Ophelia Bauckholt was living her best life in spring 2023.
A math whiz from Germany, Bauckholt, then 26, was making more than a half-million dollars at a New York City trading firm and juggling a bustling social calendar. Her apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, was the gathering place for her network of friends, most of whom were highly educated transgender women like her.
“She was the glue of our friend group,” Bauckholt’s roommate at the time, Astra Kolomatskaia, said. “She was living a very good life.”
But over the next few months, things turned dark. Bauckholt began to retreat from her friends and talk on the phone for long periods of time to people she wouldn’t identify. She started taking frequent weekend flights to places she wouldn’t talk about. And then, in November 2023, she hopped on a flight out of Newark Liberty International Airport and cut off all contact with her friends, leaving them with no idea where she had gone.
Until two weeks ago.
That’s when Bauckholt was shot dead in a gunbattle with U.S. Border Patrol agents in northern Vermont. It broke out after agents pulled over Bauckholt’s car on Jan. 20. At some point during the traffic stop, a woman riding with Bauckholt drew a gun and opened fire on one of the agents, prosecutors say, prompting at least one agent to shoot back.
Bauckholt was fatally shot after she pulled out a firearm, according to an FBI affidavit. (Bauckholt, who transitioned to female after college, is referred to in court documents by her birth name, Felix.) A border agent, David “Chris” Maland, was also killed in the gunfire exchange. And the woman in Bauckholt’s car, Teresa Youngblut, who authorities say had fired at agents, was wounded.
The headline-grabbing death of their gentle, generous friend has left Bauckholt’s once-close circle reeling. But it did not come as a total shock, three people who knew her told NBC News.
Bauckholt, her friends say, had been drawn into a cultlike group that has since been linked to six killings, one attempted murder and at least one faked death, according to court records. Its leader is an enigmatic Alaska native named Jack Amadeus LaSota, who goes by Ziz and identifies as a woman, according to multiple people who have interacted with LaSota and her associates.
LaSota is known for wearing dark robes and describing herself as Sith, a reference to the evil figures in the “Star Wars” franchise. People who know LaSota’s small group of associates describe them as smart, techie vegans, many of them transgender women, who share an obsession with the dangers of artificial intelligence. They have been dubbed by LaSota’s critics as “Zizians.”
One person connected to the group has been identified by prosecutors as a person of interest in the killing of a Pennsylvania couple. Two have been charged with attacking an older California man with a sword and other weapons, leaving him blind in one eye. And just last month, a fourth associate was charged with murdering that same California man to prevent him from testifying against those involved in the initial assault, prosecutors say.
“There are a lot of young people…who would have had OK lives except they bumped into the network around LaSota,” said Anna Salamon, a co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality, who had organized events that were attended by LaSota and some of her associates now suspected in the deaths in California, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
The Center for Applied Rationality began to organize gatherings in Berkeley, California, where it is based, in 2012. Its founders were seeking to build a community of so-called rationalists, people who are committed to using mathematical and logical principles to improve the world.
“We saw AI as something that was really, really important that we needed to get really, really right or it would be really, really bad,” Salamon said. “We didn’t know this at the time, but in hindsight we were creating conditions for a cult.”
They had brought together a large group of mostly young people who were open to big ideas about saving humanity. But some of them, Salamon now believes, were especially vulnerable to someone who might try to manipulate them.
Among the hundreds of people who came to these events was a tall computer programmer with curly blonde locks. Jack LaSota arrived in the Bay Area to work in tech after graduating magna cum laude from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. LaSota didn’t come off as a threat when staff members first met her at a Center for Applied Rationality event in 2014, Salamon said.
But their impressions changed during a monthlong retreat in 2018, when LaSota began espousing her belief system with an intensity that unnerved Salamon and other staffers, she said.
“I was viscerally afraid of LaSota in a way I’ve never been viscerally afraid of anybody,” Salamon said.
LaSota believed that humans have two minds, a left and right hemisphere, and each hemisphere can be good or evil, according to posts on her blog. Eventually, LaSota came to believe that only very few people — she among them — are double good.
“Suppose that you’re young and naive and someone convinces you that you’re really two people and one is good and one is sinister,” Salamon said. “Also that the world depends on you doing good stuff. That’s a pretty powerful setup for manipulation.”
On her blog, LaSota wrote that each hemisphere can have separate values and even genders, and they “often desire to kill each other.”
“Reaching peace between hemispheres with conflicting interests is a tricky process of repeatedly reconstructing frames of game theory and decision theory in light of realizations of them having been strategically damaged by your headmate,” LaSota wrote.
LaSota also described being targeted by police for her Sith-inspired garb.
“Sometimes cops harass me for wearing my religious attire as a Sith,” LaSota wrote on her blog. “(As a Sith, I’m religiously required to do whatever I want, and for now that so happens to include wearing black robes).”
LaSota was living for a time on a tugboat docked at a pier near Half Moon Bay in the San Francisco area, according to people who knew LaSota. LaSota and other associates eventually moved to a property in Vallejo belonging to an older California man, Curtis Lind, whom they had met at the dock.
“They were unhappy with living on the tug,” Lind told a documentary filmmaker, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “They decided that they wanted to move to my yard and buy moving vans, small moving vans, and change them into places where they could live in the moving van and nobody would know that they’re in there.”
Over time, LaSota’s relationship with the Center for Applied Rationality soured.
On Nov. 15, 2019, the Center for Applied Rationality was holding an event in Sonoma County, California. LaSota, then 28, and three others showed up wearing robes and Guy Fawkes masks — popularized by the dystopian film “V for Vendetta” and later adopted by the leftist hacker group Anonymous — and proceeded to block the entrance to the grounds, authorities said.
Police were called, and the four were ultimately charged with felony criminal conspiracy and five misdemeanors, including false imprisonment.
As the criminal case was still playing out, they hired a lawyer, Jerry Friedman — they sought him out because he was a vegan, he said.
With Friedman’s help, they filed a federal lawsuit against the retreat facility and Sonoma County deputies, alleging that they were “falsely arrested while protesting” and that LaSota was stripped naked while in custody and mocked for being transgender.
Then things went off the rails.
In August 2022, Friedman received word that LaSota was presumed dead after falling off a boat in San Francisco Bay. A brief obituary was published in LaSota’s hometown paper, the Daily News-Miner in Fairbanks, the following month.
“Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug. 19 after a boating accident,” it read. “Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed.”
LaSota’s lawyer emailed the attorneys for the retreat center informing them of the death.
“There were witnesses and a U.S. Coast Guard search (I verified with the Coast Guard) but no body was found,” Friedman wrote in the email, which he shared with NBC News.
Three months after LaSota’s apparent death, Lind, the California landlord who was then 80, was stabbed with a samurai sword after being ambushed by a group of people whom he had been trying to evict from his property, according to police and witness accounts.
Lind was “stabbed multiple times, had a sword impaled through his chest and ultimately lost his right eye” on Nov. 13, 2022, his family said on a GoFundMe page.
But Lind still managed to shoot two of his alleged attackers, killing one of them, Emma Borhanian, who had been one of the three people arrested with LaSota at the protest and was also a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit.
Two others were charged in the attack, including Alexander Leatham, another person who’d been arrested with LaSota at the protest and a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit.
Now two of the four people involved in the protest and lawsuit — LaSota and Borhanian — were believed to be dead, and one, Leatham, was in jail. The fourth had stopped responding to Friedman and was rumored to have died by suicide, Friedman wrote in court papers.
But two days after Lind was attacked, one of LaSota’s other attorneys received an email from a deputy district attorney saying that LaSota “was contacted by police in Vallejo this weekend” and “was on scene, alive and well,” according to court documents.
Two months later, LaSota would be found again — this time by police on the other side of the country.
On Jan. 2, 2023, police discovered the bodies of Rita and Richard Zajko inside their stately home in the borough of Chester Heights, a quaint Philadelphia suburb.
Rita, 69, had a gunshot wound to the back of her head, her autopsy found. Her husband, 71, had taken a bullet to his right hand and another to his right temple, according to his autopsy.
They were determined to have died two days earlier, on New Year’s Eve. The Pennsylvania State Police has said it is believed “not to be a random act of violence.”
Ten days after the Zajkos’ bodies were discovered, Pennsylvania state troopers showed up to a Candlewood Suites near the Philadelphia airport with a warrant to search the room and car of the dead couple’s daughter, Michelle Zajko. One of the troopers later testified in court that they were looking for the handgun believed to have been used in the killings.
The troopers knocked on Zajko’s hotel room door and took her into custody. As they were leading her out of the hotel, she called out to staff at the front desk and told them to tell a Daniel Blank that she was being detained, a trooper, Matthew Gibson, said in court, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News.
The troopers knew Blank. They had previously interviewed him in connection with the double homicide, Gibson later testified.
The troopers made their way to Blank’s room and banged on the door. Blank answered but refused to open it, Gibson said, prompting the troopers to return to their barracks to seek a search warrant for his hotel room.
When they returned with the warrant, no one responded to an order to open the door. So the troopers forced it open and found Blank and a second person in the bathroom, Gibson said in court.
The troopers arrested Blank and marched him out of the room. Things did not go as smoothly with the second person, identified in court papers as LaSota, the person also known as Ziz.
Troopers issued commands to LaSota, but LaSota “did not do anything,” Gibson later testified, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News.
“He had his eyes closed. He would not speak,” Gibson added. “He was just laying almost unconscious as if he was dead on the ground.”
LaSota was ultimately charged with obstructing the investigation and disorderly conduct, according to a criminal complaint. The Alaskan native continued to play dead when a mugshot was taken.
In June 2023, LaSota was released from custody after posting $10,000 bail, but then failed to return to court, leading the judge to issue a bench warrant. Her whereabouts are unknown.
Friedman said he hadn’t heard from LaSota since 2022, and he had no idea where his former client might be.
“I represent vegans. We believe in nonviolence,” Friedman said. “All of this is just crazy.”
Neither Blank nor Zajko, the dead couple’s daughter, has been charged in connection with the killing of her parents. But Zajko’s name would soon pop up in a separate murder investigation.
In January of this year, an employee of a hotel in the northern Vermont town of Lyndonville contacted law enforcement to report concerns about two guests.
The pair were dressed in “all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment,” according to an FBI affidavit, and the woman was carrying a gun in an exposed holster. They were later identified as Bauckholt, the German national, and her traveling companion, Teresa Youngblut.
By then, Bauckholt had been gone for over a year, and her friends in the New York area had stopped trying to contact her.
As a high school student in Freiburg, Germany, Bauckholt had been a national math champion. In 2014, she won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the most prestigious high school coding contest in the world, and later earned a scholarship to study pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Two of Bauckholt’s college friends said in interviews that she was a “passionate math student” who was also “fun” and “very positive.” She was an enthusiastic member of several college groups, including the computer science club and pure math club, according to the two former classmates.
“These are the kinds of people who read math textbooks for fun and do math problems on the chalkboard for fun,” said Lily Horne, who graduated with Bauckholt in 2019.
While still in college, Bauckholt interned at Jane Street Capital in New York, an elite quantitative trading firm, according to her LinkedIn page.
After graduating from Waterloo with honors, she landed a job as a quantitative trader, leveraging complex mathematical models to identify investment opportunities, with a different New York firm, Tower Research Capital.
Bauckholt was making more money than most of her friends, but she didn’t live large. She made sure to spend no more than 10% of her pretax income, her friends said, and donated a significant amount to charity. She considered herself an effective altruist, a person who believed in donating much of what she earned to causes that will have the largest impact on the most number of people.
In 2018, she posted on Facebook that she donated $5,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation. She said that she had just finished her first tech internship and wanted to “pay some of it forward.”
“The money will be used to distribute ~1100 nets, which is estimated to save ~1.4 lives,” Bauckholt wrote in the post, which was shared with NBC News. “If you too are earning more money than you’ll need, I urge you to consider giving some of it away to cost-effective charities as well.”
Bauckholt was highly calculating in other aspects of her life as well. She approached it like a math problem, deducing the precise number of hours of sleep she needed and what to avoid — soda, coffee — to be at her best.
Astra Kolomatskaia, Bauckholt’s former roommate, said Bauckholt’s day revolved around “super micromanaged decisions to make sure her state of mind was in the right place to perform as well as possible at work.”
Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who was involved in the Berkeley rationalist scene, met Bauckholt at an event in New York City in 2022. Bauckholt struck Taylor as bright but a bit weird and socially awkward, which wasn’t an unusual set of characteristics at rationalist events.
They hung out several times over the course of that year. At some point, their discussions became centered on Ziz. Taylor said it was clear that Bauckholt was enthralled with certain Zizian tenets, such as the importance of altruism and ethical veganism.
And Bauckholt seemed to not be bothered by some of the more extreme positions Ziz took, like the “importance of retribution under some circumstances,” Taylor said.
“It seemed like she considered the group more legit than other people did,” Taylor said.
Taylor said she warned Bauckholt to steer clear of Ziz and the Zizians, whom she considered to be part of a “death cult.”
That was sometime in late 2022. Taylor now knows that Bauckholt failed to heed her advice.
Bauckholt and her traveling companion, Teresa Youngblut, had been under surveillance for several days this past January before U.S. Border Patrol agents pulled over their Toyota Prius for an immigration check, according to federal prosecutors in Vermont.
The circumstances of the shooting that followed are still under investigation. Prosecutors have not said whether they believe David Maland, the fallen agent, was struck by one of the bullets Youngblut allegedly fired or by a shot from a fellow agent.
Youngblut, 21, has pleaded not guilty to two federal weapons counts. Her lawyer has declined to comment.
Prosecutors have said that Youngblut and Bauckholt were traveling with a large collection of weapons and tactical gear, including 48 rounds of .380-caliber jacketed hollow point ammunition, a ballistic helmet and night vision equipment.
In seeking to convince a judge that Youngblut should remain in jail, prosecutors said in court papers that she had been associating with people “suspected of violent acts.” The handguns possessed by Bauckholt and Youngblut were purchased by a “person of interest” in a double homicide in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
That appears to be a reference to Michelle Zajko, the daughter of the dead couple.
An alert sent to licensed firearms dealers in Vermont by the U.S. Bureau of Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, said the agency was “asking for your assistance in identifying any firearms purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, a person of interest in the shooting of a Customs and Border Protection Officer on Jan. 20, 2025.”
The alert was first reported by a local news outlet, VTDigger.
According to property records and court documents, Zajko owned land in Orleans, Vermont — located about 10 miles from the scene of the border agent shootout.
Vermont prosecutors said in Youngblut’s detention memo that she and the person who bought her gun have been in “frequent contact” with an individual who was detained in Pennsylvania during the double homicide investigation — a possible reference to LaSota.
Prosecutors also noted that this same individual was a “person of interest” in yet another crime: a murder in California.
The two people charged in the sword attack on Lind, the older California landlord, are slated to go on trial this April, and Lind was set to be a key witness.
But on Jan. 17, Lind was stabbed to death on his property in Vallejo, police said. A Seattle man, Maximilian Snyder, 22, was arrested a week later and charged with murdering Lind. Prosecutors said in court papers that Lind was killed to prevent him from testifying against the suspects accused of attacking him with a sword.
The murder occurred three days before the border agent shootout. Snyder was well known to one of the suspects, Youngblut. The pair, who had gone to the same elite private high school, had filed a marriage application in November.
Snyder was set to be arraigned Thursday, but the hearing was postponed after his attorney told the court she was no longer representing him. The court docket indicates that he has yet to hire a new lawyer.
Back in Vermont, residents are trying to come to grips with the dizzying revelations of coast-to-coast crimes that prosecutors say are linked to associates of the two people involved in the border agent shootout.
“It’s just a shocking situation,” said Vincent Illuzzi, a longtime prosecutor and former state senator for Essex County, Vermont, which neighbors the county where the border agent shooting took place.
Illuzzi said he suspects the individuals involved in the border shootout and their associates saw his rural and remote corner of the country as an ideal place to hide out.
“It’s not off the grid, but it’s the next best thing to it,” Illuzzi said. “Rural people leave you alone. There’s no one down the street watching you come and go.”
In the days and weeks after the shooting, Bauckholt’s friends have spent hours digging deeper into the so-called Zizians and comparing notes on conversations they had with the person they knew as Ophelia.
They suspect that she didn’t recognize the warning signs as she gradually became more entangled in the group’s nefarious activities.
“I know Ophelia well enough to know that she would not have voluntarily ended up in the situation that she did,” said Kolomatskaia, her former roommate.
“This came as a result of a long string of bad decisions that were made on the basis of her falsely thinking that she didn’t have other options.
“She is very naive, altruistic and trusting,” Kolomatskaia added, “and that makes her exploitable.”
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:
