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Colin Strickland in The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson.
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix (2)
NEED TO KNOW
- Colin Strickland was a rising gravel racing cyclist whose life was forever changed when he started dating Kaitlin Armstrong
- In 2023, she was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and friend, fellow cyclist Moriah Wilson
- Strickland has since stepped away from cycling and said that he "regrets everything"
Colin Strickland is a former promising gravel racing cyclist who became a central figure in a grizzly murder case between his girlfriend and ex-girlfriend turned friend.
In late 2021 and early 2022, Strickland was in an on-again, off-again relationship with yoga instructor Kaitlin Armstrong when he started becoming friends with fellow professional cyclist Anna Moriah "Mo" Wilson. During one of Strickland and Armstrong's separations, he started dating Wilson for around a week before she realized they were on different pages and they decided to stay friends.
Although Strickland and Wilson put an end to their romantic relationship, they remained friends through the cycling community. On the afternoon of May 11, 2022, Wilson was visiting Austin, Texas — where Strickland was living — for a biking race, so they met up to talk about their sport.
At the same time that Strickland was spending time with Wilson, he was lying to Armstrong about his whereabouts, which made her jealous. In a fit of rage, Armstrong went to the apartment where Wilson was staying and fatally shot her.
When police started to become suspicious of Armstrong, she fled to Costa Rica and underwent several plastic surgery procedures to allegedly change her appearance. She was eventually caught and arrested in June 2022 and was charged with Wilson's murder. Armstrong was convicted of first-degree murder in November 2023 and was sentenced to 90 years in prison.
Wilson's life and murder have since been retold in the documentary The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson, which premiered on Netflix on April 3.
Here's everything to know about where Colin Strickland is now.
Who is Colin Strickland?
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Colin Strickland and Ian Dille in The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson.
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
Strickland, who was born and raised in Texas, was a professional cyclist who specialized in gravel racing. By 2022, he was a well-known figure in that community who had won races across the world and was on his way to making a living from sponsorships and social media content.
At the same time that he was making a name for himself in the cycling world, Strickland was in a rocky relationship with Armstrong. The two met on a dating app in 2019, bought a house together during the COVID-19 pandemic and started to run a trailer restoration business.
However, they briefly split in the fall of 2021, and he later described their relationship as "tumultuous" with frequent break ups and reconciliations, per CBS Austin.
Who was Moriah Wilson?
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Moriah Wilson in The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson.
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
Wilson, who was known as "Mo" by her close friends and family, was raised in Vermont and grew up in a family who all loved the outdoors.
"Starting from a young age, Moriah had the natural inclination to be athletic," her mom, Karen Wilson, said in the Netflix doc, The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson. "She was very determined. If she didn’t do well, she would be so upset, so she would just work harder."
Wilson developed a passion for skiing and started competing but was ultimately injured too many times and had to quit. It didn't take long for Wilson to discover cycling and she started training to become a professional cyclist specializing in gravel and mountain biking.
"I had spent a lot of time riding bikes with my family, and then I discovered that gravel cycling was a thing and ended up buying a gravel bike," she said in a resurfaced interview featured in the Netflix doc.
At the time of her murder, Wilson had won several races.
What was Strickland's relationship with Wilson?
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Colin Strickland in The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson.
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
In the midst of Strickland's rocky romance with Armstrong, he developed a friendship with Wilson, since they were both active in the same cycling community. They met at a race in Idaho in September 2021 and chatted for a few minutes before he asked her to get a drink, but he maintained that they were only friends and colleagues at that point.
"I had a girlfriend," he said in a 2022 interview that was resurfaced in the doc. "We didn’t have any romantic conversations at all. We just talked about her future career."
Shortly after, Strickland and Armstrong had broken up but were still living together when Wilson reached out to Strickland and told him she'd be in Austin soon. Around October 2021, he "effectively started dating Moriah for a week."
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Moriah Wilson in The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson.
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
However, when Wilson left Austin, she and Strickland put an end to their romantic relationship, and he reignited his relationship with Armstrong. From then on, Strickland maintained that his relationship with Wilson was strictly platonic and professional. Wilson also wrote about the end of their romantic relationship in her journal.
"It was just clear we weren’t on the same page, which is okay," she wrote in a February 2022 entry. "It sort of cleared the air and helped me understand where he’s at."
Although they were just friends, Armstrong was still suspicious and frequently asked Strickland about Wilson. As a result, Strickland changed Wilson's contact information in his phone. Armstrong's alleged jealousy only escalated, and a former friend of hers later testified in court that Armstrong told her she'd "kill" anyone who dated Strickland.
What happened to Wilson?
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Kaitlin Armstrong leaves the courtroom on November 17, 2023.
Credit: Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman/AP
On May 11, 2022, Wilson asked Strickland to catch up when she was in town. The two went for a swim, grabbed burgers at a local restaurant and talked about cycling.
At the same time, Armstrong discovered that Strickland had been communicating with Wilson. She called him several times, but he didn't answer and told her that he was by himself running errands.
However, Armstrong tracked his phone and her car's GPS records showed that she waited outside the restaurant for Wilson and Strickland to leave. Strickland then dropped Wilson off at her friend's apartment at 8:36 p.m.
Just one minute later, Armstrong's black Jeep was caught on camera driving around Wilson's friend's neighborhood. She waited for Strickland to leave and then subsequently entered the apartment and shot Wilson three times around 9:15 p.m.
Wilson's friend arrived at the apartment 30 minutes later and called police, who pronounced her dead at the scene and started investigating the crime.
It didn't take long for authorities to trace Armstrong to the scene of the crime ; they issued a warrant for her arrest on May 17. However, by then, Armstrong had already fled Texas, taken her sister's passport and flown to Costa Rica.
Armstrong evaded authorities for over a month by changing her appearance and undergoing a reported $6,000 worth of plastic surgery, as surgeon Dr. Jorge Badilla told Dateline in 2024.
On June 29, 2022, Armstrong was caught and arrested after authorities used her love of yoga to lure her to apply for an opening as an instructor in the town where they believed she was living. She was extradited to the United States and charged with first-degree murder and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Her trial began on Nov. 1, 2023, and 15 days later, she was found guilty of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to 90 years in prison and is serving her sentence at the Dr. Lane Murray Unit Texas state prison for women in Gatesville, Texas.
Where is Colin Strickland now?
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Colin Strickland in The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson.
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
In the years since he testified in Armstrong's murder case, Strickland has kept a low profile and rarely spoken about the ordeal. He briefly appeared in the Netflix documentary and said he spends much of his time by himself in his repair garage.
"This is pretty much my life these days," he said. "Just time alone in the shop. Part of that’s, just things are just outside my control, so I shrunk my world massively, so that I could feel some kind of control. Things were spinning out of control."
Strickland didn't elaborate on the murder or his life since, but he admitted that he "regret
"I regret everything," he said. "I'm ashamed of everything I've done. I would have never f---ing started bike racing, not ever met Kaitlin, not ever met Moriah, not ever spoke with Moriah in private — every single thing, because it all led to this."
Strickland gave up cycling after the murder and has not raced competitively since.
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