Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants

Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Roque had been in the Army for just over four years when a man fatally shot her in the head. Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks. “Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.” A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.

The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers.

In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims. “There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “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.’” Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them.

But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions. “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.”

Homicides of women in the Army by type of perpetrator. Fei Liu / The Intercept Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense. Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide. The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison. There’s also nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members, who their victims are, or where homicides occurred. The Defense Department’s annual suicide report doesn’t note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment. Meanwhile, systems meant to protect women are being rolled back and dismantled. In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It had existed for nearly 75 years, focusing on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April, a woman who had been a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. Hegseth has also intervened to block the promotions of women officers.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Army denied that its protections were insufficient. “The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” said Army spokesperson Heather Hagan.

A Pattern of Abuse When Spc. Mayra Diaz was assaulted on the Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, she was lucky to survive. Diaz was blindfolded, with her hands bound over her head, having water poured on her face — “waterboarding me and causing me to choke,” Diaz later wrote. 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. The Army knew two other women had been assaulted at the barracks in similar attacks; officials chose not to issue a public warning, citing concerns about compromising the investigation and causing potential panic. The problems of homicide and suicide among women in the Army are inextricable from the prevalence of sexual assault. In some cases, like Diaz’s, a sexual attack involves an attempt on a woman’s life. Rape and sexual abuse are known to be detrimental to mental health, increasing the risk of suicide or self harm. “There’s a huge correlation between sexual assault and suicide rates,” said Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for victims of military sexual trauma. “It’s unambiguous — sexual assault rates are higher than in the civilian world.”

The Intercept’s investigation found suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.

Male soldiers faced a smaller increase in suicide rates compared to civilian men than Army women did compared to civilian women, and men in the Army have a lower risk of dying by homicide than their non-military counterparts. In fact, The Intercept’s investigation found, suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women. Some cases have made national headlines, such as the March 2023 death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood, who took her own life at 20 years old after reporting sexual harassment. For Ruiz’s family, the timing of her death raised troubling questions, echoing fellow Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillén’s infamous 2020 murder by an Army specialist.

A subsequent Army inquiry into Ruiz’s case, reported by Telemundo, pointed to a “persistently toxic culture permissive of harassment.”

Years earlier, in the wake of Guillén’s death, an independent review revealed “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 violence didn’t stop. Women at Fort Hood continued to experience a grim roll call of harm: Homicide. Sexual assault. Suicides. Three deaths at Fort Hood were never reported publicly by the Army but appeared in the data obtained by The Intercept. Counting Guillén and Ruiz, there were nine fatalities from homicide or suicide among women stationed at the base in five years. The Defense Department’s most recent suicide report does not provide data on how many suicide decedents experienced sexual trauma, although the Pentagon has provided this data in previous years. From 2001 to 2023, nearly 1 in 4 women service members experienced sexual assault, according to the Brown University’s Costs of War project, much higher than the numbers annually reported by the Pentagon. Research identifies those experiences as a key driver of suicide risk. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among women veterans have risen faster than among men. In Diaz’s view, institutional failures were a key factor in her assault. “Because the Army took no action to address the string of female soldiers attacked in their barracks,” Diaz wrote in a federal tort claim, “Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.” Clarke assaulted five women before he was apprehended October 2022 and convicted in 2025 of charges including attempted premeditated murder. He died by suicide in custody. Diaz was “in a U.S. Army base in a locked barracks, opening the door to someone in uniform. It was very reasonable for her to think that that was a safe thing to do,” Christine Dunn, an attorney representing Diaz, told The Intercept. “You don’t expect someone who’s in a uniform to be a serial predator.”

“Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”

Diaz wrote that leadership denied repeated requests to move her into family housing off-post, and only after she and her sexual assault representative made clear that remaining in the barracks was “an untenable environment” was she finally allowed to leave. “I suffered from extreme paranoia, exacerbated by my attacker remaining at large,” Diaz wrote. “I abused alcohol in an attempt to forget what happened to me. … I began going to weekly therapy but have stopped going because I still find the attack very traumatizing to talk about.” The Army did not provide comment on Diaz’s case or reports of Clarke’s predation specifically. The anxiety, Diaz wrote, has never fully gone away. “What happened to me was a result of the United States Department of the Army’s and the Department of Defense’s negligence,” her complaint stated. “It was entirely preventable.”

False and Frivolous Last year, Pete Hegseth directed the Army to change its 15-6 regulation, which governs the process for investigating military-related misconduct like sexual harassment. Now the first step is verifying the “credibility of accusers with new disciplinary measures for soldiers who submit knowingly false or frivolous complaints. Some fear the rule may discourage those experiencing sexual harassment from reporting incidents, perpetuating a “culture of victim blaming,” according to Protect Our Defenders’ Connolly.

While Hegseth rolls back protections, the issue of violence against women in the military appears to be getting worse. The Intercept’s analysis shows that from 2011 to 2020, the per capita rate of women dying by suicide or homicide in the Army was 15 per 100,000. From 2021 to 2024, following the Army’s attempted reforms in the wake of Vanessa Guillén’s killing, the rate increased over 35 percent, to 21 per 100,000. And deaths continued their pace in 2025. Siegal McIntyre, the UNC professor studying domestic abuse, pointed to cases like that of Sgt. Francine Martinez, who was just weeks away from her 25th birthday on a night out at Fort Hood in September 2021, when she ran into the father of her child.