The leader of an alleged cult informed by the murderous hypothetical artificial superintelligence of “Roko’s Basilisk” once faked her death in the months before the first of several killings that have been linked to her followers.
As The Guardian notes, Jack “Ziz” LaSota — the alleged leader of the “Zizians,” a militantly vegan group of computer scientists who have now been linked to six deaths in three states — was believed to be dead after her sister and friend claimed that she’d fallen from her sailboat in the San Francisco Bay.
After a 30-hour search that involved the Coast Guard and multiple fire departments, LaSota’s “body” was never found. Though the nature of her alleged death-faking scheme is unclear, Ziz was nevertheless considered dead by her family, who published an obituary for her in her hometown newspaper in Alaska.
In an interview with the Silicon Valley nonprofit news site Open Vallejo in January, Coast Guard official Hunter Schnabel explained that the branch doesn’t have the authority to declare a person’s death and “isn’t going to investigate” further — a convenient procedural situation that would make it easy for someone who “didn’t want to be found” to “disappear.”
A few months after that purported boating accident, Ziz seemingly sprang back to life when she was arrested at the scene of a different disaster: the sword stabbing of then-80-year-old Curtis Lind, a man who owned the property where some of her friends (or followers, depending on how you see it) were living days before they were set to be evicted for failing to pay rent. The landlord lost his eye during the attack, and two of Ziz’s alleged associates, Suri Dao and Alexander Leatham, were charged with his attempted murder.
More than two years later, Lind was stabbed again — this time fatally — ahead of his upcoming testimony against Dao and Leatham. It remains unclear who killed him or why, but his murder happened just a day after prosecutors noted that he was the sole witness to his initial stabbing and that the people accused of it were “extremely dangerous.”
In Lind’s case, and that of the five others involving Zizians, it does not appear that the group’s leader was directly involved. As this story unravels, it looks a lot like LaSota is a Charles Manson type: a charismatic leader whose ideas might have infected the minds of her followers to the point that they were willing to go to extremes for the woman who believes, among other startling things, that she is one of the only righteous people alive.
More on Ziz: Alleged Leader of Roko’s Basilisk Murder Cult Says She Did Nothing Wrong, and Would Appreciate Some Vegan Food in Jail