A promising young athlete is murdered. Her suspected killer disappears and an international manhunt by U.S. Marshals begins. Jonathan Vigliotti reports. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who was Mo Wilson?
I'm here with the fabulous Mo Wilson. You are, like, ready. I'm ready, yeah. I'm so excited to be here.
Her name was Mariah, but everybody called her Mo. My name is Pilar Melendez, and I am a senior reporter with The Daily Beast. Funny and friendly and smart and driven, Mo was a rising star. What happened to Mo was a tragedy.
They found Mo inside the residence. It was a pretty grisly scene. She had been shot multiple times.
Chapter 2: What happened to Mo Wilson?
At first, detectives thought it was a robbery.
You're looking into this possibility of a robbery or a burglary, but parallel to that, there is this name, Colin Strickland. Sure.
Chapter 3: Who is Colin Strickland and his connection to Mo?
Colin's relationship with Mo, like, was... Like, they were both bike racers. They had, like, a romantic relationship.
Colin said they had broken up. The situation was complicated. There was another woman in Colin's life. Her name was Caitlin Armstrong. Homicide detectives were very interested in talking to Caitlin Armstrong.
He's starting to get this sense that there could be some jealousy to it.
At this point, she kind of disappears. No one knows where she is.
Caitlin Armstrong vanished, seemingly in the thin air, sparking what would become an international manhunt, first leading authorities across the United States and then eventually here to the beaches of Costa Rica. Along the way, she used multiple identities and changed her appearance, even getting plastic surgery. How smart was Caitlin Armstrong?
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Chapter 4: What do we know about Caitlin Armstrong?
She did some pretty intelligent things. The thing that people don't know is you don't have to be just smarter than one, two, three, or four of us because there's a team of 20 plus people. You have to be smarter than a lot of people to get away with it.
It almost worked. It almost worked.
Up-and-coming pro gravel bike racer Mariah Wilson, known as Moda Sum, appeared happy and enthusiastic just months before she was found murdered.
I don't think anybody could really believe it at first. You know, why would anybody want to hurt or harm or kill this lovely, talented young woman?
Lisa Gosselin-Lynn is the editor of Vermont Sports Magazine and Vermont Ski and Ride Magazine. She's also a CBS News consultant.
Mariah Wilson right there coming in.
Lynn had been following the Vermont native's career for many months before her tragic death.
Mariah had the potential to be one of the top bike racers definitely in the country and probably in the world.
On May 10, 2022, just one week before her 26th birthday, Mariah arrived in Austin, Texas, to prepare for the Gravel Locos bike race, a race she was favored to win. Mariah stayed with a close friend in this Austin apartment. But the next evening, just before 10 p.m., the friend returned home and discovered Mariah, who had been shot multiple times.
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Chapter 5: What evidence linked Caitlin Armstrong to the crime?
Pretty early on, I looked up to Colin when I was coming up on the scene.
Please welcome Chris Tolley.
Chris Tolley is friends with Colin Strickland. They met on the racetrack.
He was the one to beat. He loved to kind of create a show around bike racing, kind of selling bike racing. He was really passionate about it.
Talley said his friend had been popular with women. Strickland had briefly dated Mariah, but it was short-lived. He was serious with a woman named Caitlin Armstrong. The day after Mariah's murder, police visited and spoke to Colin Strickland at his home.
My personal take was he was being very cooperative, being very forthcoming. Obviously, he was in shock. Being very transparent. Very transparent, yeah.
And investigators say when he agreed to go down to the police station to be interviewed, he didn't seem to hold back when telling them about the day he spent with Mariah, a day that would end up being her last. They went swimming, then they got food. Mariah and Strickland are seen here on the restaurant's security camera.
I know he's being transparent at this point during this questioning, but what he's saying is starting to sound a lot like a date. Oh yeah, 100%. Investigators had a lot of questions, and they would soon have more. On the night of Mariah's murder, police discovered an important clue on video from a neighbor's security camera. The video was taken just one minute after Mariah was dropped off.
There's a video from a ring doorbell camera that clearly shows like a black SUV with a bike rack. Can't see the license plate because of the bike rack on it.
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Chapter 6: How did investigators track Caitlin Armstrong?
They see a black Jeep with the bike rack on the back of it. So at that point, we run the license plate and it comes back that it's registered to Caitlin Armstrong.
Caitlin Armstrong, Colin Strickland's girlfriend. Chris Talley says he knew her very well.
She had a really strong, you know, kind of, you know, love for travel. You know, she'd spent time pretty much, you know, globe hopping around the world. Really, you know, kind of interesting person.
Armstrong had a background in finance and loved yoga. Armstrong and Strickland had been together for approximately three years and even lived together, but hit a rough patch and that's when Strickland briefly dated Mariah. Their relationship only lasted a short time before Strickland got back together with Armstrong.
When police asked Strickland about his relationship with Armstrong, he had a lot to say.
He starts to portray her as being the jealous type, even saying things like, I can't keep people in my phone like Mo's not in my phone as Mo.
Strickland told investigators he kept Mariah's phone number under an alias in his contacts, and on that evening after he'd been out with Mariah, he texted Armstrong that he'd been running an errand and that his phone had died. That was not true. Investigators say there were other clues pointing toward Caitlin Armstrong.
on the night of the murder, Caitlin Armstrong's phone was not connected to a cell network. In this day and age, if your phone is off and not connected to a network, you're either the victim of a crime or you're probably committing one.
A silent phone speaks louder in some cases than actions. Oh, absolutely. Strickland also shared that he had bought handguns for Armstrong and himself for personal security.
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Chapter 7: What was the motive behind the murder?
After Caitlin Armstrong vanished,
U.S. Marshals got the job of tracking her down.
We look for friends. Sometimes we look for family.
One of the things that I did was collect as many photos as I could.
Damian Fernandez and Amir Perez are deputy U.S. Marshals. They joined Austin police officers Jonathan Riley and Mark McCloud on the case. The team, based in Texas, is known as the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force. With no sign of Caitlin Armstrong, the task force suspected Armstrong may have left town, headed for her sister Christy's place in upstate New York.
We were thinking maybe she's driving cross country. We didn't know.
Their instincts were right. In upstate New York, another deputy marshal managed to track down Armstrong's sister.
What did the sister say? The sister ultimately said that her sister had come to visit her, had stayed with her a couple of days, but that she had dropped her off at the airport in Newark. And last she heard, she was going to board a flight back to Austin, but then called her back later and said that she decided that she was going to drive back.
Which made absolute no sense to any of us that you would just drive back.
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