A 10-year-old blue Toyota Prius was rocketing through northern Vermont on the afternoon of Jan. 20 when a U.S. Border Patrol agent pulled it over for an immigration inspection.
Law enforcement officers had been watching the two people inside the car for the better part of a week, since a hotel employee reported that they were armed and dressed in tactical gear. Shortly before the Prius was stopped, officers watched them buy aluminum foil at a Walmart and wrap it around their phones.
Now, on a stretch of highway flanked by snow-crusted ground and hardwood forest, one of the agents asked them to get out of the car.
There seemed little explanation for what happened next. The driver of the Prius was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. The passenger, a German national, had an H-1B visa, reserved for highly skilled workers. Items found in the car might have suggested a dark purpose, but were not illicit: a ballistic helmet, a night-vision monocular, full-face respirators and hollow-point ammunition.
Yet without warning, according to an F.B.I. affidavit, the driver drew a Glock pistol and opened fire. A Border Patrol agent fired back. The passenger also reached for a gun, according to an incident summary by the Border Patrol. The agent ordered the passenger to stop. The demand was ignored, and the agent shot at the passenger, too, the summary said.
The driver went down, struck in the arm and the leg. The passenger, hit twice in the chest, died at the scene. A Border Patrol agent took a bullet in the neck. He was rushed to the hospital, but did not survive.
The driver was identified as Teresa Youngblut, 21, a University of Washington computer science student who had been reported missing by her parents eight months earlier. Prosecutors have cited her “associations with individuals suspected of violent acts,” namely the shooting deaths of an older couple in their suburban Philadelphia home in 2023 and the fatal stabbing of an 82-year-old man who was to be the central witness in a trial in California.
Eight months later, state and federal law enforcement officials are still trying to piece together a bizarre saga involving the deaths of six people in three states. Seven members of a group that was passionately vegan, mostly transgender, highly educated and following a charismatic and confessional blogger who called herself Ziz are now in jail, awaiting trial on charges ranging from trespass to murder. As the death count mounted, the story of what some news reports called a “murder cult” attracted national attention.
The Zizians, as they became known, were a contentious faction within a tech-heavy subculture known as the Rationalists, who are preoccupied with the dangers of artificial intelligence. The Zizians believed that veganism was essential to preventing an A.I. doomsday, and that the Rationalist establishment was hypocritical and covering up abuse and corruption.
But the passenger in the Prius that January day did not share the Zizians’ most outlandish beliefs or outsider status. A transgender woman known as Ophelia Bauckholt, she was a 28-year-old, highly paid analyst at a Manhattan trading firm, balancing a brimming social life with a devotion to helping vulnerable people. Her many friends have puzzled over the persistent mystery of how and why she vanished from New York City and, more than a year later, ended up dead on Interstate 91.
“Her life was clearly falling apart. She was really stressed, and she didn’t tell anyone about what was going on, and then she disappeared,” said Astra Kolomatskaia, a close friend. “So the story kind of cuts off there.”
Transcranial magnetic stimulation
Ms. Bauckholt arrived in New York City in 2021 for a new job that friends said paid at least $500,000 a year. Brilliant and frolicsome, she plunged into the city’s Rationalist scene, usually accompanied by an entourage of other trans women. She socked away money to give to charity, living on a tenth of her income.
A photo posted on social media after her death shows a grinning face with sunglasses and windblown, curly dark hair.
Still, she was far from ascetic. Her life was a heady mix of financial freedom, like-minded new friends and the “second puberty” brought on by hormone therapy. There were parties and polycules, experiments with injectable estrogen and a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine that Ms. Bauckholt and her friends used to activate parts of their brains.
“We were all young and kind of thought that we were invincible, capable and special, and had a history of playing with fire and throwing conventional wisdom out of the window,” said Ms. Kolomatskaia, a mathematician who was Ms. Bauckholt’s roommate the summer before she vanished.
Though Ms. Bauckholt was vegan and trans, she did not aggressively proselytize about either, friends said. At work, and to her family back home, she went by Felix.
Another New York Rationalist, Harry Altman, said he first bonded with Ms. Bauckholt over integer complexity, a mathematics concept, and came to admire her. “To me, it was like, if Ophelia does something, that is good evidence that it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
Born in Germany in 1996, Ms. Bauckholt — still Felix to people from her past — was highly intelligent and socially inept, a friend recalled, but seemed unbothered by her lack of friends. “Felix had principles,” the friend said. “He was the first one who as a kid went vegan.”
The child of two composers, Ms. Bauckholt excelled at the clarinet, but her passion was for mathematics, programming and video games. In 2014, she won a gold medal in a prestigious computer science competition, which landed her a scholarship at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
There, she wrote for the math journal, worked on the “stable marriage problem” (a method for determining optimal matches) and was a ruthless opponent in Humans vs. Zombies, a live action game. She created a goofy fan page for a favorite math professor.
At the beginning of her senior year, she donated $5,000 to purchase 1,100 mosquito nets. The nets would save approximately 1.4 lives, she posted on Facebook, along with a link to the underlying data. “I just finished my first tech internship (it was amazing!),” she wrote, “and I wanted to pay some of it forward.”
Ms. Bauckholt was embracing the principles of what is known as effective altruism, which encourages people to make sure their effect on the world is “net positive,” either by working for a good cause or taking a high-paying job in order to fund good causes.
The effective altruism movement heavily overlaps with Rationalism, a movement that at its core is an endeavor to think better. Rationalists, whose aspirations are evident in names like LessWrong, a community forum, and Overcoming Bias, the New York City meet-up group, try to minimize cognitive errors and constantly “update” their “cached” opinions based on new information.
In part because of the community’s devotion to open-mindedness, it attracts high numbers of trans and neurodivergent people. For the same reason, some participants flirt with extreme right ideology. Like the tech world more generally, the community is male-dominated and has been accused of encouraging norms of social and sexual freedom that provide cover for abusive behavior.
Ms. Bauckholt, who used the online handle @orellanin, a toxin found in mushrooms, was a playful and sometimes naïve participant in online Rationalist debates. In a thread about the inadequacy of responses to the question, “Why did you transition?” her list of reasons included “upset about my aging face,” “lanky tall girls are really pretty and there should be more of them,” “my body slowly changing in these preprogrammed ways just seemed really exciting” and “straight relationships are terrifying (not sure if this was a real reason or something I’m making up now).”
Another time, Ms. Bauckholt wrote, “I think of intelligence+integrity as an explosive combo. I’m drawn to people because of ongoing explosions or a sense that something might explode around them.”
There was another side to Ms. Bauckholt, an inherent drive to make the world a better place. One friend described her as a reliable “active bystander,” willing to go out of her way to protect people from abuse.
Ms. Bauckholt rarely posted on the Overcoming Bias New York City Discord channel. But in July 2022, she caused a furor when she named a Rationalist who had recently moved to New York, saying that she had seen evidence that the person had spied on and mistreated an ex, committing what Ms. Bauckholt called “willful persistent sexual misconduct.”
“I hope this info helps everyone stay safe,” she wrote.
Zizians in need
In the summer of 2022, a blogger known as Silver and Ivory, who wrote about ethics and trans rights, dropped off the radar.
Ms. Bauckholt may not have ever met Silver, who lived in California and also went by Suri Dao, in person. But she grew worried, and decided to offer a “bounty” for information. “How about $500 + an extra $1000 for Silver if Silver is alive?” she wrote to a friend. “Would that be rude by virtue of being too low, or suboptimally high, or a suboptimal structure in your mind?” She added, “Or double those numbers I guess.”
Silver, it would later become obvious, had joined the Zizians, who were living on a compound in Vallejo, Calif. The group’s struggles were a stark contrast to Ms. Bauckholt’s thriving career and social life.
Ziz, a 6-foot-2 Alaskan with a marble complexion and rumpled blond locks, had moved to the Bay Area in 2016 to join the Rationalist community. As she chronicled in her blog, Sinceriously, she had little luck holding a job, finding stable housing or persuading the Rationalist establishment to try her ideas. A plan to convince people to live on boats, called the Rationalist Fleet, fell apart, leaving a decrepit tugboat listing in Half Moon Bay.
Ziz became increasingly disillusioned and began trying to assemble “a cabal” of “abnormally intrinsically good people” and turn them into “Gervais-sociopaths” who would, like those at the top of the organizational hierarchy in “The Office,” the sitcom co-written by Ricky Gervais, be ruthless in achieving their goals. She referred to herself as “Darth Ziz, interim de facto leader of the vegan Sith,” a reference to a Star Wars sect that uses the dark side of the Force.
In 2019, Ziz and four friends were arrested after staging a protest at a Rationalist gathering, where they accused two of the movement’s key institutions of betraying their mission to protect humanity from A.I. and of covering up pedophilia and sexual abuse.
The resulting criminal case stalled in 2022 after the Coast Guard responded to a report that Ziz had gone overboard while sailing. A search and rescue effort proved fruitless, and on Sept. 7 an obituary appeared in The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
Some Rationalists denounced the Zizians as dangerous, noting among other things that two people who had engaged with their “mental tech,” including a method of trying to put half of their brains to sleep at a time, had killed themselves.
But others in the community were sympathetic, finding it easy to believe the group’s claim that it was the victim of mistreatment by law enforcement officers and that the Rationalist establishment was hypocritical. Ms. Bauckholt was in the latter camp. (The group objects to the name Zizians, saying Ziz is not its leader.)
She frequently discussed the Zizians, but as far as Ms. Kolomatskaia knew, the subject was little more than a conjectural pastime. “We’re like, ‘The Zizians are dropping like flies. Why don’t we prevent them from dying?’” she recalled. “It’s a curiosity. It’s a very fun thing to talk about every week.”
Still, Ms. Bauckholt was invested. She told a friend, according to a screenshot of a Discord chat, that based on their convictions, “you would have predicted that they’d become respected members of the Rationalist community, and instead uhhh people just talk about how they don’t want to hear anything about cults when I bring up stuff related to them.”
She later wrote that she was “pretty stressed once I got news that Ziz is allegedly dead.”
By November, any hope of saving the Zizians dimmed. Two members of the group, including Silver, were arrested after an attack on their landlord, who was stabbed multiple times and impaled with a sword. During the struggle, he shot and killed another Zizian, whom Ms. Bauckholt had interacted with online, in what the authorities said was self-defense. And Ziz, it turned out, was not dead. A person fitting her description was also at the scene, and was taken to a hospital by the police.
Ms. Bauckholt told a friend she was skeptical of law enforcement’s account of the episode and implied she had a connection with the group. “If your concern is that they’re dangerous to be around” because they are being targeted, she wrote in a Discord chat, that “also applies to me.”
Then, on New Year’s Eve, the parents of another of Ziz’s friends, Michelle Zajko, were shot in the head in their home in Chester Heights, Pa. The case remains unsolved, but the authorities have identified Ms. Zajko, who had written that her parents had verbally abused her, as a “person of interest.” When the police found Ms. Zajko, Ziz and a man named Daniel Blank in a hotel a couple of weeks after the deaths, they arrested them for obstruction of justice.
Ms. Bauckholt became secretive about her relationship to the Zizians. “At this point I don’t feel like telling you whether I’m friends with Ziz or not,” she wrote in a Discord chat, “but I do want to note that I’ve never said I was friends with Ziz.”
At the same time, she told another person that she had contributed money to help with Silver’s legal defense, according to Ms. Kolomatskaia. “She is very naïve and she’s very trusting,” Ms. Kolomatskaia said. “She gives people the benefit of the doubt, and also believes that a lot of systems in the world are unjust — like, the criminal justice system is unjust was one of her main beliefs.”
‘Sith lord Goth’
In June 2023, Ziz was released from jail in Pennsylvania. Around that time, Ms. Bauckholt’s friends noticed a distinct change in her behavior. She started having frequent, secretive phone calls, according to Ms. Kolomatskaia.
She stopped going to work and began to leave town every weekend, but did not say where she was going. “She was really stressed that summer,” Ms. Kolomatskaia said. “She wasn’t voluntarily, eagerly doing this.”
Other friends noticed, too. “I asked her what was going on and she was just like, ‘It’s a private matter,’” Mr. Altman said. “And so I didn’t really pry into it, because I trusted Ophelia.”
In November, Ms. Bauckholt disappeared from the New York area entirely and stopped responding to messages.
Unbeknown to her friends, she and some Zizians had rented two Airbnbs in a secluded neighborhood in Chapel Hill, N.C. They rode bicycles and had a style of dressing that Paul Lascara, a neighbor, described as “Sith lord Goth.”
The person he later identified from the news as Ms. Bauckholt was awkward, he said, jogging in the cul-de-sac in street clothes — “like a lackadaisical kind of dancing-jogging,” Mr. Lascara said.
There was no hint of violence, he said. But the Zizians were prepping for something, apparently converting box trucks into live-in vehicles.
In the wee hours of Feb. 13, 2024, a Prius registered to Ms. Bauckholt was captured on license plate cameras driving north through New York State toward Vermont, where Ms. Zajko had previously lived, according to a court filing.
That day and the next, Ms. Zajko bought four handguns at a gun store in Mount Tabor, Vt., the filing says.
In the border shootout almost a year later, the driver of the Prius, Ms. Youngblut, fired one of those guns, the authorities said. Ms. Bauckholt, they said, reached for another.
The net of law enforcement finally began to tighten around the Zizians after the death of the Border Patrol agent, David Maland, an Air Force veteran. On the West Coast, where two members of the cabal were already awaiting trial in the stabbing of the landlord, Curtis Lind, a 22-year-old man was arrested and charged in his murder. The man had been in a long romantic relationship with Ms. Youngblut.
In Maryland, Ziz, Mr. Blank and Ms. Zajko were arrested on charges of illegal gun possession, possession of LSD and trespassing on private land. Most recently, prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty for Ms. Youngblut. All have pleaded not guilty.
The weapons and deaths, as well as reports of medical supplies and surgical equipment found among their belongings, made it apparent to outsiders that the Zizians had turned from wanting to save the world from a vengeful A.I. to a far darker, less comprehensible mission.
As a Rationalist, though, Ms. Bauckholt was given to questioning assumptions. She may not have believed the Zizians’ more unconventional ideas, but she bought into the narrative that they had been forced underground by their willingness to call out powerful sex abusers and pedophiles. “I’ve basically spent the last two years (before I was captured) in home-brewed witness protection,” Ms. Zajko wrote in a 20-page letter released to journalists in March.
The Zizians were exactly what Ms. Bauckholt had long been on the lookout for: people who needed saving. She had the resources to fund an underground life — she and Ms. Youngblut had gone to Vermont to look at an off-the-grid property for sale. She believed the Zizians could not get a fair hearing, either by the Rationalist community or by the courts.
She was a crack mathematician who erred in her most consequential calculation of risk.
“You can give people the benefit of the doubt and you can have it not bite you for the longest time,” said Ms. Bauckholt’s friend, Ms. Kolomatskaia. “Until it does.”
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Germany.
Shaila Dewan covers criminal justice — policing, courts and prisons — across the country. She has been a journalist for 25 years.
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