A new investigation using Pentagon death and manpower data found that, from 2011 to August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army—more than half at the hands of fellow service members or veterans. The analysis also found active-duty Army women fa
On the last day Sarah Roque was seen alive in October 2024, she went to Walmart for trash bags. She was 23 years old, and she had been in the Army for just over four years.
Her killer was not an enemy combatant. The man convicted of murder, Wooster Rancy of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, went into the barracks’ orbit too—after Roque’s body was later found in a dumpster behind the barracks, according to the investigation’s account.
Roque’s mother, Ana Roque, said she can’t reconcile the violence with the idea of safety. “Even now, I still can’t believe it,” she told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”
In a finding that complicates a core part of how soldiers are trained to think about danger. an investigation by The Intercept found women in the Army are more likely to be killed by fellow service members than by enemy combatants. Between 2011 and August 2025. the investigation reported at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army. and more than half of those deaths were at the hands of other service members or veterans.
The analysis went further, using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per-capita death rates. It found active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers—an outcome the investigation says runs opposite of national and global trends.
Much of the pattern is intimate and familiar. In many cases described in the reporting, women were killed by current or former romantic partners. The investigation said more than 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point. It also found that the rate of homicides among women soldiers tied to intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average.
In other cases, like Roque’s, the motive and path are harder to trace from the outside. “There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” Ana Roque said. Rancy was convicted of murder in February. and Roque said she could not fault prosecutors for what they proved in court. “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.”.
A number of researchers have pointed to the military’s hypermasculine culture—one that has historically devalued women—as a contributing factor to violence. But even that explanation collides with a different barrier: the availability of data needed to measure what’s happening. Erin Siegal McIntyre. a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. said there is no reliable way to know the full scale.
“There’s no way to know how bad the problem really is,” Siegal McIntyre said. “There is an abysmal amount of data collected on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, for example, many of whom are former military.”
The investigation’s findings also describe a system that does not publicly disclose the full picture of deaths among service members. In addition to the 41 homicide deaths among women. it reported another 128 women died by suicide. with the majority being lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. It said homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide from 2011 to 2024. the last complete year of data included in the investigation.
At the heart of the reporting is what the Army does not separate and what it does not count in accessible ways. The investigation said homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita. preventing deeper analysis and comparison. It also said there is nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members. who the victims are. or where homicides occurred.
The Defense Department’s annual suicide report, as described in the investigation, does not note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment.
And while the data is incomplete. other parts of the institution’s policy landscape are moving in a direction advocates say will make accountability harder. In September. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. a panel that had existed for nearly 75 years and focused on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April. a woman described in the investigation as a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. The investigation also said Hegseth intervened to block the promotions of women officers.
When asked for comment, an Army spokesperson denied that protections were insufficient. “The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” Army spokesperson Heather Hagan said in a statement to The Intercept.
The violence described in the investigation often bleeds into sexual assault. and that connection shows up in the accounts offered by victims’ advocates. The investigation described Spc. Mayra Diaz’s assault on an Army base at Fort Hood. Texas—an account that links brutality and institutional failure in the way it unfolded inside a locked barracks.
Diaz was blindfolded and her hands were bound over her head. Water was poured on her face—she later wrote: “waterboarding me and causing me to choke.” Her attacker “then wrapped a cord around my neck in an attempt to kill me.” The assailant was a superior. Sgt. Greville Clarke. who knocked on her door at the barracks before threatening her with a pistol and raping her during the attack.
According to the investigation, the Army knew two other women had been assaulted at the barracks in similar attacks, but officials chose not to issue a public warning, saying it could compromise the investigation and cause potential panic.
Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, said the relationship between sexual assault and self-harm is not subtle. “There’s a huge correlation between sexual assault and suicide rates,” Connolly said. “It’s unambiguous — sexual assault rates are higher than in the civilian world.”.
The investigation also found suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women. It cited national headlines, including the March 2023 death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood. Ruiz took her own life at 20 after reporting sexual harassment. The timing of her death raised questions for Ruiz’s family. and the investigation referenced a subsequent Army inquiry reported by Telemundo that pointed to a “persistently toxic culture permissive of harassment.”.
Years earlier, after Vanessa Guillén’s 2020 murder by an Army specialist, an independent review found “a total disregard and disrespect for female soldiers.” Investigators issued 70 recommendations, including a sweeping overhaul of the military’s sexual harassment and assault prevention programs.
But the investigation says the violence did not stop. It described continued harm at Fort Hood—homicide. sexual assault. and suicides—and said three deaths at the base were never reported publicly by the Army but appeared in the data obtained through its Freedom of Information Act request. Counting Guillén and Ruiz. the investigation reported nine fatalities from homicide or suicide among women stationed at the base in five years.
Diaz’s case adds another layer to the story of insider violence. She filed a federal tort claim that described institutional failures and argued she was left exposed to predation. In her view. “Because the Army took no action to address the string of female soldiers attacked in their barracks. ” Sgt. Clarke was “empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”.
Clarke assaulted five women before he was apprehended in October 2022 and convicted in 2025 of charges including attempted premeditated murder. The investigation said he died by suicide in custody.
Christine Dunn. an attorney representing Diaz. told The Intercept that Diaz’s circumstances were particularly alarming in how ordinary access became dangerous. “You don’t expect someone who’s in uniform to be a serial predator,” Dunn said. She also argued it was reasonable for Diaz to believe her setting was safe: “It was very reasonable for her to think that that was a safe thing to do.”.
Diaz wrote that leadership denied repeated requests to move her into family housing off-post. Only after she and her sexual assault representative told officials that remaining in the barracks was “an untenable environment” was she finally allowed to leave.
She described the ongoing aftermath as severe and persistent: “I suffered from extreme paranoia. exacerbated by my attacker remaining at large. ” Diaz wrote. She said she abused alcohol in an attempt to forget what happened and began going to weekly therapy but stopped because “I still find the attack very traumatizing to talk about.”.
The Army did not provide comment on Diaz’s case or on reports of Clarke’s predation specifically.
In her complaint, Diaz argued the harm was preventable and tied it directly to failures by the Army and Defense Department: “What happened to me was a result of the United States Department of the Army’s and the Department of Defense’s negligence,” she stated. “It was entirely preventable.”
The investigation does not stop at one base or one category of violence. It also points to domestic and intimate partner homicides, describing a mismatch between what the Defense Department reported and what it found in the data.
It said that Martinez’s death, at Fort Hood in September 2021, was one such case. Sgt. Francine Martinez was weeks away from her 25th birthday when she ran into the father of her child—a fellow soldier with whom she had recently separated. The investigation described that Martinez had filed for child support weeks earlier. After an argument broke out, Martinez got into a car to leave, and he followed. She was eventually shot in the head, hospitalized for two weeks, and died from her injuries, leaving behind her 1-year-old.
The investigation said Defense Department and Pentagon data indicate rates of domestic and intimate partner violence in the military—particularly in the Army—are higher than the civilian population. It said most victims are women and that women make up most of the homicide cases tied to that violence.
In 2021. the Defense Department reported three cases in which service members killed someone in a domestic or interpersonal dispute. according to the investigation’s account. But it said it identified at least seven cases in 2021 in which service members were suspected of killing a spouse or partner in acts of domestic or intimate partner violence—more than double the official count.
“When the situation involves a marriage or partnership between agents and service members, it only complicates reporting,” Siegal McIntyre said.
The investigation also cited a Naval Criminal Investigative Service report from 2021 suggesting the number could be higher. identifying additional domestic violence-related homicides. It said congressionally mandated reports in other years also have data tracking problems. including an account from a Project on Government Oversight investigation that found thousands of abuse cases involving Army personnel were mishandled and many never entered tracking systems.
Investigators could only look at 10 out of more than 60 Army installations, the investigation said. A Government Accountability Office report. as described. found the Pentagon doesn’t reliably screen for sexual assault when service members seek care or leave service and lacks systems to prioritize treatment or ensure confidential. long-term support.
Dunn said the institutional structure does not create accountability in practice. “I don’t think there’s a mechanism within the Army for holding itself accountable,” Dunn said.
She also tied the issue to another legal fight—saying she represents some of the 80 victims suing Army gynecologist Maj. Blaine McGraw, who was assigned to Fort Hood in 2023. The investigation said McGraw has since been accused of recording and making harmful physical contact with women during gynecological exams. The Army did not comment on McGraw’s case, which remains ongoing.
Dunn said some women who came forward had gone to McGraw seeking rape kits for sexual assault and that the allegations describe actions that further traumatized them.
“When the institution is facilitating the assaults and allowing them to happen, the institution needs to be held accountable,” Dunn said. “Almost every client who comes to me wants to come forward so that this wouldn’t happen to other women.”
The Army acknowledged. according to the investigation. having recorded more homicides than were noted in the dataset provided based on the FOIA request. Between 2021 and 2023, Army spokesperson Hagan said the Army recorded a total of 16 homicides among active-duty women. The data provided to the investigation for its FOIA request counted only nine.
Hagan did not respond to follow-up questions on the discrepancy, and the Army did not provide data outside the years 2021 to 2023. The investigation argued that if undercounting extended across the full 14-year span of its dataset, the true toll could be substantially higher.
After the independent review of Fort Hood following Guillén’s killing. Hagan said the Army implemented major reforms to strengthen prevention. reporting. and accountability for sexual harassment and assault. The investigation described those reforms as including a shift of the criminal investigations division to civilian leadership. requiring more independent investigations; stricter missing-soldier response protocols; and expanded data-driven oversight of cases.
But advocates argue the deaths continued anyway, including another homicide at Hood last year.
Connolly said Congress should step in by demanding answers and scrutinizing the data on domestic violence. “You have to call DoD into Congress and demand answers on why progress hasn’t been made,” Connolly said. He said Congress could scrutinize the data, appropriate more resources to DV investigations, and hold hearings.
Siegal McIntyre said oversight depends on how funding is tied to accountability. “The potential solution lies with how funding is or isn’t tied to oversight,” she said. “Without Congress doing its job, nothing can change.”
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan. D-Pa. a House Armed Services Committee member and Air Force veteran. described the findings as both staggering and familiar. “This report is staggering, and unfortunately, unsurprising,” Houlahan said. “Servicewomen consistently bear the brunt of harassment. assault. retaliation. and systemic failures within the ranks. and it is costing them their careers. their safety. and in far too many cases. their lives.”.
The investigation notes earlier research the Pentagon did not extend—citing a 1995 Defense Department study on homicide victims by gender. It said female service members across active-duty branches were killed at higher rates than both their male counterparts and women nationally. It also cited a Marine Corps and Navy-specific study covering 1995 to 1999 that found similarly elevated risks.
Ana Roque, speaking about her daughter, said change would start with how the military builds protections for women. She called for more careful screening in recruitment—saying recruiters need to be more careful regarding where individuals come from. She also asked for more police and camera surveillance on bases. arguing that if those safeguards had been present. “they could have seen him moving my daughter’s body in broad daylight.”.
She said she wishes she could have her daughter back.
“She always had a smile, no matter how difficult her day was,” Roque said. “She made time to help colleagues with various issues and never said no. I have many stories written in my notebook from soldiers and civilians who knew her and told me. ‘She saved me. ’ simply by taking a minute to listen to them. She loved her family; we would talk three times a day: at 7 a.m. during my lunch break. and at night. when she would always say ‘Good night. Mommy.’”.
U.S. Army women in the military homicide domestic violence suicide Fort Hood Pentagon Defense Department sexual assault reporting