Dawn Wilcox adds more names to her list every day. Sometimes as many as 50.

From her home in a quiet cul de sac in Plano, Texas, Wilcox runs Women Count USA – a project honoring victims of what she believes to be America’s unseen crisis: femicide.

Wilcox has spent much of the past two years scouring online news stories and social media for reports on women and girls killed by men in the US. She compiles their names in a publicly available spreadsheet and shares details about their lives and deaths with nearly 6,000 people on the Women Count USA Facebook page.

It is no small task. By Wilcox’s count, in 2018 it happened to at least 1,600 women and girls from Alaska to New York, of all races, ages and income status. They were killed in their beds and in their cars, at work and in yoga class, by their fathers, husbands, ex-boyfriends, cousins, sons, neighbors and strangers.

Wilcox’s work is filling a gap in data on femicide, typically defined as the killing of women and girls because of their gender, said Jodie Roure, an expert on violence against women in the Americas. The federal government tracks domestic violence killings, referred to as intimate partner homicides, but doesn’t specifically compile data on femicide, Roure said, in part because the US hasn’t adopted a standardized definition for the term as in some Latin American countries.

Without a centralized system to gather data on incidents of violence against women and girls, those crimes are underreported, Roure, who is a professor at John Jay College, said. “The data that does exist we know is alarming,” she added. “Violence against women is normalized. And because it’s normalized we don’t see it as a crisis.”

The Violence Policy Center, which produces an annual report on female homicide victims based on FBI data, echoes Wilcox’s concerns about violence against women in the US. There aren’t adequate resources assigned to reducing it, the VPC legislative director, Kristen Rand, said. Congress let the landmark 1994 Violence Against Women Act expire during the most recent government shutdown.

But individual stories can help spur action, Rand said, and that is where Women Count USA comes in. “People look at statistics and they too often don’t see what’s behind the statistics – this humanizes the problem,” Rand said. “Every single one of those people is a human being with a family.”

Using Google alerts, news reports and her free time, Wilcox has taken it upon herself to tell the stories of America’s murdered women.

Dawn Wilcox documents femicide in the United States for her project, Women Count, from her home in Plano, Texas. Photograph: Laura Buckman/The Guardian

On a Saturday afternoon in January, Wilcox is perched over her computer again, the light of the screen reflecting in her glasses as she clicks away. Since last spring, in between days at the elementary school where she works as a nurse and evenings at home watching movies with her husband, Wilcox has searched for a photo of Alina Duwyenie, an Arizona woman who was killed by her boyfriend. Martin Larney told police he shot Duwyenie because he was upset about what she was wearing.

Duwyenie proved particularly difficult to find. Facebook searches and news stories produced nothing. But on this afternoon, just as the sun is sinking into the horizon, she starts getting somewhere. Wilcox finds Duwyenie credited as an illustrator in a children’s book, that leads to the Facebook page of a colleague of the young woman, and finally, the photo.

Duwyenie is smiling. There are gems under her right eye and hair falling over one side of her face.

“There you are, I found you,” Wilcox says to the photo of the dark-haired 22-year-old. Then she adds Duwyenie’s photo to her list.

Finding photos of murdered women is of particular importance to Wilcox. The faces that make up her list – a half-smile overlaid with a Snapchat filter, a preschooler grinning under a princess crown, a grey-haired woman holding a kitten – remind viewers that these women are more than just numbers.

Wilcox spends much of her time thinking about them. While at the grocery store or doctor’s appointments she writes notes to herself: leads to follow up on, women to include.

She started the project after the killings of Cecil the lion and Harambe the gorilla. There was such outrage over the animals’ deaths, and while Wilcox is an animal lover, she didn’t understand why there wasn’t the same level of concern for murdered women. “People are starting petitions and they’re marching and I’m like I just heard about three women killed today, what about them?”

Violence against women is normalized. And because it’s normalized we don’t see it as a crisis Jodie Roure

A self-described information junkie, Wilcox, 55, has spent decades learning about domestic violence, in part because she has been a victim of it. A boyfriend once held her captive and abused her for hours after she tried to break up with him, Wilcox said. And for years Wilcox was married to a man who she says controlled what she wore, who she could vote for, and left her fearing for her life.

She tried to leave again and again. She knows why women stay, why it’s often the most dangerous when they try to leave and wishes people would ask, “why was he violent?” instead of “why did she stay?”

“Femicide, it’s the end road where all other abuses of women sort of lead. That is why words matter. It starts with dehumanizing language,” Wilcox said.

To Wilcox, the women on her list are victims of an epidemic unseen or ignored, the result of societal attitudes that see women’s lives as the property of men. Pushing back against that means documenting the victims, the impact of male violence, and the stories behind the numbers, like those of Katelin Crocker and Jamie Martin.

Crocker and Martin never knew each other. They lived more than 1,000 miles apart, but the nature of their deaths brought them together on Wilcox’s list.

In the final moments of her life, 19-year-old Katelin Crocker was packing up her makeup case with all the Kat Von D eyeshadows the young cosmetologist needed, her mother Johnnah Dixon Crocker said. A coroner would tell her mother that although she probably started to turn at the sound of her boyfriend, Alexander Harmon, cocking a 12-gauge shotgun, she died before she knew what hit her.

Jamie Martin spent the last minutes of her life staring down the barrel of a gun, according to her sister Jennifer Tice. Stacey Ayotte shot the mother of his two children in the front yard of her home in Tupper Lake, New York, on a cold May morning 18 months after she ended their long, abusive relationship. The first bullet hit her pelvis, but it was the second, fired six minutes later – the sound of which her mother would hear from half a mile away – that would kill her, Tice said. In Facebook comments, friends of Ayotte would ask what pushed him over the edge; some would blame Martin.

Jamie Martin and her daughter Alexis. Martin was killed in the front yard of her Tupper Lake, New York, home by the father of her two children. Photograph: Courtesy Jennifer Tice

A 2018 UN report on the gender-related killing of women and girls around the world found they face the greatest danger in their own homes, and that although the majority of murder victims are men, women are much more likely to be killed by those closest to them.

“Violence against women is so ubiquitous that it is invisible,” Wilcox said. “That one nurse in Texas can find 1,600 women that have been allegedly murdered by men in the United States in a single year, that is staggering.”

In the days after Jamie Martin’s death, her sister, Jennifer Tice, came across a tribute posted by Wilcox that she said beautifully described her sister, a mother and an artist who worked with people with disabilities.

The posting led Tice to the list, filled with the names of hundreds of other women who were murdered like Jamie: “I looked at the chart every single day. I guess to see my sister’s name and see how many people are living the life I’m living.”

Tracking these deaths is exhausting, and easily takes up Wilcox’s every free hour. But she finds time to step away from the project; she paints – mostly landscapes – watches TV shows like Leave It to Beaver, spends time with her family and reads. Although some titles, like a book about staging crime scenes, are related to her research.

Despite the difficult nature of her work, Wilcox is hopeful. A poem on her Facebook profile reads: “Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world … the broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.”

“I care about all these women. I care they lived and I care that they were murdered but I can also compartmentalize it,” she says. “You can’t let this wreck you. You can’t be effective if you let it destroy you.”

Wilcox will dedicate herself to Women Count USA full time after retirement. She isn’t counting this year; instead she will go back and ensure she has the names of every woman killed in 2018. Eventually, she’d like to start working backwards, documenting all women and girls killed by men in the last 50 years to remind the world that they existed, and they mattered.

“Some of these women are killed in front of their children, they’re killed with their children. These are women being killed while they’re pleading for their lives. Even though I couldn’t do anything to stop it, this is my way of making sure they’re not completely alone – that I’ll be there to document it.”