A mother-of-two who had undergone a hysterectomy was determined to have a baby with her new partner – driving her to horrifyingly extreme measures
Maternal Instinct official Netflix trailer
A harrowing 911 call preserves the moment when a woman found her daughter’s horribly mutilated body in her home. In a spine-chilling recording, a clearly distraught Jessica Brookes begged the call handler: “Help me. My daughter’s been murdered. Somebody got in her house. She’s dead!”
A post-mortem examination later determined that Jessica’s daughter, Reagan Simmons-Hancock, suffered a total of 15 stab wounds as well as 98 other cuts, and around 40 blunt force injuries,
The medical examiner, Dr. Melinda Flores, testified that two of the knife wounds perforated Reagan’s jugular vein, and some were deep enough to reach the bone, and the blunt force injuries, apparently inflicted with a hammer, resulted in both a broken nose and five skull fractures.
But most horrifyingly, Reagan had been almost eight months pregnant at the time of her murder. And her baby was missing. Reagan’s daughter had been delivered by a crude improvised caesarian section by her killer, leading to the infant’s death.
The baby’s body, when recovered, showed bruising on the scalp and umbilical cord, meaning that some of the hammer blows that had killed Reagan has also struck the baby inside her. The story behind this brutal murder is a spiral of deception and twisted obsession that resulted in Taylor Parker becoming the youngest woman on death row in Texas.
Reagan, seen here with friend Emily Shirey, had hired Parker to photograph her wedding(Image: Netflix)
Within months of meeting husky Texan hog trapper Wade Griffin at a rodeo show, Parker had become obsessed with him. Convincing Wade and his family that she came from an oil-rich family and was due a sizeable inheritance, Parker lavished Wade and his family with gifts.
She bought his mother a brand-new car, for example, although it was soon repossessed because it hadn’t actually been paid for. Parker’s spending not only continued but escalated, with a $4million (£2.9m) cash offer on a ranch in Oklahoma.
That ranch wouldn’t just be a home for her and Wade, Parker insisted, but for their daughter as well. Just a few months after they had met, Parker had proudly proclaimed that she was pregnant with Wade’s baby.
“I like to take stuff slow,” a rueful Wade says in new Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, “not just start jumping from dating one month to ‘I’m already pregnant.’”
Parker managed to convince Wade that she was pregnant(Image: Netflix)
But Parker had a dark secret. An ectopic pregnancy some years before had led to a hysterectomy, and she was no longer capable of becoming pregnant. Examination of her internet search history from that period reveals that she was looking for “pregnancy silicone belly,” “newborn adoptions,” and “how to find a birth mother.” Most chillingly of all, she had also searched for “video of c-section.”
For a while, Parker – who had two children from previous relationships – had convinced Wade’s family that she was pregnant, even faking an ultrasound photo of “Clancy,” as she insisted the baby would be called. But Wade’s mother, Connie became increasingly suspicious. Even so, Parker always seemed to have a plausible explanation ready. “She always had a counter,” Connie says. “Everything I presented, she countered it.”
In fact, it later emerged, Parker had for many years been a well-practised liar, convincing friends of various ailments such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and even a stroke. But as one by one her former friends cut her off, Parker, working at the time as a wedding photographer, had met and befriended Reagan Simmons-Hancock.
Reagan’s mother Jessica Brookes described Parker as a ‘demon'(Image: YOUTUBE)
Booked to photograph Reagan’s wedding in September 2019, Parker had formed an instant friendship with the younger woman. They became very close, to the extent that Reagan would defend Parker when others raised questions about her alleged pregnancy.
Reagan had become pregnant herself, a couple of months after Parker had announced she was expecting a baby, and the two women would bond even more closely over their hopes for their future children.
But all the while, Parker was becoming increasingly desperate, trying to find a way of adopting a newborn or doing anything else that could conceal her months-long deception. She had even infiltrated a teen pregnancy support group and began stalking pregnant women.
Parker’s lies had been made easier because, at the time, the Covid pandemic was in full swing and it had been east for Parker to convince Wade not to attend hospital appointments with her during what toured out to be a 10-month “pregnancy.”
On her alleged due date, she had used a burner phone to lure Wade away from home with a faked livestock sales enquiry, started a fire at her own home to cause chaos, and even called in a bomb threat to nearby Mount Pleasant hospital
Parker was obsessed with the idea of becoming a mother(Image: Netflix)
All of this was a bid to get Wade, and Wade’s family, away from her while she carried out her sickening plan.
Even before Reagan’s brutal murder, concerns had been raised that Parker appeared to be faking a pregnancy, and nearby hospitals had called a “Code Pink” alert to be extra-watchful for any signs of a child abduction. But no-one could have imaged just how extreme Parker’s actions would be.
A state trooper who found Parker’s car pulled over on a highway outside De Kalb recorded body cam footage of the distraught young woman performing CPR on a newborn. Parker told the officer that she had been on her way to meet her husband at a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma when the infant had stopped breathing.
She was rushed to hospital, but there her web of lies soon began to unravel. Parker showed no physical signs of having given birth and she was soon questioned by Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation [OSBI] agent Chad Dansby.
Parker remains on Death Row(Image: Bi-State Detention Center )
As Dansby was asking Parker to again confirm that she had given birth that morning, across the state border in Texas, Jessica Brookes was opening the door to her daughter’s blood-spattered home.
Jessica found Reagan’s three-year-old daughter Kynlee hiding in a cupboard, not far from the body.
On September 12, 2022, Taylor Parker stood trial in Bowie County, Texas for the capital murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock and there unborn daughter, who would have been named Braxlynn Sage Hancock.
Giving a victim impact statement, Reagan’s mother describe Parkerr as an “evil piece of flesh demon,” adding: “My baby was alive still fighting for her babies when you tore her open and ripped her baby from her stomach.”
On October 3, 2022, Parker was convicted of capital murder and later sentenced to death. She has made a number of appeals against her sentence, all of which have been denied, and she remains on death row in Texas, where at 33 she is the youngest of seven women awaiting execution.
