Waterloo Region Record
February 22, 2025
A friend says she warned Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt about the dangers of becoming involved with the “Zizians,” a cultlike group linked to six homicides, including the January shootout with border agents in Vermont that claimed the lives of Bauckholt and an officer.
Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt knew how to play a human, but she excelled as a zombie.
Bauckholt, who used she/her pronouns, could survive the week at one of the University of Waterloo’s Humans vs. Zombies events by completing missions, armed with Nerf guns and sock weaponry. Once the zombie, she would attempt to infect humans by tagging them.
“When she was playing as a zombie, she could catch other players by learning their class schedule and then finding a good hiding spot by the exit of their lecture hall so she could lie in wait to pounce,” one Waterloo schoolmate from 2017 recounts.
“She was the type to go all-in and attend the midnight drop one evening and then be back out hunting at the crack of dawn the next day.”
Bauckholt was a math prodigy from Germany who had won medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics and came to study at Waterloo in 2015 as a recipient of the prestigious Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Olympiad Scholarship.
She graduated, moved to the United States and began a career that many could only dream of. By 2023, she was earning close to half a million dollars working as a quantitative trader using complex mathematical models for a New York trading company, living in an apartment in New Jersey and surrounded by a large circle of friends.
Then she disappeared.
On Jan. 20, Bauckholt was pulled over by border agents on Interstate 91 in Vermont. Prosecutors allege her companion, Teresa Youngblut, pulled out a gun and began firing at the agents. FBI documents say Bauckholt pulled out her own gun and was shot and killed, along with border agent David “Chris” Maland.
Cult connections
In the ensuing days, connections between Bauckholt and a cultlike group known as the “Zizians” emerged, a collection of highly educated vegan and transgender members, mostly in their 20s and 30s, with connections to five other homicides across the United States.
The group appears to share bonds over topics like radical veganism, gender identity and artificial intelligence, though much is still being learned about their connections, objectives and leader, Jack LaSota, or “Ziz,” who was arrested on Sunday along with two other alleged members.
“I feel like the person I knew and the person I am grieving is stuck in a time capsule,” said Lily Horne, a fellow math major at Waterloo who was friends with Bauckholt. “There is a lot of trying to understand the pieces of the puzzle that have been laid before us.”
Mathematicians are taught that with every proof, you have to justify how to get from one step to the other, she said.
“How was each step in this proof justified, and what definitions were used here? It’s just so disorienting because I can still hear their voice in my head and see their face, and it’s just like: what happened?”
On the surface, Bauckholt’s time at Waterloo appeared relatively normal. Waterloo is home to one of the world’s top math programs, with more than half of any incoming class earning averages in high school above 95 per cent.
Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt was a math prodigy from Germany.
Just to be accepted is an achievement; Bauckholt was specifically recruited, earning a full-ride scholarship.
Horne said Bauckholt was involved in computer science and pure math clubs, wrote for mathNEWS, worked as an orientation leader for incoming math students and even created a fan page for one of their favourite instructors.
Their Facebook page shows it was at Waterloo where she first attended an Effective Altruism Waterloo talk on moral uncertainty, the beginning of a series of events she attended until at least 2023 before her disappearance, her Facebook page shows.
It was during this period after graduation that Bauckholt transitioned to “Ophelia,” and began using female pronouns.
Jessica Taylor met Bauckholt at a rationalist event in New York City in 2022, and spent about a year in her orbit. Taylor, an AI researcher, would spend time at Bauckholt’s apartment in New Jersey, where conversations started to focus on LaSota, or “Ziz.”
Taylor said Bauckholt was particularly interested in things like effective altruism, ethics, ethical veganism, mathematics and decision theory. Those were similar interests to LaSota, who wrote extensively on a blog about their beliefs, including a theory that the brain is contrived of two hemispheres that can hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.”
Taylor had concerns about LaSota, and told Bauckholt.
“We had a conversation about the dangers about this group, and I told her that some people might end up dead if they are going off, cutting off contact with everyone, and going to live with this group,” she said.
“From what I gather from mutual friends, in the summer of 2023 she began having secretive phone calls, and then went off in late 2023 and just cut off contact with everyone, which is exactly what I had warned her about.”
Taylor believes she then went off to meet with co-conspirators, but doesn’t know the exact steps, as everything was kept secret. The Associated Press reports Bauckholt began renting half a duplex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in July 2023.
Bauckholt and Taylor never spoke again.
When she read about Bauckholt’s killing in January, she was among the first to publicly link the death with the Zizian group.
“I made the Ziz connection before others did in public, and I’ve been looking for more information to back that up. Instead of maybe having a depressive grief response, I thought that I can do something about this and decided to post about it on the internet.”
A ‘textbook’ case
Lorne Dawson, a sociology professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, spent 20 years studying new religious movements, wrestling with why some eventually turn violent. When the Canadian government asked him to use that expertise on terrorism, he spent the next 20 years focusing on the process of radicalization.
He retired about two years ago but, after reading about Bauckholt, he decided to start looking into what he calls a “textbook” case.
“The vast majority of people who get involved in new religious groups, and to some degree terrorist groups, are generally kind and empathetic. And because they have that background, they really feel upset about injustices in this world,” Dawson said.
“So, being an empathetic, generous person actually draws you in more, which leads to a belief that you need to do something more.”
With Bauckholt, he said, you have a person who is exceptionally talented in mathematics and stands out from the crowd in a way that likely didn’t make them the most popular kid in school.
“Most people who join new religious movements are overachievers,” Dawson said. “They are not the losers that public discourse likes to think they are.”
In many instances, family members of people who were involved in cults believed they had been preyed upon and radicalized. But the research has shown that in almost all cases, these people had been struggling with issues of identity for years and were cloaking the uncertainty by buying in to societal norms and outwardly succeeding, Dawson said.
When success comes and the inner turmoil continues, it can lead someone to find a cause that feels true to them.
“When they find the group or when they find the leader, they find like-minded souls. They don’t just have some nice people they met in residence at university, they find people who seem to have gone through the same experience and seem to get it. Or they might find people who appear to have figured it out,” Dawson said.
“Those social ties, that bonding, is the key element to then getting people to start to undertake actions that are way more extreme than they ever would have anticipated doing on their own.”
While much is still unknown about the inner workings of the Zizians and their belief system, Dawson said its leader appears to have traits similar to those of other new religious movements.
“They appear to be a charismatic prophetic figure with a powerful sense of imagination and putting a form or shape to this amorphous process, and that is going to be wildly appealing to somebody who themselves is still struggling.”
LaSota was arrested Sunday along with two other people believed to be Zizians. They face charges of trespassing, obstructing and hindering and possession of a handgun in the vehicle.
With LaSota in custody, law enforcement should learn more about the group and the circumstances that led to Bauckholt’s death.
“These kinds of occurrences are statistically rare,” Dawson said, but they do exist. “People find themselves in these circumstances with a certain regularity. In terms of numbers, it’s small, but in terms of occurrence, it keeps happening.
“It’s a very destabilizing event to society because it implies that things are fundamentally insecure and you never know when something horrible is going to happen. That is true of the individuals that get trapped in these very extreme scenarios.”
At any moment, there are between 2,000 and 3,000 new religious movements operating in the United States. Dawson estimates there are a few hundred operating in Canada.
“It is tricky because when you hear this story, you have to wonder: could anyone have stopped Ophelia? Probably not,” Dawson said.
https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/how-a-waterloo-math-genius-died-in-a-shootout-after-joining-vegan-transgender-death-cult/article_7dd28abc-e5f8-5506-9941-ae10c0f7946a.html
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