The Nurse Who Names the Dead
December 04, 2025 at 03:30PM
Christa Hillstrom | The Atavist Magazine | November 2025 | 2,688 words (9 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 169, “14,445 and Counting.”
1.
On the dark, humid morning of August 30, 2014, Christina Morris walked into the shadows of a parking garage outside an upscale housing development in Plano, Texas. Morris, who was 23, had been visiting friends from high school in an improvised reunion that stretched long past midnight. When she was ready to leave, the streets outside were mostly empty, so Enrique Arochi, an acquaintance, offered to escort her to her car. Grainy security-camera footage caught them from behind, walking so close together their shoulders almost touched. It was the last time Morris was ever seen alive.
Note: This story contains graphic depictions of violence, including murder, torture, and sexual assault. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available from the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
Later, in news reports, her mother would grieve over the selfie Morris sent before going out that night, along with her own casual bid for her daughter to have a good time and be safe. Morris’s family and friends were used to hearing from her nearly every day. In the days after the reunion, when she didn’t call and didn’t show up at work, her loved ones contacted everyone they could think of, including Arochi, who swore that he and Morris had parted ways at their cars. Morris’s parents told themselves not to assume the worst. Still, they checked the dumpsters near the garage where she’d gone missing.
Police found Morris’s locked Toyota Celica where she had parked it. They reviewed security footage but couldn’t find any of Morris exiting the garage. At 3:55 a.m., she walked in with Arochi; three minutes later, he emerged in his car, apparently alone. Suspicious, investigators swabbed his Camaro. They found Morris’s DNA in the trunk.
By the time Arochi was arrested for aggravated kidnapping that December, Morris’s family had launched a campaign to find her. Morris’s father, Mark, organized groups every weekend to comb through fields and forests. Many of the searchers had never met Morris or her family; one volunteer told the Dallas Morning News that he came to help because his own niece had gone missing and was eventually found dead. The searchers never located any trace of Morris.
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Her family gathered on visiting days outside the detention facility where Arochi was being held, pressing his family to persuade him to reveal where Morris was. (In statements to police, he denied involvement in her disappearance.) They held signs with pictures of Morris’s smiling face and the hashtag #FindChristina. They offered a $30,000 reward. Maybe she was out there, captive somewhere. Her family would believe she was alive until proven wrong.
Dawn Wilcox, a school nurse in Plano, watched all this unfold from a distance. Years before, Morris had been a friend of her daughter’s; they were part of the same Brownies troop. Wilcox, fifty, could still picture Morris as a child: a small gap-toothed girl with straight brown bangs and gentle eyes. Despite her family’s hope that Morris would be found alive, Wilcox was gnawed by doubt. She knew that if someone went missing for more than 24 hours, the chances were not good that they’d be found.
Three weeks after Morris’s disappearance, Wilcox attended a vigil at Morris’s old high school. It was dusk, and the parking lot glowed with somber candlelight. As she wandered through the crowd, Wilcox kept running into former students—she could remember taking their temperatures and treating their stomachaches. One, a young man who was close to Morris, approached Wilcox and told her that she had been his favorite nurse. He hugged her. Wilcox thought about how often women were harmed by men they knew. Morris was trying to be safe when she let Arochi walk her to her car. “That just ate me up inside,” Wilcox said.
Years before, Wilcox had been hurt by a man she loved. She could sometimes narrate the story impassively, as if it had happened to someone else. More often, the experience welled up in disorganized memories—hot breath in her ear, a face streaked with mud, terror so strong it immobilized her.
Wilcox felt tied to Morris. She believed they were part of the same story about misogynistic violence, one that no one was telling. Local news covered Morris’s case closely, but to Wilcox that coverage seemed driven more by fascination than a desire to understand why such crimes kept happening. How many more women had gone missing in America since Morris? How many had been murdered? Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?
Then, in May 2016, zookeepers at the Cincinnati Zoo shot and killed a gorilla named Harambe after a child crawled into its enclosure. Threats were directed at the people responsible for the animal’s death, mourners gathered at zoos and organized vigils, and an online petition demanding #JusticeForHarambe gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. (Later, viral Harambe memes took on a life of their own.) Wilcox found the killing upsetting, but she was incredulous at the response. How had the death of an animal ignited such furor when the murders of women and girls did not? “There’s been five women killed today,” Wilcox remembers marveling. “Where’s the outrage?”
She started posting online and got into social media spats. What about murdered women? she would ask in comments on stories about Harambe. We can care about two things at once, people would reply. But you don’t, Wilcox thought. Not enough to do anything about it.
She started looking for data on how many women in the United States were murdered by men each year. She wanted to put a link in her online comments, a gateway to a definitive account of the information she thought might make people see what she saw: a national crisis. “Look at all these freaking women!” she remembers wanting to scream. “Pay attention to this!”
But the data wasn’t there. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked murders using a reporting system with hundreds of potential attributes, such as whether domestic violence was a factor, but the information wasn’t publicly accessible. FBI figures relied on voluntary reporting from thousands of law-enforcement agencies, and some years yielded more robust data than others.
Wilcox also considered the data grossly incomplete because it was anonymous; it didn’t include information about who the victims were. Someone needed to document the women—to name them, describe them, and honor them. And if no one else was doing it, Wilcox decided that she would.
She opened a spreadsheet and got to work. Each successive row would contain the details of a woman’s murder. Wilcox started labeling columns: Name, age, location of death. Whether there were postmortem injuries, and whether the crime was a murder-suicide. The killer or suspected killer’s name—if it was available—and his relationship to the victim. Soon Wilcox had labeled more than thirty columns.
Then she started adding names. She found them in news stories: Lauren Johnson, strangled and thrown off a balcony by her boyfriend in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, in January 2016. Jennifer Ann Lopez, the following week in Overland Park, Kansas, strangled with a pair of leopard-print leggings by a roommate high on meth. Four days later, Janise Talton-Jackson, shot by a man whose advances she’d declined at a bar in Pittsburgh. Wilcox kept going, adding name after name along with whatever context she could find.
Two years after she started the spreadsheet, in March 2018, construction workers excavating a remote wooded site in Anna, Texas, unearthed skeletal remains. The medical examiner determined that they belonged to Christina Morris. Her family could finally stop looking for her. Her mother placed a bouquet of flowers where she was found. Arochi, who was already serving a life sentence for kidnapping Morris, was never charged with her killing.
By the time Morris was found, Wilcox was three months into recording the murders of U.S. women and girls that had occurred that year. The list would grow to nearly 2,000 names.
2.
The late-September sun was sloped westward as I drove up an isolated highway that cut through the windswept plains skirting Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Clouds clustered amid the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains visible in the distance. It was 2017, and I was researching activists in Native American communities who were demanding justice and accountability for thousands of missing and murdered women. I had come to Montana to report on the case of Ashley Loring Heavyrunner, a local woman who had disappeared that summer. Her family, like Morris’s in Texas at that very moment, were scouring the wilderness looking for her. They, too, were unsuccessful. As I drove, the vast emptiness around me felt leaden with hopelessness.
I was headed to meet one of Heavyrunner’s former teachers. Annita Lucchesi had been a professor at Blackfeet Community College the previous year, while she worked on a master’s thesis that explored the Native experience of intergenerational violence. When she started looking for reliable data on missing and murdered Native women, she couldn’t find it, so she started making her own list. “I thought this was a project that would have a start and a finish,” Lucchesi told me when we met. It didn’t turn out that way. Tracking became a mission. She hoped that her data would provide a public service, giving color and shape to a reality many in Native communities already knew: Women were dying or disappearing at an astonishing rate.
Lucchesi collected news articles, social media posts, police records, and, eventually, details from families who reached out to her directly. She filed Freedom of Information Act requests for homicide records pertaining to Native women in dozens of municipal police departments. There were rapes, stabbings, immolations. One news item she’d logged just before I met her described a man bludgeoning three women with a frying pan in a trailer. One of the women died.
It was hard to fathom sifting through this kind of horror daily, facing the scope of the loss and the brutality of it. But for decades women like Lucchesi had made it their life’s work.
Femicide entered the lexicon in 1976, when radical feminist scholar Diana Russell used it to describe “the killing of females by males because they are female.” Russell wanted to push back against the normalization of women’s murders, especially in a domestic context, as private misfortunes or crimes of passion. In much the same way that defining genocide clarified the intent behind an atrocity, describing misogynistic murders as femicide demanded that the crimes be recognized as uniquely motivated. “We must recognize the sexual politics of murder,” Russell wrote. “From the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for ‘honor,’ we realize that femicide has been going on a long time.”
Almost as soon as the term was coined, women began tabulating femicides. Between January and May 1979, twelve Black women were murdered in Boston, six within a two-mile radius, prompting an activist group called the Combahee River Collective to publish a pamphlet entitled “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?” The public feared a serial killer, but the victims were bound by their gender, race, and personal circumstances, not by who took their lives. Just two of the women were killed by the same man. With each printing, the collective struck out the old number in the pamphlet’s title to reflect new murders of Black women in the city. A decade later, in 1989, a man shot and killed fourteen women, most of them engineering students, in Montreal. Before the massacre he yelled, “I hate feminists.” In response, activist Chris Domingo created the Berkeley Clearinghouse on Femicide, where she collected stories about similar killings.
The following decade, women in Mexico started counting female murder victims, including hundreds found brutalized in the deserts and dumps surrounding manufacturing facilities in Ciudad Juarez known as maquiladoras. Activists noted what connected these killings: their exaggerated cruelty, the economic conditions that put victims in vulnerable positions, the violence that invaded women’s daily life because of drug trafficking. Esther Chavez Cano, an accountant, started collecting obituaries of femicide victims and news stories about their murders in a file cabinet. Later, Maria Salguero, a data activist, built the country’s most comprehensive archive of femicides—more than 5,000 in all, accessible to the public via online maps.
In 2012, Mexico became one of the first countries in the world to pass legislation codifying femicide. Ecuador, Peru, and other Latin American countries followed. Eventually, thirty countries worldwide would adopt similar laws and pledge resources toward rooting out the causes of femicide, including misogynistic social norms and impunity for gender-based violence.
But change wasn’t propelled only by the sheer number of femicide cases. Public response was a driving force, too. Governments took action when their citizens demanded it, loudly and often, in mass protests, labor strikes, and public awareness campaigns. In Argentina, the hashtag #NiUnaMenos (Not One Less) went viral after 14-year-old Chiara Paez was beat to death and buried beneath her boyfriend’s back patio—he’d killed her because she didn’t want to get an illegal abortion. The rallying cry inspired demonstrations against femicide in dozens of cities and eventually influenced government reforms, including the legalization of abortion in the first trimester.
In 2015, Dubravka Simonovic, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, called for every country in the world to track femicides and determine where governments had failed victims, with an eye toward prevention. Data could help reveal where, say, expanded reproductive rights or tighter restrictions on gun ownership for men accused of abuse might have protected vulnerable women. Few countries answered Simonovic’s call, however, rendering the work of citizen trackers in many places the most reliable source of data.
In Puerto Rico, Carmen Castelló, a retired social worker living in a senior facility, kick-started the territory’s primary femicide-tracking project by copying and pasting news stories about women’s murders into a Word document. When Naeemah Abrahams, a researcher in South Africa, realized that media outlets were biased toward covering women’s murders committed by strangers rather than spouses or family members, she started gathering data from detectives, mortuaries, and medical examiners—work that would inform her country’s official femicide-prevention strategy. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Karen Ingala Smith, a charity worker, spearheaded the annual publication of the Femicide Census. “If any other circumstances had led to the loss of eight lives in three days in the UK, it wouldn’t be described as a series of isolated incidents,” Ingala Smith wrote in The Guardian in 2021. That year, the Femicide Census reported that nearly 90 percent of victims were killed by someone they knew.
Then there was Lucchesi, perched at her laptop in a quiet college library, plugging data into her spreadsheet—names, dates, weapons, motives. By 2019, tireless activism by Native communities effected change on the issue of missing and murdered women. Lucchesi’s work helped, just as she’d hoped. There were congressional hearings and proposed bills; activists needed data to make their case, and Lucchesi was the only one who had it. In 2020, Congress passed two laws intended to improve the federal response to gender-based violence against Native women.
More broadly, though, few people in the United States were talking about femicide. There were no official inquiries, no sustained mass protests, no mobilization against misogynistic murders, even as the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault accelerated. Men killing women was more often the subject of entertainment—podcasts, documentaries, entire TV networks—than public action or legislation. This was in keeping with a long history in the United States of treating women’s murders as everyday tragedies. Caroline Davidson, a law professor at Willamette University, told me that when Congress was drafting hate-crime legislation decades ago, gender-based violence was considered “too prevalent and too common” to merit inclusion. “It would wind up swallowing the entire category of hate crimes,” she said.
What would it take for the country to see femicide as an endemic threat to women? Maybe comprehensive data was the starting point. But how to account for every woman in the country murdered by a man? Lucchesi knew someone trying to answer that very question. She told me: You should meet this school nurse in Texas. She was talking about Dawn Wilcox.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/04/femicide-database-dawn-wilcox/
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