A spent brass shell casing rests against the white baseboard of a bathroom floor on Maple Avenue. It looks almost accidental, like a dropped coin, until you see the dull smear of dark fluid creeping toward the tile grout. The air inside the quiet Austin home is thick and still, carrying that unmistakable, metallic scent that instantly tells the human brain something terrible has just occurred.
That tiny piece of metal was the epicenter of an absolute nightmare. It was May 11, 2022, and Caitlyn Cash had just walked through her front door after dinner. Instead of finding her guest winding down for the night, Cash found 25-year-old rising cycling star Anna Moriah "Mo" Wilson bleeding out on the floor. Her frantic 911 call set off one of the most twisted murder investigations in modern Texas history.
When first responders arrived at 1708 Maple Avenue, they realized immediately that this was not a survivable injury. The trauma was catastrophic, pointing to an execution-style shooting at point-blank range. Yet on the surface, everything looked like a burglary that had spiraled out of control.
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The Missing Bicycle and the Staged Robbery
Every crime scene tells a story, and whoever pulled the trigger wanted detectives to read this one as a botched theft. Moriah Wilson was in Austin to compete in a premier gravel race. She had arrived with a specialized racing bicycle valued at over fourteen thousand dollars—a high-dollar prize that would catch any opportunistic thief's eye.
When officers swept the house, the bicycle was nowhere near the front entryway where Cash said Wilson always parked it. If the bike was gone, maybe the killer had panicked after breaking in, fired the fatal shots, and sped away with the gear. It was a neat, convenient narrative.
Except the killer made a sloppy mistake. Searching the thick woods just steps from the property, patrol officers spotted the bike ditched in the underbrush. A genuine burglar does not risk a murder charge for a piece of carbon fiber only to abandon it fifty yards away. The missing bike was not a motive; it was a red herring designed to buy time.
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The Last Man to See Her Alive
With the robbery angle falling apart, detectives needed to retrace Wilson's final hours. Cash pointed them toward Colin Strickland, a fellow professional cyclist and Wilson's ex-flame. Cash told police that Wilson had spent the afternoon swimming and grabbing drinks with Strickland, returning home mere minutes before the attack.
Strickland quickly became the person detectives needed to talk to most. When investigators located him at his home, the encounter played out with uneasy tension. They informed him of Wilson's death without revealing how she died—a classic investigative tactic meant to see if a suspect slips up and mentions a gunshot before anyone else does.
Strickland's body language was guarded, his eyes rarely meeting the officers' gaze. Was it the numb shock of a friend processing unimaginable grief, or the panicked calculation of a man trying to hide his tracks? Detectives were not ready to take any chances.
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Spoiler Warning: The Jealousy Behind the Trigger
Please be advised: the following details reveal major findings and suspects uncovered during the Austin Police Department's homicide investigation.
Neighborhood security footage cracked the case wide open. A nearby Ring camera picked up the low rumble of a dark Jeep Cherokee rolling past the home just seconds before muffled gunshots rang out. When detectives arrived at Strickland's house to question him, there was that exact same dark Jeep sitting right in his driveway, complete with a rear bicycle rack.
The vehicle did not belong to Strickland. It belonged to his live-in girlfriend, Kaitlin Armstrong. Beneath the surface of Austin's elite cycling scene sat an explosive romantic entanglement that had turned lethal.
During an earlier breakup in late 2021, Strickland had dated Wilson for several weeks. Even after reconciling with Armstrong, he stayed in touch with Wilson—even renaming her contact in his phone to hide their communications from an increasingly jealous Armstrong. Strickland dropped Wilson off at 8:36 PM; moments later, the dark Jeep pulled up.
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The Interrogation Room Trap
Strickland sat with detectives for hours, laying out text timestamps that cleared him of being at the scene when the shots were fired. But Armstrong had no verifiable alibi. She claimed she had spent the evening getting laser hair removal and attending a yoga class, yet she could not provide a single concrete detail to back it up.
Police discovered an outstanding, low-level warrant under Armstrong's name for theft of services. It was the legal leverage they needed. They brought her in, playing it completely casual. Detective Connor spoke with an easy, almost bored tone, pretending the interview was just about clearing up paperwork while watching her squirm in the chair.
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Armstrong sat with rigid posture, deflecting every question with razor-thin smiles and evasive non-answers. Every beat of the interrogation footage feels like a scene pulled from a psychological thriller: the investigator feigning indifference while the suspect quietly realizes the room is shrinking around her.
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The Frame Collapses
What makes this tragedy so haunting is how calculated the violence was. The staged burglary, the ditched racing bike in the brush, the cold-blooded timing immediately after Strickland drove away—every choice was designed to deflect blame onto an anonymous stranger.
Yet crimes driven by furious obsession almost always leave behind their own signatures. A security camera capturing a passing car, a shell casing that refuses to match a fictional robbery, and a trail of digital breadcrumbs inevitably collapse the facade.
Think back to that solitary shell casing sitting on the Maple Avenue floor. To an intruder, it was just spent brass left in the dark. But to the detectives who followed its silent trajectory, it was the exact key that unmasked a deadly love triangle and shattered the lives of everyone caught inside it.
