“He gets in the car and says, 'That's her.' She's there,'” the deputy US marshal told CBS News.
Love triangle killer Kaitlin Armstrong, who escaped to Central America after undergoing plastic surgery to alter her face, was captured by authorities after they lured her back to the United States with an advertisement for a yoga instructor.
The US Marshalls recently revealed that Armstrong, who fled the United States after shooting professional cyclist Anna Moriah Wilson in May 2022, was captured that summer.
According CBS News, the Marshalls pursued the fugitive killer across the United States and Costa Rica, believing she was hiding near the coast. However, she was using multiple names and plastic surgery to fool authorities.
So instead, the feds forced her to come to them by taking advantage of her love of yoga and posting an ad for a yoga teacher on a local Facebook page in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica.
It took Armstrong, now 90 years old for killing Wilson in a jealous rage, nearly a week to bite, but just as the Marshals were about to return to the U.S., they received a message from someone who identified himself as a yoga instructor.
“We were bitten, by someone who, um, identified herself… as a yoga instructor and said she wanted to meet us at a particular shelter,” said Deputy U.S. Marshal Emir Perez. CBS News. “And we said… 'This is our chance!'”
Pérez and Deputy United States Marshal Damián Fernández rushed to Santa Teresa from San José. They found her in a shelter, speaking in Spanish while they examined her bandaged nose and swollen lips, which were part of her identity concealment surgeries. However, her eyes matched those seen in a previous photograph.
“He gets in the car and says, 'That's her.' She's there,'” Fernández said. CBS News.
Local police arrested her and the feds took her back to Texas, where she was charged and jailed. She managed to escape again, but she didn't get very far before officers caught her.
Wilson, a Vermont native and rising star in professional gravel and mountain bike racing, was found dead on May 11, 2022.
She had been in Austin before a race in Texas where Armstrong followed her to an apartment and shot her three times, according to the charges.
A Jeep matching Armstrong's was caught on camera outside the crime scene, and a 43-day international manhunt ensued.
It took a Texas jury just two hours to convict Armstrong, and a day later, a judge put her behind bars for nine decades.
