How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?
Ophelia Bauckholt was killed in a shootout with U.S. Border Patrol agents in northern Vermont — an unlikely end to a life that held so much promise.
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.
Rating: 5