The woman on death row for killing a pregnant friend and stealing her baby

Taylor Parker’s lies had become so elaborate that they came with baby clothes, medical videos and even a gender reveal party.

By October 2020, prosecutors said that the Texas woman had spent months pretending to everyone that she was pregnant. The problem, brutally simple, was that she couldn’t be.

Parker had undergone a hysterectomy in 2019 she’d not told anyone about. Her boyfriend Wade Griffin – who fully believed that the couple were expecting their first child together – didn’t know that.

What followed became one of the rarest and most disturbing murder cases in modern American crime. It also left Parker on death row.

The 29 year-old was convicted of killing her heavily pregnant friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock and gruesomely cutting her unborn daughter from her body. Not only was Reagan tragically killed, but her baby, Braxlynn, didn’t survive either.

Almost six years on, Parker is now 34 and one of only seven women on death row in Texas. No execution date has been set.

The truly shocking case is attracting fresh attention ahead of the release of Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, which examines the killing, the investigation and the courtroom battles that followed.

The case has remained legally significant because of one grim question at its very centre… Was Braxlynn alive when Parker removed her from her mother’s body?

That question mattered because Parker was convicted of capital murder. In Texas, prosecutors argued that the killing was aggravated by kidnapping.

Parker’s lawyers later argued that if Braxlynn had not been born alive, she could not legally have been kidnapped. It is the sort of legal argument that sounds cold until you remember that death row is where technicalities become rather important. It is, after all, a matter of life and death. In more ways than one.

Texas appeal judges rejected the defence’s argument. They ruled that a rational jury could find Braxlynn had been born alive before she was kidnapped.

The US Supreme Court declined last month to review Parker’s case. Her conviction and death sentence have already been upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

The horrific and almost unbelievable violence itself took place on October 9, 2020, in the city of New Boston, down in Texas.

Reagan Simmons-Hancock was seven and a half months pregnant. She knew Parker through photography work. Parker had photographed her engagement and wedding before the two became friends.

Prosecutors said that Parker attacked Simmons-Hancock inside her home. Investigators later said she’d been stabbed and slashed over 100 times.

Reagan’s three year-old daughter Kynlee was also in the house. She was found unharmed, hiding beneath a blanket on a bed.

Parker left the house with the newborn but her escape collapsed almost immediately. Almost immediately a state trooper stopped her for erratic driving. The officer found Parker covered in dried blood with the baby in her lap. The umbilical cord was still attached.

Parker claimed that she had given birth at the roadside. The trooper had no reason not to believe her. Doctors at a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma, however, found no signs that she had recently given birth.

During questioning, Parker admitted being in a ‘physical altercation’ with Simmons-Hancock. She also admitted taking the baby from her friend’s body.

Prosecutors said that the murder was the end point of a very long deception. They argued that Parker had faked a pregnancy because she feared losing Griffin.

The couple had met at a rodeo in 2019. Griffin later told court that the relationship had been an ‘emotional rollercoaster’. He said that Parker cooked meals, cared for livestock and helped run the home. She also promised to give him 800 acres of land.

Parker had claimed to be linked to the Blackburn syrup fortune while trying to buy a $4.7 (£3.4m) million estate. In reality, she had worked at a staffing agency and an OB-GYN clinic.

Investigators said she had collected baby items and watched videos on childbirth. Prosecutors argued that those preparations showed planning that had stretched back a number of months.

At trial, the defence did not try to prove that Parker had not killed Simmons-Hancock. The focus was very much on saving her from a lethal injection.

A neurologist called by the defence said ‘something is very wrong with her brain’. He described Parker’s condition as frontal lobe syndrome, which can involve serious changes in behaviour, emotion and judgement.

The jury convicted Parker of capital murder in October 2022. She was sentenced to death the following month.

Her appeal lawyers also argued that the trial had been tainted by heavy media coverage and social media commentary. A request to move the case out of Bowie County had been denied. They said prosecutors had portrayed Parker as a ‘deviant’ and a ‘terrible mother’. The courts were not persuaded that those arguments were enough to overturn the verdict.

Thankfully, cases like this are almost entirely unheard of. Fetal abductions by maternal evisceration numbered just 15 in the US between 1987 and 2011, with around 100 recorded worldwide in that time period.

That rarity is part of what makes Parker’s case so difficult to comprehend. More than five years later, it remains one of the most unusual murder cases in modern American criminal history.

Maternal Instinct will be available to watch on Netflix from June 12.