How did a German math genius get drawn into a ‘cult’ accused in coast-to-coast killings?
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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.
Content retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309.
