Anna Moriah "Mo" Wilson

Turquoise Lake sits just outside Leadville, on the course of the Leadville Trail 100. In August 2021, Mo Wilson finished second there against the best mountain-bike field in the country. That is the tie to this race, and it is the reason we keep a page for her: she rode the ground we ride, and she rode it near the front.

She was killed in Austin in May 2022, a week short of her 26th birthday. The case that followed became a national story. We tell it below, plainly and from the record. But we start where she would want to be remembered, with the bike.

Anna Moriah Wilson was born on May 18, 1996, and grew up in Kirby, Vermont, in a family built around endurance and snow. Her parents, Eric and Karen Wilson, had both raced on the U.S. ski team. Sport was the household language, and Mo spoke it early.

She went to Burke Mountain Academy, the small Vermont ski school that has sent racers to the Olympics, and she lettered in alpine skiing, cycling, and soccer. As a junior she was nationally ranked on skis, taking third in the downhill at the 2013 U.S. Junior National Championships. Skiing looked like her path.

She carried it to Dartmouth College, where she skied for the women's alpine team and studied engineering. Friends and classmates from Thayer, the engineering school, remember someone who worked late into the evening on hard problems and still pushed everyone around her to take one more run before the lifts closed. She graduated in 2019 with an engineering degree.

Two torn ACLs took ski racing away from her. Rather than stop competing, she changed sports. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and took a job as a demand planner at Specialized Bicycles, the bike company, and started riding and racing seriously on the side. The talent transferred almost at once.

Those who knew her describe the same person again and again: a vivacious laugh, a wide smile, fierce loyalty, and a drive that was matched by how generous she was with other riders. Cyclingnews, in its remembrance, called her "all light and laughter." Her Dartmouth community called her "exceptional in every way."

Wilson turned from promising amateur to the top-ranked woman in American gravel in barely two seasons. She left the desk job at Specialized to race full time, backed by Specialized and among the sport's most-watched favorites, and by early 2022 she was winning almost everything she entered.

Her results across those two seasons read like a rider hitting a different gear than the field:

• 2nd, Leadville Trail 100 MTB — the marathon MTB classic in the Colorado high countryAug 2021
• 1st, Big Sugar Gravel, Bentonville, Arkansas — won the inaugural editionOct 2021
• 1st, Sea Otter Classic Fuego MTB 80K — took the early lead in the Life Time Grand Prix off-road seriesApr 2022
• 1st, Belgian Waffle Ride California — won by roughly 25 minutesApr 2022

At the time of her death she was the leading American woman in gravel and a favorite for the races still on her calendar. She was in Austin to train and to start a race in Hico, Texas, that weekend.

Wilson was staying with a friend in East Austin ahead of the weekend's race. On the evening of May 11, 2022, she went for a swim at Deep Eddy Pool with the cyclist Colin Strickland and had dinner with him afterward. He dropped her back at the friend's home.

Shortly before 10 p.m., her friend returned and found Wilson shot on the bathroom floor. She had been shot multiple times and could not be revived. Austin police called it a targeted killing from the start.

Investigators quickly focused on Kaitlin Armstrong, Strickland's girlfriend. Surveillance footage near the friend's home showed a vehicle matching her Jeep around the time of the shooting, and prosecutors would later argue the motive was jealousy over Wilson's brief relationship with Strickland.

Days after being questioned, Armstrong left the country. She sold her Jeep, flew out of Austin, and boarded an international flight from Newark to San José, Costa Rica, on a passport belonging to her sister. She spent the next weeks moving between towns under a string of aliases, teaching yoga for cash, and altering her appearance, including paying for cosmetic surgery on her nose and cutting and dyeing her hair.

The U.S. Marshals Service tracked her for 43 days. Working with Costa Rican authorities, they found her at a beachside hostel on Santa Teresa Beach on June 29, 2022, and returned her to Texas to face trial.

Kaitlin Armstrong's trial began in Travis County in late October 2023. On November 16, 2023, a jury found her guilty of first-degree murder after deliberating for less than three hours. The next day it sentenced her to 90 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

She is held at the Dr. Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, Texas, and under Texas law becomes eligible to seek parole after 30 years, around 2052. She had briefly escaped custody during a medical transport shortly before trial and was recaptured. In January 2026, Texas's Third Court of Appeals affirmed her conviction, finding no reversible error. Wilson's parents have also pursued civil action against Armstrong.

Wilson's death landed hard on women's gravel and mountain-bike racing, a sport she had done as much as anyone to lift. It also opened a wider conversation about safety for women athletes, on the road and off it.

Her family founded the Moriah Wilson Foundation, built around the line from her own journal, "to inspire people to ride bikes and be active," with a focus on positive body image for women and girls in sport. The foundation funds racing scholarships and one-to-one mentoring for young riders, and the cycling community has held "Ride for Mo" gatherings in her memory.

The case was covered at length by national news programs. These are complete, official uploads. Two more networks aired hour-long specials that are not on YouTube; they are linked at the end.

Two additional hour-long specials aired on network television and stream on their own platforms rather than YouTube:

• Dateline NBC, "The Last Ride" — a two-hour special reported by Keith Morrison (NBC / Peacock).
• ABC 20/20, "Three Shots in the Dark" — a two-hour episode on the murder, chase, and trial (ABC / Hulu).

When this race runs its stages past Turquoise Lake and up toward the passes, it runs over ground where Mo Wilson once raced to a podium. She was 25. She was the best American woman in her sport, and by every account she was kind about it.

We keep this page so that a rider who loved these mountains is not remembered only for how her life ended. Ride for Mo.

This happened in Austin, and the Austin press owned the story from the first night through the manhunt, the trial, and the appeals. For the local record, in our own words with links to theirs: