Daughter In Cultlike Group Charged With Parents’ Murder
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Hey there, folks. It is Thursday, June 25th. And what a story. Rose, before we started, you said this is just weird. And the weird story has to do with a woman who's sitting in jail right now accused of murdering her parents on her birthday... After her mom sent her a message trying to make amends, and all of the weirdness comes because she's a member of a secretive cult in Pennsylvania. And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ Robes. I tried to get in as much and stack this thing up, but this is a complex and very tragic story, and we are still short on answers in this one.
Yeah, and it's a long time in the making because this double murder took place on New Year's Eve 2022, and that was Michelle Zyko's 30th birthday. So she had become estranged from her parents, and most likely because, yeah, she had joined this, they describe it as a cult-like group called the Zizians.
I wasn't familiar with them at all.
Ever heard of them? Look, locally, this group,
What is the basic overview of the Michelle Zyko murder case and the Zizian group?
is organized or had been organized in the state of vermont and so there was a lot of reporting in that area about this group because that group is now tied to as many as six murders right now so this is a bizarre story but yes you have 68 year old rita 71 year old richard zyko Rita reaches out to her daughter on her birthday, which is New Year's Eve, December 31st, 2022, and says, I'm sorry that we've basically grown apart and happy birthday. And that text went unanswered via text. But prosecutors announced yesterday that it was answered with violence.
A couple of hours later, they say. The part of this, I guess, Robes, the story would get attention. Anytime you hear about a kid murdering parents, I say kid, she's an adult, but you hear about murdering parents, that will get attention. This other stuff having to do with this secretive cult, again, they keep calling it cult-like, but let's, okay, I just want to use the right phrase here about what we're talking about and who these folks are who are, I guess, robes characterized by a lot of law enforcement and people who keep an eye on this stuff as a cult. So calling them cult-like versus a cult, I don't know what the distinction is.
I don't either. I feel like that's standards and practices with news organizations. I remember it was always a big deal to actually use the word cult for whatever reason, maybe from legal purposes. You could be sued if you call someone or say they're in a cult when it technically isn't. But I looked up cult-like just to actually understand why everyone's using that term. It refers to behaviors, groups, or environments that resemble a cult. Okay, so yes, it's... Are we going to get sued if we call it a cult? Because that absolutely is what it appears to be.
Well, I don't know if we've been indemnified by iHeart. We'll go with cult-like then, fine.
Cult-like, okay. So this Zizian group, here's what we know. This is a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists. They share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity, and artificial intelligence. They're against artificial intelligence. They're pro-trans, and it's been described that Michelle is trans and went by the name Jamie, but in most of the articles, she is still referred to as Michelle. So anyway, this is a group that had similar beliefs, and all were described as highly intelligent groups. So here's what we know about this crime. And I'm just puzzled why it took this long, actually, for them to make this arrest because they have a neighbor's doorbell cam with a vehicle pulling up to the home of Rita and Richard's house in an affluent area just outside of Philly.
So it's like a really nice house, a really nice suburb, a place where crimes like this don't occur. So the car pulls up. And they can hear on the doorbell cam through the video a voice shouting, Mom. And then you hear another voice that screams, Oh, my God. Oh, God. God.
So to your point about what took so long, obviously, they have to collect evidence.
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