The Zizians - The Story of America's Most DISTURBING Death Cult

The Zizians, the Story of America's Most Disturbing Death Cult, from That Chapter with Mike, running about 42 minutes. This is one of those stories that sounds like fiction but is terrifyingly real. It involves genius-level computer scientists, transgender hackers, NASA researchers, Silicon Valley rationalists, a faked death, multiple murders across the United States, and a group that has been described as a vegan Sith death cult. Mike does an excellent job untangling the timeline because this case is genuinely difficult to follow.

The Vermont Shooting That Started It All

The story opens on a bitterly cold Monday in mid-January 2025, in Vermont, less than ten miles from the Canadian border. Border patrol agent David Maland, who went by Chris, was working the southbound lane of Interstate 91. He was 44 years old, an Air Force veteran, engaged to be married, and had worked border patrol for 15 years. A 2015 blue Toyota Prius with North Carolina plates caught his eye. The vehicle had been on the authorities' radar for about a week after hotel employees where the occupants had been staying reported them wearing tactical gear and carrying weapons.

Agent Maland flashed his lights and pulled the Prius over. What appeared to be a routine traffic stop turned deadly when shots were fired from inside the vehicle. Minutes later, Agent Maland lay in the snow. He was rushed to hospital but pronounced dead at four in the afternoon, just 45 minutes after the stop. One of the suspects inside the car was also killed. The other was shot and wounded.

The two people in the Prius were identified as 21-year-old Teresa Jungblut from Seattle and 28-year-old Emilia Bau from Germany. Emilia was transgender and had worked as a quantitative trader at a research capital firm in New York City, implementing mathematical models to find trading algorithms. She had quit that job in October 2023, which also meant her H-1B visa had expired, one reason border patrol was interested in the vehicle. Emilia was the one killed in the shootout.

Teresa was from Washington State, had attended an elite private school, studied computer science, and was engaged to a man named Max Snider. At the time of the Vermont shooting, Max was in jail in California. For murder.

The Origins of the Zizian Cult

To understand how these events connect, Mike takes us back to the beginning and to a person named Jack Amadeus Ziz Losoda. Ziz, who was transgender, was from Alaska, born in 1991, and studied computer science. From an early age, Ziz was described as a hacker who struggled socially but had explosive outbursts. In high school, Ziz managed to hack the school's computer system and access payroll information. Ziz's own father worked in AI, so it seemed to be a family affair.

Ziz interned at NASA, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for the tech industry. Things did not go well. Ziz ran a blog called Sinceriously, written in a style Mike describes as a computer nerd trying to write philosophy. It was full of flowcharts, hacking terminology, true-or-false statements, and constant references to nerdy pop culture that would be largely unintelligible to anyone without the same single-track mind.

Ziz was drawn to the rationalist subculture, a Silicon Valley community interested in existential risks of technology, particularly artificial intelligence. Groups like the Centre for Applied Rationality and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute were at the centre of this world. But Ziz took things to an extreme, developing a worldview that treated people as objects to be optimised, where sociopathy was necessary to avoid being pawned by the external world.

The Rationalist Fleet and Growing Darkness

Around 2017, Ziz began living on a boat in the San Francisco Bay, unable to afford rent and unable to get a job. Together with another person named Gwen Danielson, Ziz started what they called the rationalist fleet. Gwen believed that people had multiple personalities inside their heads, activated by switching brain hemispheres, and that by putting one hemisphere to sleep you could activate an entirely different personality, potentially even a different gender.

The group developed its own jargon. Terms like single good, non-good, collapsing the timeline, which referred to multiverse theory. The idea being that since multiple timelines exist, killing someone in this timeline is acceptable because they are fine in another one. If that sounds insane, Mike acknowledges, it is. But the cult logic worked on the vulnerable and neurodivergent people Ziz specifically targeted.

Classic cult behaviour was employed. Members were cut off from friends and family. They developed their own terminology. You were either with them or against them. Ziz was described as a master manipulator who was extremely skilled at targeting those who were naive and vulnerable. The group began to grow, attracting mathematicians, intellectuals, people who worked at NASA, Google, and high-tech research institutes.

The Protest, the Landlord, and the Sword

In 2019, Ziz led a protest against the Centre for Applied Rationality alumni reunion. By this point, the Zizians had been ostracised by mainstream rationalists. They showed up wearing black robes and Guy Fawkes masks, surrounded all exits of the venue in the northern California woods, and blocked a bridge with a van. SWAT teams were called. The Zizians were arrested and accused the police of anti-trans discrimination.

After the boat experiment failed, the group moved to trailers on land owned by an 80-year-old man named Curtis Lind in Vallejo, California. Lind was a patron of the arts who rented the space cheaply. Then the pandemic hit, California banned evictions, and the Zizians simply stopped paying rent. Relations deteriorated. The Zizians started carrying knives in plain sight.

Then in August 2022, Ziz supposedly died in a boating accident. She fell into the San Francisco Bay at night. The Coast Guard searched for hours. Her body was never recovered. A memorial was posted online. Condolence messages praised her as one of this age's visionary philosophers. Gwen Danielson also disappeared, with her lawyer claiming she was dead, though she was spotted by multiple people at the trailer park after her supposed death.

In November 2022, things exploded. Curtis Lind came to fix a water leak on the property. What happened next is disputed. The Zizians say he came down threatening them with a firearm. Lind says they attacked him. What is not disputed is the result. Curtis Lind was stabbed with a katana that went straight through his body. He lost an eye. He suffered approximately 50 puncture wounds. He managed to draw his gun, killing one Zizian named Emma Boranian and injuring another named Alexander Letham. Lind, with a sword still sticking out of his body, staggered to a neighbour's house and was airlifted to hospital. He spent a month recovering. Used surgical equipment and a dozen laptops were found in the trailers.

The Double Homicide in Pennsylvania

One month later, on New Year's Eve 2022, in Chester Heights, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia, Richard and Rita Zajko let two people into their home at around eleven thirty at night. Less than two minutes later, screams were heard. The couple were later found shot in the head in their bedroom.

Their only child was Michelle Zajko, 30 years old, highly educated with a master's degree in bioinformatics from Temple University, had worked at NASA, and was currently at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She had purchased a firearm of the same type that killed her parents. She was never formally charged but was considered a person of interest.

About a week after the bodies were discovered, police tracked Michelle to a hotel in Chester City, Pennsylvania. And who was in the hotel room with her? Ziz Losoda. Alive. Back from the dead. The whole drowning had been faked. Ziz was lying on the floor completely unresponsive and had to be carried out. Also present was Daniel Blank, a 24-year-old described as simple and gentle but easily manipulated.

In Michelle's blog, she had written that Ziz informed her the only way to gain her trust was to murder her roommate Alice, preferably soon. Ziz helpfully suggested using a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, destroying the body with lye, and then video calling Ziz to show proof. If Michelle did not do it, Ziz planned to drive across the entire continental United States to murder her instead. Michelle did not kill Alice. Ziz did drive across the country. And a little over a week after Michelle's parents were murdered, Ziz was found in that hotel nearby.

The Final Kill, Curtis Lind's Murder

This is where it all comes full circle. In January 2025, two of the Zizians were facing trial in April for the murder of Emma Boranian and the attempted murder of Curtis Lind. Curtis was the only non-Zizian witness. On January 17th, Max Snider, Teresa's fiance, showed up outside Curtis Lind's home in Vallejo dressed in all black. Curtis confronted him. Max grabbed him and stabbed him multiple times with a large knife. Curtis fell. Max walked away, then turned around, walked back, and slit the 82-year-old man's throat.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Teresa and Emilia were heading to Vermont, where they would fatally encounter Border Patrol Agent Maland. Inside their vehicle, police found hollowpoint ammunition, gas masks, night vision equipment, and a firearm that had belonged to Michelle Zajko.

The Arrests and Where Things Stand

On February 16th, 2025, Ziz, Michelle Zajko, and Daniel Blank were all arrested in Allegany County, Maryland. They were found in a white van on private property with handguns, rifles, and ammunition. They had been linked to a property in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which appears to be where the cult relocated after leaving California.

The death toll linked to the Zizians now stands at six. Emma Boranian, Richard and Rita Zajko, Curtis Lind, Border Patrol Agent David Maland, and Emilia Bau. Max Snider has been charged with Curtis Lind's murder. Teresa Jungblut has been charged with Agent Maland's murder. Nobody has been formally charged with the Zajko double homicide, but the evidence points in an obvious direction.

Key Takeaways

This is one of the most disturbing and complex true crime stories of recent years. What makes it uniquely terrifying is not just the violence but the intellectual veneer. These are not your typical cult members. They are NASA researchers, Google engineers, quantitative traders, and computer scientists who built an ideology around rationalism and AI safety, then twisted it into a justification for murder. Ziz faked her own death, orchestrated killings across multiple states, and was finally caught camping in a van. The story of the Zizians is a warning about what happens when brilliant but broken people find each other online, develop their own moral framework, and decide that the end justifies every conceivable means. Mike from That Chapter does an outstanding job making this labyrinthine case comprehensible.