Convicted love-triangle killer Kaitlin Armstrong was caught after fleeing the US with her face altered by plastic surgery by a phony ad for a yoga instructor, it was revealed in a new report.
The Texas woman — who fled to Central America after fatally shooting professional cyclist Anna Moriah Wilson in May 2022 — was reportedly caught by the US Marshals that summer after she responded to an ad the feds placed for a yoga instructor.
It might have been their last, best hope — the marshals had chased the fugitive killer across the United States and into Costa Rica, where they believed she was hiding near the coast, according to CBS News.
But she was surprisingly cagey, employing multiple new names and even changing the shape of her nose through plastic surgery to throw authorities off her trail.
So instead, the feds made her come to them.
And they did it by seizing on her love of yoga: They put out an ad for a yoga teacher on a local Facebook page in the one-street town of Santa Teresa, Costa Rica.
It didn’t work at first — Armstrong, who is now serving 90 years for killing Wilson in a jealous rage over a past relationship with Armstrong’s boyfriend, took almost a week to bite.
But just as the Marshals were about to head back to the United States, they got a message from someone who identified themselves as a yoga instructor, CBS said.
“We got a bite, somebody that, um, identified herself … as a yoga instructor and said they wanted to meet with us at a particular hostel,” Deputy US Marshal Emir Perez told the network. “And we said … ‘This is, this is our chance!’”
Perez and his partner, Deputy U.S. Marshal Damien Fernandez, raced to Santa Teresa from San Jose, where they had been preparing to go home.
They found her sitting at a table in the hostel. Perez spoke to her in Spanish while he perused her bandaged nose and swollen lips — remnants from the surgeries meant to conceal her identity.
But her eyes were the same as he’d seen in an earlier photograph.
“He gets in the car, and he is like, ‘That’s her. She’s in there,’” Fernandez told CBS.
Local cops made the arrest, and the feds brought her back to Texas. She was charged and held in jail.
She did manage to escape again — but didn’t get far before deputies caught her.
That was the first real step in the lengthy march to justice for Wilson, who was found dead on May 11.
A Vermont native and former alpine skier at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Wilson was an emerging star in pro gravel and mountain bike racing.
She’d been in Austin ahead of a race in Texas — and she was among those favored to win.
Armstrong tracked Wilson to the apartment in which she was staying through a fitness app, investigators said. Then she shot her three times, twice in the head and once through the heart, according to the accusations.
A Jeep matching Armstrong’s was caught on camera outside the home where Wilson’s corpse lay, and the 43-day international manhunt ensued.
A Texas jury took just two hours to convict Armstrong and a day alter, a judge put her behind bars for nine decades.