Grassroots Projects Push for Visibility on Femicide

Staff | Cherokee 411

Adapted from reporting by Christa Hillstrom

Dawn Wilcox

PLANO, Texas (Cherokee 411) Christina Morris walked into a Plano parking garage before dawn on August 30, 2014, and did not come out again on camera.

The 23 year old had spent the night catching up with friends at an upscale development north of Dallas. When she left for her car in the early morning hours, an acquaintance, Enrique Arochi, offered to walk with her. Security footage later showed the two entering the garage side by side at 3:55 a.m.

A few minutes later, another camera recorded Arochi driving his Camaro out of the structure. Morris was not seen again.

Her locked Toyota Celica was later found in the same place she had parked it. Investigators said they could not find any footage of Morris leaving the garage. They swabbed Arochi’s vehicle and reported that Morris’s DNA was found in the trunk.

As days passed without word from her, Morris’s family and friends organized search parties, checked dumpsters near the garage and launched a public campaign with the hashtag FindChristina. Volunteers combed fields and wooded areas around North Texas. Arochi told police and reporters that he had parted ways with Morris at their cars.

In December 2014 he was arrested and later convicted of aggravated kidnapping. Morris’s family held to the belief that she might still be alive.

Watching from a distance was Dawn Wilcox, a school nurse in Plano. Years earlier, Morris had been in her daughter’s Brownie troop, a small girl with straight brown bangs and a gap toothed smile. Wilcox felt a growing conviction that the case was part of a much larger story.

Note This story contains descriptions of extreme violence.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available at the National Domestic Violence Hotline at thehotline.org or 1 800 799 7233.

Wilcox had lived with violence before. As a young woman, she survived an abusive relationship in Dallas that escalated from pranks and threats to a night when her boyfriend bit her, pinned her by the throat and said he would kill her while claiming to be Satan. She eventually left him. Later she learned he had been sent to prison for raping two women at knifepoint.

She also knew women who had been killed. In the mid 1980s, a woman she knew named Carol Davidson was raped and strangled in Tacoma, Washington. Years later, when Wilcox was married to a crime scene officer, he warned her never to leave knives in a kitchen block. Too many women, he told her, died with their own kitchen knives in their bodies.

Cases like Morris’s and Davidson’s left Wilcox asking the same question over and over. How many women in the United States were killed by men each year, and why did that violence remain so invisible

When she tried to find clear, public data, she discovered that federal figures were incomplete and anonymous. Victims appeared as numbers, not as people.

So she started counting them herself.

A personal spreadsheet of loss

Wilcox opened a spreadsheet on her laptop and began entering names from local news stories across the country. Each row represented one woman or girl killed by a man.

She tracked names, ages, dates, locations, whether the case was a murder suicide, whether there had been a restraining order, and what investigators or prosecutors had said about the relationship between victim and suspect. She added a column for the alleged or convicted killer and how he knew the woman.

Then she added a column titled About Her.

Wilcox did not want the women remembered only for the violence that ended their lives. She searched obituaries, interviews and social media for details about who they were before they were killed.

One entry describes a radio host named Kumba Sesay, shot and dumped in a ditch by a man she had been dating. A close friend recalled how Sesay would show up, eat her food, flip through her streaming queue without picking anything and then talk for hours about business and God. Another entry notes that a woman named Debra Jean Helgerson, stabbed to death by her daughter’s ex boyfriend, was an avid Green Bay Packers supporter and self described fashion lover who could not watch games live because she became too nervous.

If Wilcox cannot find any personal details, she leaves a note in the spreadsheet inviting relatives or friends to send information about the woman’s life, hopes or interests.

The project, which she called Women Count USA, is a volunteer effort that now occupies up to 25 hours a week during the school year and more time in the summer. She searches for cases using online alerts and newspaper archives, and she posts about them on social media to draw attention.

For Wilcox, the spreadsheet is also a way to impose some order on horror.

“If you cannot make it out and quantify it, then you cannot do anything about it,” she said.

Femicide and the global effort to count

The term femicide entered feminist scholarship in 1976, when researcher Diana Russell used it to describe the killing of women by men because they are women. The concept was meant to distinguish those killings from random violence or what were once called crimes of passion and to draw attention to patterns rooted in gender and power.

In the decades since, women in many countries have tried to catalog those deaths and use the numbers to push for policy changes.

Activists in Boston tracked a series of killings of Black women in the late 1970s. In Montreal, they documented the aftermath of a 1989 massacre at an engineering school, where a gunman shot and killed 14 women and declared his hatred of feminists. In Mexico, citizen researchers built maps and paper archives of women killed near factories and in border cities. Their work helped push Mexico to adopt a legal definition of femicide in 2012. Several other Latin American countries followed with similar legislation.

In 2015 the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women urged every country to gather detailed data on femicides in order to understand how governments had failed victims and to prevent future killings. In many places, only limited official action followed, leaving independent projects to fill the gap.

In Puerto Rico, a retired social worker began pasting news clippings about women’s murders into a document that evolved into a territory wide reference. In South Africa, a researcher built a detailed data set that drew on police files and mortuary records rather than media reports. In the United Kingdom, an annual Femicide Census tracks women killed by men, finding that most were killed by someone they knew.

In the United States, Wilcox’s spreadsheet is one of several efforts to give names and context to what remains a largely uncounted pattern of violence.

Cherokee 411 and the MMCP project

Similar work is beginning to emerge in Cherokee communities as well. Cherokee 411 has launched Murdered and Missing Cherokee People, or MMCP, a podcast, video series and reporting project that focuses on Cherokee citizens who have been killed or disappeared, and on the families still seeking answers.

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The series is part of the broader Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives movement, but it concentrates on cases involving Cherokee people. Each episode works directly with families to document the life of a missing or murdered relative, the circumstances of the case and the obstacles families face when they search for help.

In addition to the storytelling series, MMCP is building what organizers say is the first dedicated database of murdered and missing Cherokee citizens. Volunteers help gather names, timelines and available records so that families, advocates and the public can track cases in one place. The goal, MMCP leaders say, is to ensure that no Cherokee relative is forgotten and that community pressure for answers and reform can grow.

MMCP reflects the same belief that drives Wilcox’s work that naming and counting victims is a first step toward change.

Patterns of control and punishment

As Wilcox added cases to Women Count USA, she created categories to track repeated patterns.

Entries marked breakup or divorce filed involve women killed when they tried to leave a relationship. A tag for crime scene staging or deceptive narrative covers cases where a killer tried to disguise a murder as a suicide, accident or missing person report. Another category notes the use of cameras, GPS trackers or other technology to stalk or control a woman before she was killed.

One label Wilcox uses is corrective femicide, a term she applies to killings where men appear to be punishing women for exercising independence.

In one case from Washington state, authorities said a man stabbed his girlfriend more than 20 times, decapitated her and is believed to have killed her in front of their young child. According to court records, he told police he acted after speaking with God and quoted scripture about women who did not obey.

In another case from North Carolina, a woman named Marcquius Timmons Moore was found in her home, bound with tape and plastic bags and tied to her bed. The air conditioning had been left on a very low setting, a detail that investigators said may have been intended to slow decomposition. On the wall, someone had written in crayon, Here lies the ultimate of all strumpets. Her husband was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Wilcox wrote in her notes that this case haunts her. She could find very little about Timmons Moore beyond the manner of her death, the fact that she had a daughter and that she had once spoken frequently with her mother.

These patterns, Wilcox says, point to a consistent thread in many of the cases she records. They are not random acts, she argues, but violence rooted in entitlement and control.

From anonymous data to named lives

Government statistics in the United States can describe how many women die by homicide each year, whether a firearm was used and whether domestic violence was suspected. What they do not provide is a public, detailed accounting of who those women were or how their cases fit into any larger story.

Wilcox’s spreadsheet and projects like MMCP cannot replace national data. They rely on what is reported in the news and what families are willing and able to share. Many cases never reach the public eye.

But they do something official numbers do not. They record women by name and try to preserve fragments of their lives.

By early 2018, the list of women and girls killed by men that Wilcox had entered for that year alone neared two thousand. She continued to add more each week while working full time as a nurse.

One name among thousands

In March 2018, construction workers digging at a rural site near Anna, Texas, unearthed skeletal remains. The Collin County medical examiner identified them as belonging to Christina Morris, the young woman who had disappeared from the Plano parking garage nearly four years earlier.

Her family could finally stop searching fields and roadsides. Arochi, who had already received a life sentence for kidnapping, was not charged with murder.

By then, Wilcox had recorded hundreds of other femicides in the United States and was still adding entries. Morris’s name and story appear there, one row in a growing list of women whose deaths Wilcox believes should be seen as part of a national crisis rather than a series of private tragedies.

In Cherokee communities, MMCP is doing similar work for Cherokee families, preserving names and stories in its own emerging database and media archive.

Both efforts rest on the same premise that counting and remembering women who are killed is a form of care, and that careful records can be a tool for accountability.

For Wilcox, the work continues, case by case on a home computer in Texas. For MMCP, it continues through reporting, interviews and a growing list of Cherokee families who refuse to let their loved ones be forgotten.