Kaitlin Marie Armstrong, 35, was declared guilty of murdering Anna Moriah "Mo" Wilson by a jury of her peers at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center in Austin, Texas on Thursday.
The deliberations took just two hours before Judge Brenda Kennedy read the guilty verdict to the court with no apparent reaction from Armstrong.
The next phase of the trial will be sentencing. Armstrong, who pled not guilty to first-degree murder charges, faces up to 99 years in prison.
She also faces a separate felony charge of trying to escape from custody, causing bodily injury, for a failed escape last month. If convicted, she faces an additional 20 years in prison.
Wilson was a successful gravel racer on an upward trajectory, having won the prestigious Unbound Gravel event in 2021.
She was in Austin for the Gravel Locos race and preparing to defend her Unbound title when she was found fatally shot in a friend's apartment in Austin, Texas on May 11, 2022. The news was devastating for her family, friends and the gravel community.
Amid the outpouring of support, fellow gravel racer and organiser Rebecca Rusch described Wilson as "all light and laughter" and "talented, intelligent, gentle, fast, focused and graceful".
After a six-day inquiry, police issued an arrest warrant on May 17, 2022 for Armstrong, who fled the country using her sister's passport, flying to Costa Rica. She was apprehended 43 days later and brought into custody.
Armstrong's trial began on November 1, 2023, with the State providing eight days of testimony from witnesses including Armstrong's boyfriend Colin Strickland, who was the last person to see Wilson alive.
Wilson and Strickland had a brief romantic relationship during a breakup between Armstrong and Strickland in 2021, and multiple witnesses testified to Armstrong being jealous of Wilson.
Testimony suggested that Armstrong used Wilson's Strava data to track her.
The Defense took only one day to argue in Armstrong's favour, arguing that a neighbour's security camera that captured images of her Jeep at the murder scene on the night of Wilson's death showed no images that Armstrong was present.
Investigators found DNA strongly linked to Armstrong on Wilson's bike which was found in the bushes near the murder scene in addition to bullets that were deemed a match to a gun that Armstrong possessed.
According to KXAN, Prosecutor Rickey Jones pointed to the evidence in his closing arguments as proof of Armstrong's guilt, saying, "No one else in the world fired from [that pistol] and had their DNA at the scene. No one else in the world left the scene of the murder in Kaitlin Armstrong's Jeep two minutes after the murder."
Armstrong's attorneys Rick Cofer and Geoffrey Puryear argued that she had been "stuck in a nightmare of circumstantial evidence" in a case "based on assumptions, confirmation bias and a lack of direct offence".
