive, altruistic and trusting,” Kolomatskaia added, “and that makes her exploitable.”
The post How did a German math genius get drawn into a ‘cult’ accused in coast-to-coast killings? appeared first on NBC News.
