Serialously with Annie Elise
344: Vegan Hipsters Start Their Own Murdering Cult?! | The Zizian Group
08 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the story behind the Zizians cult?
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Get 15% off your first order of $100 or more at hillhousehome.com with code NEW15. Again, that's code NEW15 for 15% off your first order at hillhousehome.com. When officers arrived at the scene, they found three members of what police believe is a West Coast cult. What happens, you get this paranoia when you're in a cult like this, and the leader makes you hate the world but love each other.
Ziz and some of his alleged followers staged a protest, standing up for their beliefs, and the story gets progressively more violent. They showed up there in all black robes and thigh fox masks with a school bus. The questions, how did the group start, and how did they get here? Who's behind this latest trail of terror?
Hey, true crime besties. Welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to an all-new episode of Serialistly. With me, Annie Elise, your true crime bestie, here to take you on another rollercoaster of a case because, let me just tell you, today's case is wild. But before we get into all of that, hoping you are having a good start to your week.
Hope you had a fantastic weekend, whether you're driving, whether you're at home, just chilling, whether you're cleaning, wherever it is you're at, I hope that you're just mentally ready. I hope that you're in a state of, I don't want to say zen, but maybe zen, maybe zen, just ready to hear the unthinkable and ready to go on this truly twisted roller coaster with me today.
Because to say that today's case is a weird one is like the understatement of the universe. It is a case that is filled with everything. I'm talking about an online cult, dead bodies, bizarre beliefs, a true obsession over AI, disappearances, fake disappearances, fake identities, and somehow, in the mix of all of that, as if that wasn't odd enough...
throw in some Harry Potter fan fiction for a little added sprinkle into it. I mean, it's really wild, but to really understand how this entire insane case unfolded, we've got to go back and start with where a lot of bizarre things really start in today's day and age, and that is the deep, dark corners of the internet.
Now, in this particular case, it was a handful of people who got really, really into specific blog posts about philosophical stuff. You know, people's values, how human beings think, the power of computers, things like that. And they really started bonding together over these blog posts.
And they believed in this way of thinking that basically rejected human emotions and it relied on logic for everything. And it was like these very like techie, techie type of people, kind of like, you know, a little bit of nerd alert stuff, if I'm being totally honest with you.
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Chapter 2: How did Ziz's online philosophy attract followers?
Also, nobody was physically recruiting other people. They just happened to stumble upon each other online, whether it was in comment sections or maybe even chat rooms, and then just kind of slowly go down that rabbit hole together. And people could leave the group whenever they wanted.
And as far as we know, there also wasn't any sign of any sort of financial exploitation, which we know is very, very common in traditional cults. But then, on the flip side of that, like other cult groups, a lot of members did start isolating themselves from their families and friends. And the person at the center of all of this, Ziz, she had a lot of influence.
Now, there's no public evidence that Ziz ever told anyone directly that they needed to commit violence. However, her blog posts would often talk about people who, quote, didn't contribute value and suggested that, logically, death could be a reasonable outcome in some cases like that.
And for the people who were already very deep in it, that kind of language could really shift how they saw the world. And how they saw the people in it. So some people see the Zizians as more of like this fringe philosophy or even a fanbase that eventually went too far. I mean, at the very least, it is a textbook example of online radicalization.
and how ideas in certain blog posts can just truly spill over into real life with very real consequences. Because in the beginning, the Zizians just had shared some beliefs that they bonded over. They hadn't even really been a real problem for anyone. They weren't a thorn in anybody's side. But that all started to change in 2019.
That year, Ziz got arrested at a protest outside a Northern California retreat center. The center was holding an event for people who were involved in an organization called the Center for Applied Rationality. And a few of Ziz's close friends were also there too, including a girl by the name of Emma and a guy, Alexander.
Now, according to Ziz and her friends, they were protesting what they claimed was sexual misconduct within the group at the retreat. Basically, they felt like this group was against trans women. But they ended up going too far in their protest for whatever reason, and they got arrested.
And it wasn't a huge story in the media at the time, but it was maybe the first moment that pushed Ziz's group out of the world of blog posts and into real-world disruption. Now, as we all know, right around that time, COVID hit in 2020. So that kind of threw a wrench into all of the court dates and everything else that was supposed to transpire after these Zizians were arrested.
So from the time it went down until 2021, there was kind of this super messy legal back and forth. The cops claimed that the Zizians had weapons on them during that protest, but they all denied it. Then, the Zizians filed a civil rights complaint saying that they were victims of excessive force.
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Chapter 3: What extreme beliefs did the Zizians hold about veganism?
However, the suspect managed to slip away and evade the officers. which Curtis's friends and family were absolutely devastated. They had described him as kind, generous, a little idealistic. He had this big heart for the community, always wanted to help people. He also loved boating.
He would pitch creative ideas to help the homeless situation, saying, you know, we could use old cruise ships as shelters, things like that. And Curtis never imagined that his life would end the way it did, just being targeted, twice. And the timing of Curtis's death raised some serious questions, right? Like, could the Zizians have been behind this second attack as well?
And if so, was it because their plan was to stop him from testifying? I mean, after all, he was the main witness in a murder case that had gone wrong, and he was about to testify as the trial was about to start. But while the police were scrambling for leads in California and searching for Curtis's killer, another violent act was about to unfold 3,000 miles away in Vermont.
January 20th, 2025 started out like any other day for David Christopher Milland, a 44-year-old U.S. Border Patrol agent who was working near the U.S.-Canada border in northern Vermont. Now, he went by Chris for short, and Chris was a veteran of both the Air Force and his current Border Patrol job.
He had once even worked security at the Pentagon during 9-11, and he had spent the last decade of his life patrolling the northern U.S.-Canada border. His friends and co-workers all described him as humble, dedicated, just extremely kind. And I know a lot of people have this idea probably of what it's like working border patrol and how it probably is super intense all the time.
And don't get me wrong, I'm sure it can be. But most of the days, especially at this northern border, were essentially pretty uneventful and pretty peaceful. Agents would spend most of their time just checking IDs, responding to alerts, monitoring crossing points. Violence was very, very rare, not the norm. But January 20th? That was different.
Because that day, Chris pulled over a Toyota Prius on Interstate 91 in a town just about a half hour south of the Canadian border in Vermont. And it was supposed to be just a standard stop. Apparently, authorities had reason to believe that one of the passengers in the car might have an expired visa, which kind of begs the question, okay, well, who was in the car? Why was that an issue?
Well, inside the Prius that day was 21-year-old Teresa Youngblood. She's from Washington State, and she also had a friend with her named Felix Baucold, a German citizen who now identified as a woman and used the name Ophelia.
So both Teresa and Ophelia were already on federal law enforcement's radar because just a few days earlier, a hotel employee in Vermont had reported seeing the pair dressed in full tactical gear. Obviously not something that you normally see every day. And I'm talking about black clothing, body armor, visible firearms.
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