Warning: This article contains discussion of themes which some readers may find distressing.
Taylor Parker was sentenced to death in 2022 for murdering her friend, who was eight months pregnant, before taking her unborn baby.
A new Netflix documentary revisits the 2020 case involving the Texas woman, now 33, who remains on death row after her conviction and sentence were upheld on direct appeal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in November 2025.
Prosecutors said Parker killed 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock at the victim’s home in New Boston, Texas, and removed her unborn daughter, Braxlynn, from her womb on October 9, 2020.
Evidence presented in court showed Parker had spent months staging a fake pregnancy for her relatives and for her partner, Wade Griffin, while planning to obtain a baby she could present as her own.
According to court filings, Parker had undergone a hysterectomy in 2019 but continued the deception, collecting baby items and maintaining the false claim that she was expecting.
Parker told Griffin that she was
‘pretty much pregnant’
According to investigators, Griffin did not know Parker, who already had two children, had undergone a hysterectomy in 2019.
On October 9, 2020, police stopped Parker after she was seen driving erratically. Officers found her covered in dried blood and holding the infant, whose umbilical cord was still attached.
Parker claimed to officers that she had delivered the baby on the roadside.
However, hospital staff later determined there were no signs that she had recently given birth.
While being questioned, Parker admitted she had been involved in a
‘physical altercation’
with Simmons-Hancock and had taken the baby from her body.
The investigation later found that Simmons-Hancock had been stabbed more than 100 times. Medical evidence discussed in later court filings said Braxlynn died before or during the extraction.
During the trial, Parker’s legal team did not argue that she was innocent. Instead, they focused on trying to prevent a death sentence, but the jury ultimately rejected that effort.
She was convicted of capital murder in Bowie County and sentenced to death on November 9, 2022, making her one of the few women on Texas death row.
In the Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, which premieres tomorrow (June 12, 2026), Griffin speaks publicly for the first time about the case.
“It was unimaginable what she did, I don’t even know how to explain it,” he said in the trailer.
The documentary arrives as Parker’s case continues through the post-conviction process. Court records show her conviction and death sentence were affirmed in November 2025, and a petition seeking US Supreme Court review was filed in March 2026.
Forensic psychologist Gary Brucato also addressed the possible motive behind the crime.
“There’s a phenomenon called elimination murder, where you have no hard feelings toward the person but they are in the way of something you want.”
The case is part of a rare but especially shocking category of crime known as fetal abduction. Researchers and investigators have previously noted that documented US cases involving the killing of a pregnant victim and removal of the fetus are extremely uncommon, though several have been recorded in recent decades.
Records show that before 1973, there had been no documented US cases of fetal abduction involving maternal evisceration.
Between 1987 and 2011, that figure rose to 15 cases nationwide.