How Did a Yoga Instructor Get Away With Murder for 43 Days? | Kaitlin Armstrong Case

How Did a Yoga Instructor Get Away With Murder for 43 Days? | Kaitlin Armstrong Case

Kaitlin Armstrong was a yoga instructor and real estate agent in Austin, Texas — composed, disciplined, and completely in control of how she appeared to the world. On May 11th, 2022, she shot professional cyclist Mo Wilson three times in a bathroom in East Austin. Then she sold her car for cash, flew to Costa Rica on her sister's passport, paid $6,000 for a nose job, and went surfing for 43 days. This is her case — and Mo Wilson's story.

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In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, we go beyond the love triangle narrative to look at what this case actually reveals — about identity built entirely on image, about anxious attachment and narcissistic injury, about the danger hiding inside someone who looks completely fine, and about what Colin Strickland knew and chose to manage around instead of warn anyone about.

This isn't a crime of passion. It's something colder than that. And it deserves a closer look.

In This Episode:

• Who Kaitlin Armstrong was before the crime — the image she constructed and what was underneath it

• Mo Wilson — Dartmouth engineer, nationally ranked skier, rising pro cyclist, and the person this story too often forgets to center

• Colin Strickland 

• The four months between January and May 2022 — tracking Mo on Strava, visiting a shooting range, and telling friends what she intended to do

• 43 days on the run — aliases, a Costa Rican surgeon, and the fake job listing that caught her

• The trial — two weeks of circumstantial evidence and a jury that deliberated for under three hours

• The 90-year sentence — and the grace Mo Wilson's mother showed in that courtroom

• The psychology behind it all — anxious attachment, narcissistic injury, and what premeditation actually looks like

Want more stories including the companion blog for this episode? https://www.gbrlife.com/blog/we-called-it-love-it-was-a-warning

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Transcript

Kaitlyn: 0:00

It is Wednesday, May 11th, 2022, Austin, Texas. The kind of place where everyone was building something. A family, an identity, a life that looked exactly the way they wanted it to look. At approximately 10 o'clock in the evening, a young woman named Kaitlin Cash comes home to her apartment in East Austin. She's been out. She was not expecting to find anything except a friend who had been staying with her. A cyclist, 25 years old, preparing for a big race in a small Texas town called Heiko. What she finds instead stops her at the bathroom door. Three gunshot wounds, two to the head, one to the chest. The chest shot came last, according to forensic evidence. The other two had already dropped her to the floor before the final bullet arrived. Her name was Anna Mariah Wilson. Everyone called her Mo. She was, by every account available, one of the most gifted gravel cyclists in the country. A dart-mouth engineer turned professional athlete, a woman her peers described as joyful and generous and deeply, genuinely kind. She was 25 years old, and she had a race in two days. The woman who had killed her was a 34-year-old yoga instructor and real estate agent named Kaitlin Armstrong. It was the behavior of someone who had already decided, long before she walked up to that apartment, exactly what came after. She sold her car for cash. She deleted every social media account. She flew to New York and then to Costa Rica. She paid $6,000 for a nose job, changed her hair. She found a hostel near a surf beach and introduced herself to people as a teacher, a traveler, a woman with nowhere particularly to be. She was gone for 43 days. Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlin, and you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them. Today, we're going to talk about a case that looks, on the surface, like a simple story about jealousy, a love triangle, a crime of passion. But I don't think it's that simple at all, because the most interesting question in Kaitlin Armstrong's case is not whether she did it. The evidence answered all of that. The question is, what kind of person watches the woman they are about to kill go inside an apartment, raise a gun, and then spend the next six weeks building a new life on a beach? And what did it cost everyone around her that nobody saw it coming? To understand Kaitlin Armstrong, you cannot start with Austin or Colin Strickland or Mo Wilson. You have to start in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb 20 miles west of Detroit. The kind of place built on the promise of stability, of modest achievement, of a life that holds its shape. Split levels and good school districts and families who went to the same places every Sunday and called it life. Kaitlin was born in 1987. She was athletic. Volleyball, track, field, basketball, she was social. Her senior yearbook had her voted for best hair. That specific detail is almost too on-brand to be real. And yet, it matters in a way you might not expect. Because what it tells us is that even at 17, what Kaitlin Armstrong was known for was how she presented, how she looked, the surface. And her father, Michael Armstrong, is a man who stood by his daughter through everything. At sentencing, he testified to her character. He described her as strong, as someone who does not get flustered by things. He sat in a Texas courtroom and looked at a jury that had found his daughter guilty of murder. And then he spoke about her with what can only be described as genuine love. Not easily flustered, though. That phrase is going to matter. And here's what we know about Kaitlin Armstrong's inner life in her early years. Almost nothing. And that's not an accident. People who knew her described her as quiet, health conscious, focused on wellness. She moved through spaces without leaving much of an impression beyond the presentational. She was fit. She was attractive. But she was composed. And what was underneath that composure? Well, nobody seems to have actually asked or had a reason to ask. And after high school, she took a conventional path, community college. Then Eastern Michigan University, she studied finance. She found yoga. At some point, she became a certified instructor, reportedly training in Indonesia. She became a licensed realtor as well. And she built a life that was on every visible surface about discipline and health and self-improvement. But here's what psychologists will tell you about people who construct identity primarily through image and discipline. The self underneath can be remarkably fragile. When your sense of who you are lives on the surface in how you look, in how you perform, in how others see you, any threat to that surface feels like a threat to everything, not your pride, but your pride. But to your existence. And then she eventually landed in Austin. And in October of 2019, she matched with a man on a dating app. His name? Colin Strickland. He was a professional cyclist, four-time winner of one of the most grueling gravel races in the country. He was exactly the kind of person who would fit the life Kaitlin Armstrong was building. Physical, ambitious, admired in a specific world. And they began a relationship. It was, by Colin's own later testimony, tumultuous. On and off, he questioned their long-term compatibility. She managed his finances, and they formed an LLC together. They bought property, and she embedded herself in his world, in his schedule, in the infrastructure of his career. She went to his races, and she ran the books. Yes, every single thing you're hearing is a red flag. not just of her, but of him too. Why continue to allow someone to enmesh themselves totally in your life? Why enmesh yourself totally in someone's life, especially when the two of you know you're not compatible, especially long-term? But this pattern, total immersion in a partner's world, coupled with growing possessiveness. It's one that clinicians recognize because it's not love in the straightforward sense. It's closer to what psychologists describe as anxious attachment, where the relationship becomes not a complement to a stable self, but the container of it. When that container is threatened, the response is not proportionate because what is at stake does not feel proportionate. And in September of 2021, at a gravel race in Idaho called Leadville, a 25-year-old cyclist named Anna Mariah Wilson placed third among women, and her peers were watching. The cycling world was beginning to understand that something exceptional was happening with Mo Wilson. She had been a competitive skier, trained at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, and graduated from Dartmouth with an engineering degree. and she worked as a demand planner for a major bike company. And then she decided to go pro in gravel cycling, where the distances were brutal and the margins are everything and she has become someone people started to talk about. That September, Colin Strickland was also at Leadville and he and Kaitlin Armstrong at that moment were broken up. Colin and Mo met there and they began a brief romantic relationship. About a week by Colin's account. While he and Kaitlin were apart. Wilson went back to California. Colin and Kaitlin reconciled and resumed their relationship. And Colin later stated. After they got back together, his relationship with Mo became professional and, frankly, platonic. They saw each other at races. They texted. He saved her number in his phone using a different name because, as he later told investigators, she had gone through his phone before and he did not want to start any issues. So he hid her contact information from his own girlfriend because he had learned, presumably, from the past experiences that Kaitlin Armstrong would find it and react to it. And he was managing her. He had built a workaround into his daily life for her jealousy. And he had thought that this was enough. It was not enough. And in January of 2022, an anonymous friend later told police, Kaitlin Armstrong discovered that Colin had been romantically involved with Mo Wilson during the breakup. Whether or not you agree, Kaitlin was still furious. And she told a friend that she wanted to harm Wilson. That same month, she and Colin went to a shooting range together, and Kaitlin practiced with a Sig Sawyer P365. And it was the exact gun that would later be identified as the murder weapon. She told another friend that she had either recently purchased a firearm or was going to. And she also began monitoring Mo Wilson's location through a cycling app called Strava, where Mo logged her training rides. Every run, every route, every visit to a city was right there. A digital trail, publicly visible, updated in real time. Kaitlin Armstrong was watching Mo officially. And what I want you to look at in this moment is the timeline between January and May of 2022. Four months during which Kaitlin Armstrong was, by every public appearance, living her life. teaching yoga, working in real estate, going to the grocery store, making dinner, existing in the ordinary rhythms of an ordinary day. And simultaneously, she was tracking a woman that she had decided to harm. That capacity to hold violence in one hand and normalcy in the other for months without anyone noticing the weight. It's not a crime of passion in the way that we usually mean that phrase. It is something else. And it tells us something important about who Kaitlin Armstrong was, who she was underneath all that discipline and that wellness routine and that carefully maintained surface. But then there's Moe, Moe Wilson, because in every version of the story that gets told, and there have been many. Most recently in that Netflix show, all about her. And why? Because she often becomes a backdrop to her own story, the object of a love triangle, the reason for the jealousy. But she was so much more than that. She grew up in Kirby, Vermont, in an athletic family. She was nationally ranked junior skier before she discovered gravel cycling. And she graduated from darts miles, which I've mentioned a couple of times now, but that's a big deal. and she graduated with an engineering degree. That's hard enough. But to graduate from darts mouth in addition to being that athletic? And then she worked for that product planning company. She wouldn't stop there. She was clearly a very ambitious person, trying to decide how much further she could go as a professional racer. And then in that sense, it was pretty far as it turned out. And in the cycling world, the people who knew her described her as someone who was not only physically gifted, but she was genuinely joyful. She brought a warmth to a sport and everyone around her that could be just beautiful and wonderful. People were starting to say her name in the best possible way. It's like she was all of the things that you could imagine a perfect person to be. No, she wasn't perfect, but it didn't matter because she was becoming popular like she was. And on the evening on May 11th, 2022, Moe Wilson had dinner with Colin Strickland. They had gone for a swim together earlier in the day at a public pool in Austin. Something Strickland later said that he kept from Kaitlin because he did not want any drama. He dropped Mo off at Kaitlin Cash's apartment around 8.30 in the evening, and he drove away. One minute later, surveillance footage from a neighbor's camera showed a black Jeep Grand Cherokee driving slowly past the apartment. And that was the last thing Mo Wilson did on this earth. Because prosecutors said, next, screams were captured on a neighbor's surveillance audio. And then, three shots. 25 years old. And she had a race in two days. And she was by any measure just beginning her life. This is the moment that everything stops being about jealousy and becomes something else entirely. because the morning after the murder, police interviewed Kaitlin Armstrong. She was calm, cooperative, but she gave nothing away. The following day, she sold her Jeep Grand Cherokee, the same vehicle caught on a surveillance footage. To a local CarMax dealership for cash. She got $12,000 for it. Then she flew from Austin to Houston to LaGuardia in New York, and she was carrying her sister Christine's passport. She landed in Costa Rica and made her way to Santa Teresa, a small beach town on the Nicoya Peninsula, the kind of place that attracts people who are looking for something or running from something in roughly equal measure. And she found a hostel. She introduced herself using multiple aliases. She took yoga classes. She went surfing. She paid a Costa Rican surgeon roughly$6,000 to operate on her nose, changing the bridge of it, and wore a bandage she later claimed was from a surfing injury. Then she cut her hair and dyed it. She basically erased herself and started building a new person out of the materials available. The U.S. Marshals found her not through a witness tip or a mistake with a credit card, but through something more fitting for the person she was. They placed a fake job listing in Costa Rica advertising for a yoga instructor, and someone who matched her description responded. When they moved in to make the arrest, she identified herself as Ari Martin. A deputy named Damien Fernandez later recalled what happened when he asked her in custody what her real name was. She looked at him a long time, a full minute, he said, and then she said, Kaitlin, just the one name, just Kaitlin. She was extradited back to Texas in July of 2022, and she was held on a $3.5 million bail. And approximately six weeks before her trial was scheduled to begin, while being escorted to a medical appointment outside the jail, she ran again. Officers said that she slipped through her restraints and ran, leading them on a chase through a residential neighborhood before being caught half a block a mile away. It clearly did not help her case. And then the trial of Kaitlin Armstrong began on October 30th, 2023 in Austin, Texas. It lasted two whole weeks. The prosecution came with a case built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence, and it was devastating. Surveillance footage of her SUV at the scene. GPS data placing her at the vicinity of the time of death. Cell phone data. Her DNA recovered from Moe Wilson's bicycle, which had been moved from the porch to the bushes sometime that night. Ballistics analysis showing a significant probability match between the shell casings found at the scene and Armstrong's registered Sig Sawyer. Digital evidence from Strava showing Armstrong had been tracking Wilson's location and testimony from two friends that Armstrong had said out loud that she had wanted to harm Mo Wilson. The defense argued circumstantial. They pointed to an unidentified DNA profile found at the scene that did not match Armstrong. They argued that the Austin Police Department had gotten tunnel vision, that they had a story about a spurred, jealous lover and had built their case entirely around it. Defense attorney Jim Coffer said in closing that Armstrong had been trapped in a nightmare of circumstantial evidence. He told the jury that she fit the story that had been created for her. And that fitting a story was not the same as being guilty. He was not wrong that narratives can be dangerous in a courtroom, but the jury had two weeks of evidence to weigh against it. And on November 16th, 2023, the jury deliberated for fewer than three hours, and they returned a verdict of guilty. The following day, the same jury sentenced Kaitlin Armstrong to 90 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The prosecution had asked for a minimum of 40 years. The jury gave her more than twice that. Armstrong showed no reaction as the sentence was read. Her father described her at sentencing as someone who does not get flustered. And standing there in that courtroom, with 90 years settling over her, she appeared to prove him right. Mo Wilson's mother, Karen, said the sentence was fair. She said she hoped Armstrong would find peace and forgiveness in prison. That grace, under those circumstances, is one of the more remarkable things that I think that I've ever read in many of these types of episodes. But it does speak loudly as to why Mo was the way she was. And the easy version of Kaitlin Armstrong's story is that the love triangle is the whole reason. Man cheats, woman gets jealous, woman kills the rival. It is, as her own defense attorney acknowledged, closing a story easy to tell because it connects to something ancient and familiar in our cultural imagination. The spurred woman. The romantic rage. The passion that tips over into violence. But that version stops being useful the moment you look at the 43 days. A crime of passion ends when the passion ends. You act in the heat of it, and then you are left in the wreckage of what you did, and the wreckage changes you. What Kaitlin Armstrong did was not that. She drove to that apartment having already purchased a weapon and practiced with it. She drove there having told other people what she intended to do, and when it was done, she had a plan ready. The car sale, the passport, the flight, the surgeon, the aliases, the beach town. This was premeditation. Not in the legal sense only, but in the psychological sense. The ability to hold an intention inside yourself, intact, across months of an ordinary life, and then execute it and immediately redirect toward survival. That's not passion. That's a kind of cold architecture. And I think that this is where psychology gets genuinely interesting and genuinely dark. Because Kaitlin Armstrong is not the kind of woman this story usually stars, she was not visibly disturbed. She had no prior criminal history, except a skipped Botox bill, which I didn't mention because it's a very tiny medical bill. And she was, by every external mention, a normal person with a yoga practice and a real estate license and a relationship that she was fiercely committed to. And what the trial revealed was someone whose identity had become so fused with her relationship to Colin Strickland that the threat Mo Wilson represented felt total, not just romantic competition, annihilation. Kaitlin managed his money. She was embedded in his career. She had built her Austin life around him and with him. And when she discovered that during their brief separation, he had been with someone as extraordinary as Mo Wilson, someone young and rising and genuinely remarkable, the threat was not just that he might leave. It was that there was a version of his world in which she simply did not exist. Clinicians sometimes talk about what they call narcissistic injury, the specific kind of wound that happens when someone who's self-worth is contingent on external validation. And when this encounters a direct challenge to that validation, that's when you get narcissistic injury. And the response to narcissistic injury can look like ordinary jealousy from the outside. Inside, though, it feels like obliteration. And the impulse is not to grieve or adjust. It's to eliminate the source of the wound. And I want to be careful here because I'm not diagnosing Kaitlin Armstrong with a clinical label from the outside. But what I am saying is that the pattern of her behavior, at least, the obsessive monitoring, the months of contained rage, the total absence of visible distress, the methodical flight, is consistent with someone whose sense of self is organized around control and who responds to loss of control with something that goes far beyond what the situation might seem to call for. And then there's Colin Strickland, who hid his contact with Mo Wilson, who deleted their messages, who renamed her in his phone, who told investigators that he knew Kaitlin had gone through his messages before and he didn't want to start any issues. Well, Colin Strickland did not pull a trigger and he's not legally responsible for what happened. But there is a question this case leaves open that I do not think gets asked enough. What do you owe to the people whose lives overlap with someone you know is dangerously possessive? He knew, he managed around it and Mo Wilson, who had no reason to understand what was watching her, died for it. Now, I'm sure you're thinking that's an accusation, but it's more a question. And it's the kind of question this case earns. Either way, Kaitlin Armstrong is currently incarcerated in Gatesville, Texas, and she will be eligible for parole in 2052. She will be 64 years old. And in January of 2026, a Texas appeals court upheld her conviction, finding no reversible error in the original trial. A civil suit was brought by Mo Wilson's family, resulting in a $15 million judgment against Armstrong. A judgment designed specifically to ensure that if she ever attempts to profit from her story through books or film, that money goes directly to the Wilsons instead. And in April of 2026, a documentary called The Truth and Tragedy of Mariah Wilson premiered at South by Southwest. It tells Moe's story, her life, her career, what was taken from her, and from everyone who loved her. Mo Wilson is buried in Vermont. Her parents still race in cycling events that bear her name. Her friend, Kaitlin Cash, who had found her on that bathroom floor and called 911 and who sat in the courtroom and told the jury what she had seen, she said to Armstrong in her victim impact statement, I want you to know that I fought for Mo. And what I keep returning to in all of this is that Mo Wilson did nothing wrong. She had a brief relationship with a man who was, at the time, unattached. She kept a friendship that she had every right to keep. She logged her bike rides on an app, the way athletes do, never imagining that someone was using them to find her. And she screamed in the bathroom in Austin, Texas. And then she was gone. And the woman who killed her went surfing. And this case asks us to look at something that we would rather not look at directly, The kind of danger that lives inside a certain kind of controlled, composed, outwardly healthy person. Someone who presents themselves well. Someone who seems fine. Someone who can hold a plan inside themselves for four months between yoga classes and real estate appointments. And feel nothing that the people around them can see. The question this case leaves me with is not about Kaitlin Armstrong. She's been answered, to the extent that a jury and 90 years of a sentence can answer a person. But the question is about Colin Strickland, who hit the contact and said nothing. And about the systems that we built. Romantic, social, legal. For managing the kind of jealousy that most people would recognize as warning signs, but then continue to live around it anyways. And about what it costs us as a culture to treat possessiveness as love, to read obsession as devotion, to assume that the person who seems the most composed is the person who is the most okay. Mo Wilson was 25 years old and she was going to be extraordinary. Frankly, she was extraordinary at 25 and she deserved to find out how far that was going to take her. This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions, and I'm also Kaitlyn reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light. Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought we knew about the criminal mind. Hey, it's Kaitlyn. If you stayed this long, thank you, but a quick ask to like and subscribe each time you listen to GBRLIFE Transmissions. And don't forget to check out the reviews or blogs on gbrlife.com. Can't wait to see you there.