Two separate murders have been blamed on a pair of young computer science students who, in addition to being accused of having ties to the same bizarre Bay Area tech-cult, may also be married, according to recent reports.
Open Vallejo reports that Maximilian Snyder, 22, and Teresa Youngblut, 21, previously applied for a marriage license in Washington state, and are now both suspects in two separate murders that occurred over the past week in separate parts of the country.
Snyder, described as a data scientist who had previously studied at the University of Oxford, has been accused of stabbing a man to death in Vallejo, California. The murder victim, Curtis Lind, previously had violent encounters with young people living on his property, Open Vallejo reports, though it doesn’t specify how—if at all—Snyder may have been tied to those people. Those people had “lived in box trucks on his Vallejo property and had stopped paying Lind during the pandemic-era rent moratorium,” the outlet notes. Why Snyder would have wanted to kill Lind isn’t known.
Meanwhile, Youngblut is accused of shooting a Border Patrol officer to death during a traffic stop in Vermont. Youngblut was traveling with a German citizen named Felix Bauckholt, in Coventry, Vermont, when they were stopped by authorities. A gunfight ensued in which Bauckholt was killed and Youngblut allegedly shot one of the agents, David Maland, who later died of his injuries. Youngblut was also shot. A recent DOJ press release about Youngblut’s arrest says that she is charged with various firearm offenses for the incident involving Maland’s death.
Open Vallejo reports that both Snyder and Youngblut’s social media accounts “display beliefs consistent” with a movement dubbed “Zizianism,” although “court records do not explicitly tie them to the ideology.” While the outlet notes a potential connection to the movement, it’s not exactly clear from the reporting what the connection is. Open Vallejo characterizes the Zizians as an “ideology centered on using scientific techniques to enhance human decision making,” though a better description might be “a bunch of Extremely Online wackos with radically bad ideas.” Indeed, online descriptions of the Zizian worldview make it sound pretty damn out there: it’s an apparent offshoot of the Rationalist movement, which is a (mostly) online movement that circulates around the LessWrong web forum.
One purported friend of Bauckholt, Jessica Taylor, said that they had warned Bauckholt not to get involved with the “Ziz” movement. Open Vallejo writes:
Taylor said the group believes in timeless decision theory, a Rationalist belief suggesting that human decisions and their effects are mathematically quantifiable.
The Zizians also apparently believe that because there are two hemispheres in the brain, individuals can split their consciousness between two personalities by waking one side at a time, Taylor said. She said veganism and animal rights are also central to the ideology. A bio for an Instagram account that appears to belong to Youngblut reads, “talk to me about being vegan and ai alignment.”
Meanwhile, the people who lived on Lind’s property were said to have ties to the Zizian movement through the movement’s founder, “Ziz,” whose legal name is Jack LaSota.
At this point, it’s still unclear what exact relationship Snyder and Youngblut have with each other, although Open Vallejo reports that they both attended the Lakeside School, a prestigious private school based in Seattle that specializes in STEM. As for the whole “marriage” thing, the outlet cites an application for a marriage license in King’s County, Washington, as well as a motion filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont that claims that Youngblut had frequently been in contact with “a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.”
