The Netflix documentary The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson premieres today, April 3, 2026, and it is not a true crime story in any conventional sense.
Karen and Eric Wilson, the parents of the 25-year-old professional cyclist who was shot and killed in Austin, Texas in May 2022, agreed to participate specifically because they did not want it to be.
They wanted it to be about their daughter. The film, directed by Emmy Award-winner Marina Zenovich and produced by Academy Award-winner Evan Hayes, is the fullest account yet of who Moriah Wilson was before she became a headline.
“This is like the 9/11 of our life,” Karen Wilson told USA Today. In the documentary itself, she offers a different kind of language for what the years since have been.
“Grief is like a big mud puddle,” she says. “You can just be circling it for the rest of your life. Or you can walk right through it and out the other end.”
Who Was Moriah Wilson?
Anna Moriah Wilson, Mo to everyone who knew her, was born May 18, 1996, in Littleton, New Hampshire, and grew up in Kirby, Vermont, at the base of Burke Mountain.
Her parents, Karen and Eric Wilson, were both on the U.S. Ski Team, and Mo followed their path with the kind of natural ability that suggested she might go further than either of them.
She attended Burke Mountain Academy, the elite ski prep school, became a nationally ranked junior skier, placed third in the 2013 U.S. Junior National Championship Downhill event, and arrived at Dartmouth College on the women’s alpine ski team.
Then she tore her ACL. Then she tore it again. Two ACL tears in ski-focused years redirected her toward something she had not initially seen as her sport.
She started cycling. Within three years she was the winningest off-road cyclist in America.
The speed of her ascent in gravel and mountain bike racing was one of those stories that the sport had never quite seen, a former skier with an engineering degree from Dartmouth, a work ethic that bordered on obsessive, and a physical talent that coaches and competitors described in terms usually reserved for once-in-a-generation athletes.
She left her job as a demand planner at the cycling company Specialized in early 2022 to race full time. The next several months produced the most concentrated stretch of victories of her career.
She won Big Sugar Gravel. She won Sea Otter Classic Fuego 80K. She won Belgian Waffle Ride California. She won ten events in 2022 alone, the last two of them in April, just weeks before she was killed.
Her diary entries, read throughout the documentary, show someone who wrote down her goals every morning and spent the last lines of each entry in gratitude.
She collected heart-shaped rocks. She had what people who knew her described as a keen awareness of her own mortality, and a correspondingly urgent sense of the mark she wanted to leave on the world before she was done.
What Happened On May 11, 2022?
Mo Wilson traveled to Austin in May 2022 for the Gravel Locos race in Hico, Texas.
She was staying with her friend Caitlin Cash in east Austin. On the afternoon of May 11, fellow cyclist Colin Strickland, with whom Wilson had briefly had a romantic relationship before they settled into a close friendship, picked her up to swim at Deep Eddy pool, the oldest public pool in Texas, and then they went to dinner at Pool Burger.
Strickland dropped Wilson off at Cash’s house around 8:30 p.m.
Hours later, Cash came home and found Mo Wilson on the bathroom floor, bleeding and unresponsive. She had been shot three times.
Kaitlin Armstrong, Strickland’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, had entered Cash’s home while Wilson was alone and shot her.
Armstrong drove to Newark Liberty International Airport the same night and flew to Costa Rica on her sister’s passport.
The manhunt that followed became one of the most widely covered fugitive cases in recent memory.
Armstrong had changed her appearance and was building a new life under an assumed identity when U.S. Marshals located and arrested her in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, 43 days after the murder.
She was brought back to the United States, charged with first-degree murder, and tried in Austin in November 2023.
The jury convicted her. She was sentenced to 90 years in prison. In the weeks before the documentary’s release, the Texas Third Court of Appeals denied Armstrong’s appeal, leaving the conviction and sentence intact.
Why The Wilsons Said Yes To The Documentary
Karen and Eric Wilson did not immediately agree to participate. They were approached by producer Evan Hayes after he read a feature story in Bicycling magazine that had centered Moriah’s character and athletic life rather than the circumstances of her death.
What Hayes told them in that initial conversation was, by Karen’s account, the thing that changed her mind.
Hayes mentioned that he had a daughter, and that he believed Moriah’s story would inspire her in positive ways. Karen Wilson described that as “a big clincher.”
Eric Wilson said the way the original written story had portrayed Mo was “really beautiful,” and that the family agreed when they heard the film would be made with the same emphasis, on who Mo was, not only on what happened to her.
Matt Wilson, Mo’s brother, described the film at its SXSW premiere as “Mo’s platform” to tell her own story, rather than a journalistic enterprise conducted purely by outside observers.
The family was heavily involved in the filmmaking process throughout production and appears frequently in the documentary.
They held a private screening for the East Burke, Vermont community, the people who had known Mo her whole life, before the Netflix release, wanting those viewers to be “surrounded by a loving community” when they watched it.
Why Is There A Documentary?
The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is directed by Marina Zenovich, whose prior work includes the ESPN documentary Lance, about Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal.
This film is something different. It opens with grainy home video of Mo as a baby, loud, alert, already fully present, and follows her from Vermont childhood through Dartmouth through the cycling career through the race she never got to run.
The documentary uses archival race footage, diary entries, interviews with Austin police detectives and Travis County prosecutors who worked the case, and deeply personal conversations with Karen, Eric, and Matt Wilson and with Caitlin Cash, Mo’s friend who found her that night.
Producer Evan Hayes said, “I’m so honored to be able to show the love, strength, and vulnerability that Moriah Wilson’s family and friends shared with us in telling this tragic story.
They took their unimaginable grief and turned it into something deeply moving and inspiring.”
Director Zenovich added, “Every so often when making a documentary you become inspired beyond words, and this experience was that for me.”
Reviewers who saw the SXSW premiere described the film as unexpectedly hopeful, something several people had not anticipated walking in.
Producer Hayes said of the response after that screening,
“Someone said to me after the movie finished, ‘I can’t believe I cried that much and watched something so tragic and yet feel so positive at the end.’ And that’s what we were hoping for.”
What Is Moriah’s Wilson’s Legacy?
The Moriah Wilson Foundation was established by the family in the aftermath of her death. It promotes healthy living, community building, and expanded access to recreation, sports, and educational programs.
The foundation’s annual Ride For Mo, a 52-mile gravel route around Burke Mountain, not a race but a communal ride on the roads Mo grew up on, takes place May 9, 2026 in Lyndon, Vermont.
This year’s edition falls almost exactly four years after she was killed.
Karen Wilson has said that around the time of Mo’s death, before she knew what had happened, she read a poem about hope.
After she learned the news, she screamed at God and told Him she knew He would do something good with this. The documentary is, in part, the answer to that moment.
“Her spirit still exists,” Karen says in the film. “She’s still a part of us.”
The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is now streaming on Netflix.
