It was a gruesome discovery off a dirt road in Georgia. Hunters had found a body. Was it immediately clear to you that this woman had been murdered? Yes. But who was this mystery woman in the woods? That looks like Mindy. I'm Erin Moriarty, and from 48 hours, this is The Woman in the Woods. I've never wanted to be wrong like this in my whole entire life. Binge the full series of Woman in the Woods wherever you get your podcasts. The fabulous Mo Wilson, you are like ready. I'm ready. 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. I found Mo inside the residence. It was a pretty grisly scene. She even shot multiple times. 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. 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. She's starting to get the 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 a 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? He 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. 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 10th, 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. Austin police officers Mark McLeod and Jonathan Riley worked the case from the beginning. Whoever shot her at that point stood over top of her and shot her at least once. As they canvassed the immediate area, police discovered a possible clue. Mariah's expensive racing bicycle had been discarded in the bushes. But that theory was quickly dismissed because there was no sign of a break-in.
Then police learned that just hours before Mariah was found murdered, she was with another professional bike racer named Colin Strickland. They had spent the day together, and at around 8.30 p.m., he brought her home on the back of his motorcycle. Colin Strickland, who was 35, was considered a pioneer in the sport. He had won some of the most prestigious races and was sponsored by the industry's top brands, like Red Bull. Pretty early on, I looked up to Colin when I was coming up on the scene. Please welcome Chris Tolley!
Chris Talley is friends with Colin Strickland. They met on the racetrack. He was the one to beat. He loves 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. Mariah and Strickland are seen here on the restaurant's security camera. 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. The day after Mariah Wilson's murder, investigators quickly had an answer to who could have been driving that black Jeep that was seen on security cameras shortly before her death.
Investigators had spotted a similar-looking Jeep in Colin Strickland's driveway when they first spoke to him. Kaitlyn Armstrong, Colin Strickland's girlfriend. Chris Talley says he knew her very well. 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.
Strickland also shared that he had bought handguns for Armstrong and himself for personal security. Police worked quickly. That same day, investigators picked Caitlin Armstrong up on an old warrant for failing to pay for a Botox treatment. But investigators had to let Armstrong go. There was a problem. Armstrong's birthday did not match the date on the warrant, so the warrant wasn't valid. And police didn't have enough to charge her with anything else. Two days after that interview, police got an unexpected call. It was from a friend of Caitlin Armstrong. Police say the caller told them that Armstrong was so angry about Strickland's relationship with Mariah that she wanted to kill her. It was yet another indication that they were on the right track. A few days later, an arrest warrant was issued. But when police went looking for Caitlin Armstrong, she was gone.
Hi, I'm Tony DeCoppo, and as anchor of the CBS Evening News, I am filled with endless curiosity about our world and our society. Maybe you are too. My new podcast is called Great Question. It's an effort to capture that curiosity and to answer the question you haven't heard a satisfying answer to, or maybe haven't even heard asked. Follow and listen to Great Question with Tony DeCoppo wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Damien Fernandez and Amir Perez are deputy U.S. Marshals. They joined Austin police officers Jonathan Riley and Mark McLeod 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 New York. 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 absolutely no sense to any of us, that you would just drive back.
When the task force checked outbound flights at Newark Airport, no reservations had been made in Caitlin Armstrong's name. But the team had a hunch. Because Christy told the deputy marshal in New York that she didn't know where her passport was. So they checked with their contact at Homeland Security. And within minutes of reaching out to him, he got back to me and he's like, yeah, we're showing Christy Armstrong traveled out of Newark Futures International Airport on a one-way flight to Costa Rica.
The marshals suspected that Caitlin Armstrong had used her sister's passport to flee. Christy Armstrong later emphasized to authorities she did not give her sister the passport. She has never been charged with any crime related to this case. Marshals Amir Perez and Damien Fernandez arrived in Costa Rica a month after Armstrong. Although they would have help from the Costa Rican authorities and U.S. State Department officers on the ground, they knew finding Armstrong was going to be a big challenge. We had other intelligence indicating that she was staying in hostels in Costa Rica. And I don't know if you know anything about Costa Rica, but Costa Rica has a lot of hostels. A lot. An unbelievable amount of hostels. The marshals wouldn't tell us exactly how their intelligence gathering worked, but they believed that Armstrong had intentions of becoming a yoga instructor. Their team back in the States had managed to track down the phone number for an American businessman who they believed had connected with Caitlin Armstrong at some point.
And we actually end up sending a picture of Caitlyn while we're on the phone with him. He looks at it and he goes, yes, but she doesn't look like that and she's not using that name. Armstrong had cut her hair and changed its color. The businessman told them where they might find her. He's like, well, I met her at a yoga studio in Hakko. This is Hakko, a popular tourist destination known for its nightlife and its beaches and the perfect place to hide. It was the Marshall's first real tip, so they rushed out here.
They canvassed the area, combed through hours of surveillance video, but could not find a single sign of Caitlin Armstrong anywhere. It was a bust. But the Marshals had one more solid lead that would take them to a one-street town called Santa Teresa. One month after Caitlin Armstrong disappeared, the U.S. Marshals were in hot pursuit of her in another area of Costa Rica. A source had suggested she might have gone to a small village on the Pacific coast.
The marshals took a ferry like this one to reach a remote peninsula. Once there, they drove by car through those mountains to the tiny town of Santa Teresa. But when they finally arrived, they ran into an unexpected problem. To get to Santa Teresa, was it easy to identify her there from the other people that were there? I think from the get-go we were told, you're going to be in for a surprise because a lot of the women in Santa Teresa look just like a lot of them. And it turns out that advice was right. The town was full of foreign tourists, many of them who appeared to be into yoga. They kept hitting dead ends. Finally, they decided on one last tactic. They turned to a local Facebook page. We decided we were going to put an ad out for a yoga instructor and see what would happen.
But after almost a week of hunting, even that didn't seem to be working. We're going back to San Jose. Now back in San Jose, the marshals were getting ready to head home when suddenly... We got a bite. Somebody that identified herself as a yoga instructor and said, wanted to meet with us at a particular hostel. And we said, this is our chance. Deputy Marshals Perez and Fernandez rushed back to Santa Teresa, just ahead of a tropical storm.
Local authorities in Santa Teresa had done surveillance on a hostel called Don John's, where the yoga instructor, the one who answered the Amanat, was believed to be. It was now time for the marshals to make their move. So I walked up and I got in. They decided that Deputy Marshal Perez would approach the woman alone. They didn't want to scare her off. He would pretend to be a tourist and try to get a really good look at her face. And I saw two individuals sitting there at a table off to the left as soon as I walked in.
He says one was a woman. She looked like Caitlin, but not 100%. So I thought, well, how can I approach her or get close enough where I start asking questions where she doesn't suspect something? So I decided that I was gonna speak to her in Spanish. So I spoke to her in nothing but Spanish. So I got a little closer because I saw that she was trying to get to Google Translate on her phone and she'd raised it up to me and I got even closer and I noticed that she had a bandage on her nose and possibly her lips were swollen. And I saw her eyes. The eyes are the exact same ones that I saw in the picture. And this is her 100%.
Local police moved in to make the actual arrest. And soon, the marshals discovered why Armstrong had been so hard to find. She had been getting plastic surgery when they first arrived in Santa Teresa. At the hostel, they found a receipt. In these side-by-side photos, you can see that Armstrong changed the shape of her nose.
The Marshals took Armstrong back to Texas, where she was charged and held in jail. But just weeks before she was due to stand trial for the murder of Mariah Wilson, Caitlin Armstrong escaped again. Almost three weeks before her trial, former fugitive Caitlin Armstrong somehow managed to escape from custody. She was at a doctor's appointment and tried to escape as they were walking out. Pilar Melendez from the Daily Beast says Armstrong didn't get far before deputies caught her. It was pretty astonishing that she did that given the fact that she had tried to escape prosecution prior. On November 1st, 2023, Caitlin Armstrong's trial began. Her defense team did not respond to a 48-hour request for an interview. Prosecutors told the jury that Armstrong had been tracking Mariah using a sports app called Strava.
They said Armstrong's DNA was found on the handlebars of Mariah's bike that had been discarded in the bushes. When it was the defense's turn, they pointed the finger not at Armstrong, but at Colin Strickland, a theory that prosecutor Ricky Jones says is simply not true. In fact, at the time of the murder, he was actually on the phone speaking with someone. It wasn't Colin Strickland. After a two-week trial, it took the jury around two hours to decide Armstrong's fate. We, the jury, found the defendant, Caitlin Armstrong, guilty of the offensive murder.
One day after her conviction, Armstrong was sentenced to 90 years behind bars. Today, in Kingdom Trails in northern Vermont, a place that was sacred to Mariah, a trail was built in her honor. It's called Mariah's Asset. Mariah was a Vermonter. She was giving, she was hardworking, she was honest, she was caring. And she came from a wonderful family, and that family really wants that legacy and all of her good qualities to inspire others.
As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts.