Trans Vegan ‘Murder Cult’ Is Willing to Kill Anyone They Don’t Like

Curt Lind didn’t know it, but he was already dead.

The 82-year-old was ambushed by a hooded figure lying in wait outside his trailer park who repeatedly slashed his throat, CCTV footage seen by The Telegraph reveals.

Amazingly, Lind remained on his feet as his assailant fled. The collar of his jacket, which had been torn off during the frenzied knife attack and trailed limply from his hand, was visibly soaked through with blood.

He staggered away, perhaps trying to seek help from a neighbour, before collapsing face-first in the middle of the road.

He didn’t move again until the authorities in Vallejo, California collected his body later that day.

The man charged with his murder was Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old former computer science student. He has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors have linked him to the Zizians, a “death cult” of transgender vegans, which once operated on Lind’s land before allegedly trying to kill him following a dispute over rent.

The group scattered after what the authorities characterised as the first murder attempt of Lind. At least two of them appear to have faked their own deaths, and they have since been linked to a string of murders across the US.

But as recently as November 2022, the members of the so-called cult were living in Lind’s trailer park in Vallejo.

The sprawling compound, located at the end of a cul-de-sac in the south-west corner of the city, is a jumble of iron and steel. Boats, cars, trucks, lawnmowers and shipping containers, many of them rusted, are scattered behind the chainlink fence and padlocked gates.

Locals called it the “fruit stand” because of the strange characters it attracted. Back then, Lind was also living on the lot in a caravan.

He met the Zizians in early 2020 while the tug boat they were living on was docked at a harbour south of San Francisco, and offered to rent out his land to them.

They made a strange pairing – a former ship worker and talented machinist, then in his seventies, and a group of 20-somethings, most of them transgender vegans, who had attended elite universities. But they formed a sort of bond, and Lind would recall taking one of them to buy their first bra.

“Curt was open to different people’s ways of life,” said Jon Jenkins, who knew Lind for 20 years, recalling his friend speaking up for the group just months before they allegedly tried to kill him.

The Zizians are an offshoot from the “rationalist” intellectual movement in San Francisco’s Bay Area, which started taking root among its community of tech bros and computer geeks in the early 2010s.

The group took its name from its leader Ziz, real name Jack LaSota, who in labyrinthine blog posts would formulate a philosophy about the brain’s two hemispheres – which can be good or evil, male or female, and “often desire to kill each other”.

LaSota, who was born a man before transitioning, would dress up in long black “Sith” robes, after the Star Wars villains. “The Sith do what they want deep down,” he explained in one post. “They remove all obstructions.”

Anna Salamon, who founded a rationalist group in the Bay Area, later said she was “viscerally afraid of LaSota in a way I’ve never been viscerally afraid of anybody” and realised the group of young people she brought together could be radicalised by his violent ideology.

“We didn’t know this at the time, but in hindsight we were creating conditions for a cult,” she told NBC News.

After moving onto converted trucks on Lind’s land, the purported members were regarded with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion by neighbours. They were gaunt, pale, would never talk to or in front of strangers, and on several occasions were spotted walking around naked.

Trust is hard to find in that corner of Vallejo, where locals recall at least three bodies being dumped along the streets in recent years in cases not linked to the Zizians. Many repeat a warning not to hang around until it gets dark.

“The police don’t respond to anything. It’s kind of a lawless town,” claimed Kevin Lum, a shaven-headed mechanic who works at one of the many garages that line the road.

‘Relations soured’

The city went bankrupt a few years ago, and though it has clawed its way back to solvency, holes remain in vital services – including law enforcement, as police openly admit.

It might be just a half-hour drive from Napa Valley’s famous wine region, and the Napa River is a short walk from Lind’s trailer park, but Vallejo is a very different place. As dusk falls, sex workers wait on every corner of one of its main thoroughfares, Sonoma Boulevard.

Lind later said his relationship with the Zizians soured when they stopped paying rent as the Covid pandemic hit, and he was reportedly forced to go to court to get some $60,000 he was owed.

In November 2022, prosecutors said he was called out of his caravan by Suri Dao, one of the members of the “death cult”, who told him there was a water leak in their truck. On the way out, he grabbed a small handgun he had recently started carrying – similar to a derringer, according to neighbour Greg Frizzie.

‘He just started shooting’

Other members of the group were waiting for Lind to appear, and when he bent down to turn off the water valve they allegedly attacked him with kitchen knives and impaled him with a ninja sword.

Groping blindly for his gun, Lind fired into the group, killing Emma Borhanian, a former Google employee, and wounding Alexander Leatham, a former maths student at the University of California.

“He said he got up, he couldn’t see, but he could see silhouettes of people,” Mr Frizzie said. “So he just started shooting.”

Leatham – who is said to have wielded the sword – and Dao were arrested and charged with attempted murder. Both have pleaded not guilty.

But others were allowed to leave the scene and scattered, including LaSota and another member called Gwen Danielson, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Neither have been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with the incident.

Lind spent weeks in hospital, and was left blind in one eye with a scar on his neck from where the group members had allegedly tried to behead him. Photos of the 82-year-old from then on show him with his right eye permanently closed.

Mr Jenkins, known by locals as “Big Jon”, started acting as a kind of bodyguard for his friend and took to carrying a gun.

He also helped Lind clear out the Zizian’s living quarters, where he uncovered traces of the secretive group’s lifestyle. A hole had been dug through one of the trucks, about 8ft deep, while nearby were “boxes and boxes” of lye, a powerful alkaline.

Jack LaSota had previously told a Zizian associate that lye could be used to dispose of bodies, according to Wired.

Needles and vials were left lying around the truck – possibly for administering estrogen, which the Zizians apparently believed led to clearer thinking, according to people connected to the group.

And that wasn’t all.

“They saved their pee. Probably 25, 30 bottles of it. And they wrote big letters on it – pee,” Mr Jenkins said, wheezing with laughter.
For a long time, that was the only trace of the Zizians in Vallejo as its membership splintered.

LaSota was reported to have faked his own death in a boating accident in August 2022, and an obituary was published in his hometown paper. Danielson was also thought to be dead, but her father recently told the New York Post she was in hiding from her former fellow alleged cult members.

Then in January of this year, Mr Jenkins noticed that black flowers, with wire stems and fabric petals, had been attached to the gates of Lind’s compound. Seemingly, it was placed there to mourn Borhanian, the dead Zizian.

“We were just like – ‘Curt. You shouldn’t be around here, you know?’” Mr Jenkins recalled.

“When we first saw the flowers, he thought, well, maybe one of our friends was pulling a little joke on us. But then it was nobody we knew, and then that sort of got kind of scary.”

‘You’re not allowed to walk on my property’

Then a figure started hanging around the area. Nobody knew who he was, but according to descriptions he was about 5ft 10, and wore a Covid mask, woollen hat and hood even though it was warm for that time of year.

Mr Frizzie found the stranger sitting on his wall, and then walking down his side of the pavement, which is adjacent to Lind’s property.
“You’re new here, right?” he said to the man, who up close he claims turned out to be a “skinny Asian dude”.

The only response was a “f---ing weird stare”.

Mr Frizzie carried on: “If you’re living at the ‘fruit stand’ down the end of the street, you are not allowed to walk on my property. You’re not allowed to sit on my wall, on my side of the street.”

The stranger headed over the road to a church at the opposite end of the cul-de-sac, and resumed his silent vigil.

Mr Frizzie, who lives in Idaho but occasionally stays at a caravan on his Vallejo property for work, headed out to meet his wife, who stayed in a hotel a few towns over “because she knows how crazy it is down here”.

He was about a 15-minute drive away the next day when he got a call from Mr Jenkins, a family friend: “Something happened to Curt – we need your video, we need your camera. The cops are here.”

He pulled over and watched the footage from cameras installed outside his house, which he claims showed the man he knew for more than 30 years being chased and murdered by that same hooded figure.

Mr Frizzie watched the two-minute video on his phone again quietly while talking to The Telegraph. “Such a good guy,” he said of Lind, finally. “I learnt a lot from him.”

Authorities believe the man in that footage is Snyder, a former computer science student at Oxford University with ties to the Zizians.

He pleaded not guilty to Lind’s murder in a Vallejo courtroom in March, humming a tune under his breath as the hearing began. He wore a striped prison jumpsuit, and his black hair was long and tied in pigtails.

Three days after Mr Snyder was said to have murdered Lind in California, his girlfriend, Teresa Youngblut, a member of the Zizians, allegedly shot and killed a border guard in Vermont called David Maland.

Her companion, known alternately as Felix or Ophelia Bauckholt, died in the shoot-out that followed.

The death of Maland, whom friends called “Chris”, seems to have intensified the nationwide manhunt for alleged members of the cult.

Pennsylvania police said the gun used by Youngblut had been bought by a person of interest in another killing: Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, whom prosecutors have also linked to the Zizians. Her parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, were shot and killed on New Year’s Eve in 2022.

She was questioned in connection with their deaths but not charged.

Adding to the web of intrigue, LaSota was arrested in a Philadelphia hotel room the following month and charged with obstructing a homicide investigation, by officers who had obtained a warrant to seize Ms Zajko’s gun. Otherwise, he is not alleged to have any involvement in the deaths.

In February this year, police arrested LaSota alongside Zajko when they parked their box trucks on the land of a man in Frostburg, Maryland.

The pair, whom authorities said were dressed in black and wore gun belts containing ammunition, have pleaded not guilty to multiple charges including trespass, obstructing and hindering, and possession of a handgun.

Jessica Taylor, who attended rationalist events in the Bay Area but was not part of the Zizians, said she had attempted to warn Bauckholt away from the “death cult”.
She told The Telegraph her suspicions had been raised after meeting LaSota and his “strange” account of a suicide by a trans woman called Maia Pasek. Later, a second person linked to the Zizians killed themselves: Jay Winterford, known in online circles as “Fluttershy”.

LaSota has never been charged or accused of wrongdoing by the authorities in connection with these deaths.

Multiple trials later this year could shed light on the inner workings of the group. None of the Zizians have been found guilty of murder in court.