A former fugitive has been sentenced to 90 years in jail after murdering her love rival in a jealous rage, before fleeing the US and having plastic surgery to try to evade authorities.
A Texas jury found Armstrong guilty of murder on Thursday and a day later took three hours to decide her sentence. She faced a maximum of 99 years for the crime.
Armstrong left the Austin courtroom immediately after the verdict, as her family could be heard sobbing.
Wilson’s family embraced each other after the sentencing, as her mother Karen Wilson addressed the court.
Looking at Armstrong, she said: “When you shot Moriah in the heart, you shot me in the heart… all the people who loved her, pierced their hearts.”
At the time of the murder in May 2022, the killer was in a relationship with another professional cyclist, Mr Strickland.
The pair had been together for about three years before a period of separation – during which Mr Strickland had a brief relationship with Ms Wilson.
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Armstrong and Mr Strickland then got back together, but she remained jealous of her rival and had called Ms Wilson warning her to “stay away”.
Two of Armstrong’s friends said she told them she wanted to, or could, kill Ms Wilson, jurors were told.
Ms Wilson had been visiting Texasfor a cycling race and was among the favourites to win. She had been staying with a friend when she was killed.
Following the murder, police managed to briefly interview Armstrong. But she then sold her Jeep and fled to Costa Rica using her sister’s passport.
Once abroad, she spent more than $6,000 (£4,850) having surgery to change the appearance of her nose, as well as changing the colour and style of her hair.
But she was eventually arrested at a beachside hostel after 43 days on the run.
Armstrong made a second attempt to evade justice when she tried to escape authorities during a medical appointment outside jail last month. She faces a separate felony escape charge.
Jurors deliberated for about two hours after two weeks of testimony before delivering their verdict on Thursday.
Earlier, Ms Wilson’s friend Caitlin Cash had told the court she discovered her body and tried to perform CPR.
She told jurors she had texted Ms Wilson’s mother earlier that day with a message: “Your girl is in safe hands here in Austin.”
“I felt a lot of guilt not being able to protect her,” Ms Cash said. “I fought for her with everything I had.”
Karen Wilson also told the court: “From the day she was born, she had a force in her.
“She lived as if every day was her last day. And she lived it so fully. She never wasted any time… It’s as if she knew her life would be short.”
Armstrong, a yoga teacher, did not testify on her own behalf during the trial, which heard her Jeep was seen near the apartment at the time of Ms Wilson’s murder.
Bullet casings found near Ms Wilson’s body also matched a gun Armstrong owned.
She denied murder and her lawyers claimed she was the victim of a “nightmare” of circumstantial evidence.
There are mechanisms to protect the regime in events like this and the Revolutionary Guard, which was founded in 1979 precisely for that purpose, will be a major player in what comes next.
In the immediate term, vice-president Mohammed Mokhber will assume control and elections will be held within 50 days.
Mokhber isn’t as close to the supreme leader as Raisi was, and won’t enjoy his standing, but he has run much of Khamenei’s finances for years and is credited with helping Iran evade some of the many sanctions levied on it.
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Drone footage of helicopter crash site
Raisi’s successor will most likely be the chosen candidate of the supreme leader and certainly another ultra-conservative hardliner – a shift back to the moderates is highly unlikely.
Likewise, we shouldn’t expect any significant change in Iran’s foreign activities or involvement with the war in Gaza. It will be business as usual, as much as possible.
However, after years of anti-government demonstrations following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, this might be a moment for the protest movement to rise up and take to the streets again.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has died after the helicopter he was travelling in crashed in a mountainous area of northwest Iran.
Rescuers found the burned remains of the aircraft on Monday morning after the president and his foreign minister had been missing for more than 12 hours.
“President Raisi, the foreign minister and all the passengers in the helicopter were killed in the crash,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters, asking not to be named.
Iran‘s Mehr news agency reported “all passengers of the helicopter carrying the Iranian president and foreign minister were martyred”.
State TV said images showed it had smashed into a mountain peak, although there was no official word on the cause of the crash.
“President Raisi’s helicopter was completely burned in the crash… unfortunately, all passengers are feared dead,” an official told Reuters.
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President of Iran killed in crash
As the sun rose, rescuers saw the wreckage from around 1.25 miles, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir Hossein Kolivand, told state media.
Iranian news agency IRNA said the president was flying in an American-made Bell 212 helicopter.
Mr Raisi, 63, who was seen as a frontrunner to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, was travelling back from Azerbaijan where he had opened a dam with the country’s president.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, also died in the crash.
The governor of East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards were also said to have been on board when the helicopter crashed in fog on Sunday.
Iranian media initially described it as a “hard landing”.
The chief of staff of Iran’s army had ordered all military resources and the Revolutionary Guard to be deployed in the search, which had been hampered by bad weather.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to react to the news of Mr Raisi’s death.
“India stands with Iran in this time of sorrow,” he said in a post on X.
A helicopter carrying Iran’s president crashed during bad weather on Sunday.
But who is Ebrahim Raisi – a leader who faces sanctions from the US and other nations over his involvement in the mass execution of prisoners in 1988.
The president, 63, who was travelling alongside the foreign minister and two other key Iranian figures when their helicopter crashed, had been travelling across the far northwest of Iran following a visit to Azerbaijan.
Mr Raisi is a hardliner and former head of the judiciary who some have suggested could one day replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Because of his part in the sentencing of thousands of prisoners of conscience to death back in the 1980s, he was nicknamed the Butcher of Tehranas he sat on the so-called Death Panel, for which he was then sanctioned by the US.
Both a revered and a controversial figure, Mr Raisi supported the country’s security services as they cracked down on all dissent, including in the aftermath of the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini – the woman who died after she was arrested for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly – and the nationwide protests that followed.
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The months-long security crackdown killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained.
In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iranwas responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Ms Amini’s death after her arrest for not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities.
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The president also supported Iran’s unprecedented decision in April to launch a drone and missile attack on Israel amid its war with Hamas, the ruling militant group in Gaza responsible for the 7 October attacks which saw 1,200 people killed in southern Israel.
Involvement in mass executions
Mr Raisi is sanctioned by the US in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Under the president, Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections.
Iran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraineand has continued arming proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
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He successfully ran for the presidency back in August 2021 in a vote that got the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history as all of his potentially prominent opponents were barred from running under Iran’s vetting system.
A presidency run in 2017 saw him lose to Hassan Rouhani, the relatively moderate cleric who as president reached Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
‘Very involved in anything’
Alistair Bunkall, Sky News’s Middle East correspondent, said the president is “a major figure in Iranian political and religious society” but “he’s not universally popular by any means” as his administration has seen a series of protests in the past few years against his and the government’s “hardline attitude”.
Mr Raisi is nonetheless “considered one of the two frontrunners to potentially take over” the Iranian regime when the current supreme leader dies, Bunkall said.
He added the president would have been “instrumental” in many of Iran’s activities in the region as he “would’ve been very involved in anything particularly what has been happening in Israel and the surrounding areas like Lebanon and Gaza and the Houthis over the last seven and a bit months”.