This Is the Story of a Murder Trial

On the first Tuesday in November, everyone went swimming at the Barton Springs Municipal Pool in Austin, Texas. There was Karen and Eric Wilson, and Eric’s sisters Laura and Andrea, and his brother Rod and Rod’s wife, Clare. Caitlin Cash and her dad were there, too—Cash is from Austin and it was probably her thousandth time in the pool since she was a kid.

The crew was bobbing along side by side in the glassy water, laughing and chatting, a row of silvery heads moving in sync toward the deep end, where there’s a view of the downtown skyline. Karen and Eric’s son, Matt, showed up with a couple of friends 15 minutes later. They dropped their things on the lawn and slid down the algae-covered stairs into the pool to join everyone.

Swimming outside in November at a public pool is a novelty, at least if, like the Wilsons, you’re from Vermont. Barton Springs made everyone ooh and ahh—it’s nearly a thousand feet long, spring-fed, and smack-dab in the middle of a city of nearly a million. It is also about two miles from Cash’s apartment, where, on the night of May 11, 2022, 25-year-old Moriah Wilson—daughter to Karen and Eric, sister to Matt, friend to Cash—was shot and killed.

That’s why everyone had come to Austin: to sit in the Travis County courtroom for 11 days while a realtor and yoga teacher named Kaitlin Armstrong stood trial for Moriah’s murder.

After a while, the 68-degree water started to give even the hardy Vermonters goosebumps. The group began to make their way back to the shallow end, where Eric and his siblings got out of the pool and dried off underneath the gnarled limb of a giant pecan tree. Karen said she wanted to keep swimming. Her long wavy hair trailed behind her as she kicked and glided toward the diving board and climbed up the ladder out of the pool. At 62, Karen was the oldest and tallest one in line, her legs long and lean from decades of skiing and mountain biking. Smiling, she walked out to the end of the board, turned around, and did a backflip into the water.

Moriah Wilson was a prolific journal keeper. An organizer of dinner parties where she would debut complicated new dishes. Someone with a subtle and fun sense of style, fond of headbands and cute barrettes. She was also an up-and-coming star in off-road bike racing who in the year before her death was beginning to post major results at some of the sport’s most prestigious races. In early May, she’d quit her engineering job at the bike company Specialized in order to compete full-time. The bike world knew her as Mo.

Moriah was in Austin on May 11 because she’d made a last-minute decision to race Gravel Locos, a 155-mile race in nearby Hico. It was warm and muggy when she arrived in Texas on May 10. Cash picked her up at the airport, and the two were so excited to see one another that they left Moriah’s suitcase on the baggage carousel. They had Italian for dinner at a food truck called Patrizi’s and stayed up late into the night, chatting in Cash’s king-size bed.

The next day, Moriah texted a friend and fellow pro named Colin Strickland to see if he wanted to go for a bike ride. At the time, Strickland was dating Kaitlin Armstrong. He and Moriah had met through gravel racing and maintained a collegial friendship—with the exception of a brief romantic relationship that happened in October 2021, when Strickland and Armstrong had broken up. The prosecution planned to argue that Armstrong’s jealousy led to the murder.

You might be aware of some of these details. The story was picked up by mainstream media outlets everywhere, including Outside. Each time a new detail in the case emerged, like the recovery of Armstrong’s Jeep at an Austin Carmax or when she was found in Costa Rica after nearly two months on the lam, the headlines returned. “Love Triangle Killer Captured After Murdering Star Cyclist in Jealous Rage”—that sort of thing.

Two days after Moriah was killed, I had to write my own headline about her. I typed and deleted, then re-typed and deleted, before finally publishing the words “shot and killed.” It just didn’t compute; two days before, I’d been on the phone with her for nearly an hour. I had published our conversation as an extended interview called “Getting to know Mo” on Wednesday, May, 11, just hours before she died.

In the year and a half since Moriah’s death, her family has been reorienting to life without her. “There is no normal,” Karen said during the trial, when a prosecutor asked if things had returned to the status quo. Although she can find peace thinking about Moriah when she swims or works in the garden, she just as often feels dread. Eric has been riding a gravel bike to feel close to her; Matt writes poetry. Last year, on Mother’s Day weekend, the three of them put on a bike event in Burke, Vermont, called Ride for Mo. Two hundred and fifty people attended.

To enter the courthouse, everyone has to empty their pockets and strip their belts before passing through a rickety metal detector. Eric always carried something to remind him of Moriah, so every day he would gently place her picture or a prayer card or, once, a piece of coral in the shape of a cross into the small plastic bowl the security guard handed him. Karen kept her memories even closer; she always wore something Moriah had given her or that had belonged to her daughter, like the beaded turquoise bracelet she hadn’t taken off since May.

Inside the Travis County criminal courtroom is a heavy steel door painted a pretty shade of aqua, which stands out against the main courtroom palette of fake mahogany and harsh lighting. This is the door Armstrong walked through every morning, just 30 feet away from Moriah’s parents. Eric often grimaced as she entered, and Karen would glance up, then bow her head sadly.

The media presence was heavy. Occasionally someone from Dateline or 48 Hours would approach Matt or Karen during a break, gently offering both condolences and a business card. A gray-haired man from NBC repeatedly invited Eric to coffee. I’ll think about it, he always said.

Then there was the strange cross section of true-crime tweeters and podcasters and curious citizens, all sitting in the six or so rows behind Moriah’s friends and family. Some had come from out of town to observe the trial—one fellow journalist overheard them talking about how outrageously expensive martinis were in Austin.

What does it feel like to have the worst moments of your life, the worst thing you can possibly imagine, broadcast to the world? To have strangers showing up at your door, calling you, asking you to describe your grief?

After Moriah’s death, film producers and journalists and true-crime podcasters and TV execs came out of the woodwork, hoping to get the Wilsons’ blessing on their various projects. Matt escorted most of them away, although recently the family agreed to take part in a documentary film about Moriah’s life and legacy, spearheaded by Evan Hayes, the Oscar-winning producer of Free Solo. [Editor’s note: Hayes purchased the rights to Outside’s feature story on the murder, as well as the rights to a feature published by Bicycling.] Hayes told the family that the murder would not be the central storyline, but everyone understood why he’d come to Austin: Moriah’s life story was inextricably linked to the way she died.

Cash was the first witness called. She had asked ahead of time that Eric, Karen, and Matt not be present while she testified. Since the murder, she had been trying to protect them from certain details about what happened in her Austin apartment that night. The 911 call she made—after finding Moriah shot three times and motionless on the bathroom floor—was one of them:

“My friend is staying with me and I just walked in and she’s laying on the bathroom floor, and there’s blood everywhere.” A recording of her voice filled the courtroom. “She’s not awake, and there’s blood all over her face and the back of her head.”

Cash, 34, her long dark hair falling over the shoulders of a cerulean cashmere sweater, sat straight in the witness stand, tears pouring down her cheeks.

The dispatcher’s voice came on, telling Cash how to do chest compressions:

“Count out loud so I can count with you,” the dispatcher said.

“OK, OK.”

“Pump the chest hard and fast, at least twice per second and two inches deep.” Cash started counting.

After this, the prosecution pivoted to the subject of Moriah’s bike, which was discovered tossed into bushes outside of Cash’s apartment. “Did it have a kickstand?” a prosecutor asked. Cash couldn’t help but snicker. “No, she was a pro. This was a race bike.”

What does it feel like to have the worst moments of your life, the worst thing you can possibly imagine, broadcast to the world? To have strangers showing up at your door, calling you, asking you to describe your grief?

Cash testified over the course of two mornings. When she was dismissed, she squeezed into the second row next to her dad, who pulled her in close to his chest. Her friends pushed aside little piles of spent Kleenex to make room for the two of them.

On the trial’s second day, an investigator brought Moriah’s race bike into the well of the court. It was covered in a heavy clear plastic bag stamped EVIDENCE.

Since Moriah’s death, the Wilsons have become a Specialized family. The company had been Moriah’s primary bike sponsor once she turned pro. After the murder, the people she worked with there stayed in close touch with the Wilsons. They even made sure to honor her contract; the three bikes Moriah had been promised were given to her family.

The bike being presented as evidence, State’s Exhibit 99, was wheeled into the courtroom. As one of the prosecutors put on gloves and began to cut through the heavy plastic, Karen straightened in her seat. The prosecutor pulled things out of the plastic wrapping: a navy blue helmet with Moriah’s sponsors’ names stickered on it; a pair of Oakley sunglasses; a white packet of energy chews.

“Skratch,” Karen whispered, recognizing the brand. A smile flickered across her face, and then, just as quickly, vanished. She was imagining Moriah riding the bike, alive and happy. Eric put his hand on her back.

Eric and Karen were staying out at Cash’s dad’s place southeast of town, and even though local afternoon traffic was abysmal, the drive was worth it. The house was a sanctuary, set among scrubby Ashe juniper and live oak. Karen loved that she could hear birds singing, and Eric went jogging every other morning.

On the first Friday of the Austin trip, Eric and Karen invited Matt, his friends, and Eric’s family over for dinner. Eric grilled chicken and his sisters made a big kale salad. It was warm enough to eat outside, so people dragged chairs onto the front porch. Paper plates heaped with food balanced on laps; everyone joined hands as Eric led the family prayer.

Thank you, Lord, for happy hearts,

For rain and sunny weather,

Thank you, Lord, for this our food

And that we are together.

A minute later they were all talking about the trial. Strickland had testified that day, and the group felt unsettled. Though Strickland had been cleared by police of any involvement in the murder, he was still the last person to see Moriah alive apart from her killer and it was his girlfriend’s jealousy that allegedly led to Moriah’s death. The family had varying opinions of him.

He acted strange on the stand, slumping in his seat and not making eye contact with the prosecutor, Guillermo Gonzalez. Everyone later learned that he shoved a cameraman outside the courthouse. In his testimony, Strickland described his relationship with Armstrong as “tumultuous,” and admitted that he’d changed the label on Moriah’s number in his phone because of Armstrong’s jealousy. For Matt, the testimony dissolved his previous feelings toward Strickland into something more like pity. “At first I was angry,” he said. “Now I just feel sorry for him.”

Karen also believed that blaming Strickland wasn’t the answer, although, as she said, “I’m not particularly happy with him.”

“His life has been wrecked,” she went on, “and it will never be the same, so in many ways, not in the same way, he has suffered a lot and he’s clearly extremely depressed. That doesn’t make me happy. Moriah thought of him as a friend. She wouldn’t be happy if his life was wrecked.”

Karen is a great storyteller, and she loves to talk about Moriah. One evening at the house, Matt was lying on the couch with his head in her lap, his six-four frame taking up the length of the sofa. Someone asked: Was he a large baby? “Not really, even though he was two weeks late,” Karen said “So was Moriah, but she was induced by a coconut margarita!”

She described how her labor finally started after a sip of marg at a friend’s birthday party, which was also in the middle of May. “I remember it was so cold, I was wearing a flannel nightgown when we left for the hospital,” she said. “But when we left two days later, it had gotten so hot, Eric had to buy me a sundress.”

Eric liked the name Anna. Karen was partial to Moriah. So they named her Anna Moriah and always used her middle name. “When you’re the one in labor for 24 hours, you get to decide,” Karen said, adding: “Matt, on the other hand, came out in three pushes.”

Matt is 25, the same age as Moriah when she died. He was two weeks shy of graduating from Middlebury College when his parents knocked on his apartment door to tell him that his sister had been murdered. “I was on the couch eating a sandwich from a café, just enjoying having finished my last class ever,” he testified.

Suddenly an only child, Matt experienced grief that ran both parallel and perpendicular to that of his parents. He had planned to move to Colorado and coach mountain biking after graduation, but instead stayed home to help hold the family together.

Matt had four friends come to Austin over the course of the two-and-a-half-week trial. He wanted support, sure. Maybe even a little distraction. But he also wanted them to be able to understand after this was all over.

In the courtroom, Matt sometimes worked on sudokus he’d copied into a leather-bound notebook. His aunt Andrea occasionally knitted. Eric took notes on a yellow legal pad. Over the course of nine days, the prosecution brought 38 witnesses to the stand, the defense four, and their questions and examinations lasted up to nine hours. At times, this was so tedious that people zoned out. Other times, they were transported.

When Strickland testified, the prosecution played surveillance video from Pool Burger, the tiki bar in Austin where he and Moriah went for food and drinks after going swimming on May 11. Jurors and spectators saw them walk into the bar together, with Moriah’s long hair wet and tucked underneath a black baseball cap. Strickland was wearing a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops. There wasn’t any audio of their conversation, but their body language communicated casual comfort. The receipt from their meal was introduced as evidence: two burgers, two fries, two Negra Modelos, and something called a “hurricane with a floater.” “What’s that?” everyone wondered.

The defense lawyers didn’t have much to work with, but that didn’t stop them from using every tactic imaginable. With Strickland, they jumped around in time, trying to cast him as both a slutty playboy and an experienced firearms owner. The traps they set never seemed to work, but for Moriah’s family the process was exhausting.

Now and then, the prosecution provided comic relief without meaning to. During a cross-examination, a defense attorney repeatedly interrupted a crime-scene investigator as she tried to explain how, when collecting evidence, she takes care not to disrupt the forensic integrity of something like a fingerprint or swab sample.

“And why is integrity important?” the lawyer asked. Everyone in the front three rows gave each other a sidelong glance. The witness seemed stunned and repeated the question, deadpan: “Why is integrity important?”

This became one of Eric’s favorite lines.

One evening, the family made plans to have dinner at Cash’s apartment. “If you don’t have my address memorized by now, you haven’t been paying attention,” she joked.

Her address was mentioned several times during the trial, and photos and video were shown of her apartment and her car and the little pull-in where she parks. At one point, the prosecution called a criminal intelligence analyst from the Texas attorney general’s office. The woman helped detectives analyze the cell phone extraction data and GPS coordinates taken from the entertainment system in Armstrong’s Jeep. The exhibit, State’s 438, showed how Moriah, Strickland, and Armstong’s cell phones—and Armstrong’s Jeep—all interacted on the day of the murder. What the jury saw was essentially a time lapse, with all the evidence that had already been presented put together like a virtual jigsaw puzzle. Small icons—representing the phones and Jeep—moved around Austin as if in a video game.

Strickland’s and Moriah’s phones stopped moving—at a location that appeared to be Pool Burger—at exactly the time that surveillance-camera footage from Pool Burger showed them there. Meanwhile, the little red rectangle representing Armstrong’s Jeep started heading toward East Austin, toward Cash’s apartment. It circled her block. At 8:37 P.M., it stopped. It didn’t move again until 9:17.

At Maple Avenue that night, some of Moriah’s family had trouble finding Cash’s apartment. The helpful landmark was the white house on the corner, whose Ring camera mounted on the exterior had captured footage of Armstrong’s Jeep circling the block.

Inside Cash’s apartment, things were warm and inviting. A self-proclaimed maximalist, she’d hung the walls with artwork and other things she’d collected in her travels, and small piles of things like rocks, figurines, and little dishes were carefully arranged on shelves and a small round coffee table. Oriental rugs covered the wood floor. In the days leading up to the trial, people dropped off flowers and baskets containing chocolate, tea, and essential oils, so the space was comfortably cluttered. A Meal Train spread of chicken and rice took up the entire kitchen island.

Karen, Eric, and Cash showed up around eight, after getting massages. This wasn’t their first visit to Cash’s place; they had come over in April 2023, a year after Moriah was killed. It was horrific, Cash would later recount to the jury, to see Karen curl up into the fetal position and wail into the floor where her daughter was killed.

Cash knows what people think when they come to her house for the first time. She could, to get it out of the way, take them straight to the bathroom, point at the floor, and say, “This is where I found her.” Instead, she gently walks people through the apartment.

She could have moved after the murder. Who wouldn’t want to? But she stayed, as she said, to reclaim the space, to not let it become a place of darkness. Since then, she’d changed a few things and left others the same.

The bathroom changed the most. Now there were plants, one spidering up the side of the shower, which Cash considered a sign of life. Her landlord replaced the tile floor—it had been shattered by the bullets—and Cash found a rug that covered most of it, in various shades of amber and ocher, colors that reminded her of one of Moriah’s favorite jumpsuits.

Other things she kept the same, like the small wooden pantry at the end of the kitchen island, where she assumes Moriah was looking for chocolate when Armstrong entered the apartment.

“It was my grandpa’s,” she said of the little cabinet, “and Mo knew this is where I kept the chocolate.”

My tour got derailed in Cash’s bedroom, where Karen was stuffing pillows into freshly laundered pillowcases. She motioned to a small framed print of a bicycle on the bedside table. “Tell her the story,” Karen said.

The night after Cash found Moriah’s body, she slept at her dad’s house. She stayed there for nearly a month. Even after her landlord had redone the bathroom tile and installed a Ring camera above the doorknob, she wasn’t sure if she could move back.

But then, one day at a thrift store, a framed picture practically jumped off the wall at her. With you all the way, it said, above a whimsical sketch of a bicycle going uphill with a few stars trailing behind it. It was the sign Cash needed: Mo was telling her it was OK to go back.

On Thursday, November 16, when the jury was dismissed, everyone expected deliberations to take all afternoon. Matt went home for a nap; Eric and Karen were on a walk with Laura. When they were summoned back to the courtroom by Raquel, the victim’s counselor, they rushed back, and the security guards seemed to know why everyone was in a hurry. The number of TV cameras at the door had doubled. As people filed into the pews, Raquel told them not to express any emotion when the judge read the verdict. Cash, Matt, Karen, and Eric sat together and held hands. The courtroom was silent.

Armstrong and her lawyers rose. After the judge read the guilty verdict, she asked all of the jurors if they agreed with the decision as it was announced. All 12 answered yes. Armstrong was expressionless. Then the judge called for a ten-minute recess, and everyone lost it. Cash’s dad embraced her. “I love you so much,” he said, his words muffled by her hair. “You were there for her. You never left her.”

The prosecution whisked Matt, Karen, Eric, and Cash away to prepare them for their impact statements. Cash took the stand first. She told the story about picking up Mo from the airport and forgetting her bag. Then she said she texted Karen a picture of Mo on May 11, a shot of her building up her bike in the living room. The message said: “Your girl is safe with me in Austin.” She explained the guilt she’s lived with since sending the text, and the feeling that she somehow hadn’t done enough to save her.

Cash knows what people think when they come to her house for the first time. She could, to get it out of the way, take them straight to the bathroom, point at the floor, and say, “This is where I found her.”

Matt went next. He described his unique relationship with his sister, saying she was his closest confidant and had helped him move through periods of depression. Once, when he was feeling particularly despondent, she suggested they each write down three things every day they were grateful for. In the front row, Eric wiped away tears. He had never heard this story.

Karen’s turn. She couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “Moriah was a baby that just wanted to move,” she said. “She was meant to ride a bike. As a family, we were always doing things together outside, and she and Matt never fought.”

The prosecutor cut in: “Have you been able to get back to normal?”

“I don’t know what normal is anymore,” Karen said. “I still feel like I’m in a dream. I don’t know if I’ll ever wake up.” She ended by talking about the joy of having Cash in their life. She was like a second daughter.

Cash was crying. The prosecutor, Jean Sullivan, also choked back tears; she’s a mother, too, with children in preschool. Karen wanted Armstrong to know that her actions had consequences beyond the obvious. “When you shot Moriah in the heart, you shot me in the heart,” she said. “You shot Eric and Matt. Your actions have caused so many people to suffer. A ripple effect of sorrow upon sorrow upon sorrow.”

Eric spoke last. He talked about raising the kids to be skiers, and how he quit his job so he could be home with his family. He was so proud, so impressed with how Moriah had really blossomed in the year before she died, how she’d achieved her goal of becoming a professional cyclist. “She’d do a three-hour workout before going into work. I never saw an athlete so dedicated,” he said. “And to have that taken from a senseless premeditated plan to take her life. For what? Why? She didn’t deserve that.”

It’s a short drive from the courthouse to Pool Burger, and it was still warm and light out when they arrived. Evan had reserved a few tables in the back, and everyone ordered burgers, fries, and drinks. Two camera guys were there, moving around the tables with cameras and gimbal rigs, but nobody paid attention. If anyone had asked what was going on, it would have been impossible to explain. They were there because the trial was finally over. They were there because Moriah had been here.

Everyone devoured their food as if it had been days since they’d last eaten. The fruity rum hurricanes, which came frozen in little plastic cups each topped with a plumeria flower, went down just as easily.

As the sun started to splash pink and purple across the sky, Karen stood and announced that she was going across the street to Deep Eddy, another of Austin’s beloved spring-fed pools. Andrea and Laura and Cash got up to go with her.

Karen was first in the water. Under the setting sun, she sliced up and down the lap lane. She motioned toward the other side of the pool, which had been drained for the coming winter. “That’s probably where Moriah swam,” she said. “I doubt she was doing laps.”

Much as they did at Barton Springs, everyone moved down the pool together, five abreast, slightly buzzed and laughing. Matt arrived and cannonballed into the water.

It didn’t take long for the sky to darken completely; everyone got out together, still amazed that they were swimming, outside, in November. Standing in front of the changing stalls in the Deep Eddy bathhouse, Karen told another story about another piece of clothing that had something to do with Moriah: the cream-colored waffle-knit shirt she was wearing.

“It was mine first,” she said. “I bought it long before the kids were born, but Moriah loved it and she took it from me.” Her face expressed something that was both happy and tortured. “Of course I let her have it.”

Cash pulled out a blue dress that Karen had given her—it also belonged to Moriah. For a moment, the two of them seemed like mom and daughter, playing dress-up, admiring each other’s outfits.

The next day, Matt, Karen, and Eric spent the morning at Cash’s apartment before their nonstop flight to Boston. As they hugged goodbye, Karen said, again, that she hoped Cash could come to Burke for Christmas.

When they landed at Logan International, it was late, close to 11 P.M. No one could remember where they’d parked, and they wandered around the parking garage for an hour. They didn’t get home until two, exhausted.

The next day, they picked up their puppies, a pair of sisters named Luna and Hope, from the friends who’d been watching them. It was time to start planning for Thanksgiving.