Warning: This article contains discussion of themes which some readers may find distressing.
A recently released Netflix documentary has brought renewed attention to the shocking 2020 case involving Taylor Parker, then 27, who killed her pregnant friend and took her baby in an attempt to pass the child off as her own.
The documentary, Maternal Instinct, began streaming on Netflix on June 12, 2026, revisiting the killing of 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock in New Boston, Texas, and the death of her newborn daughter, Braxlynn Sage Hancock.
In November 2022, Parker was sentenced to death after a Bowie County jury found her guilty of capital murder. Prosecutors said she carried out a carefully planned attack after months of pretending to be pregnant and building a false narrative around the arrival of a baby.
During the trial, the court heard that Parker had spent months trying to secure a child she could present as her own. Investigators said she staged a fake pregnancy online and in her personal life, even though she had undergone a hysterectomy in 2019.
The Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct includes accounts from her former partner, Wade Griffin, who describes the unsettling period before the murder and says Parker had pretended to be pregnant for months.
“It was unimaginable what she did, I don’t even know how to explain it,” he said in the trailer.
Griffin said he was unaware that Parker, who was already a mother of two, had undergone the procedure the year before. The case later became one of the most widely followed criminal trials in northeast Texas because of the scale of the deception and the brutality of the crime.
As of June 2026, Parker remains on death row in Texas. Texas Department of Criminal Justice records list her as being received into custody on November 9, 2022, and housed within the state’s women’s death row system at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville.
Her conviction and sentence were upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on November 6, 2025. Court records also show that further post-conviction litigation has continued, including a petition filed with the US Supreme Court in March 2026, which is one reason she does not currently have an execution date.
She is one of seven women listed on Texas death row. Since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, only six women have been executed in Texas.
Details about her conduct in custody have largely remained out of public view. However, court filings have alleged that Parker repeatedly engaged in “criminal behavior, violations of jail policy, and has continued her fraudulent pattern of lying and misrepresenting most all aspects of her medical history and medical status”.
On October 9, 2020, officers stopped Parker after noticing she was driving erratically in Oklahoma. What they discovered inside the vehicle was far more horrific than they could have expected.
While holding the baby, Parker allegedly told police she had just given birth by the roadside.
But after she was examined at a nearby hospital, medical professionals determined there were no signs that she had recently delivered a child. Investigators then traced events back to Simmons-Hancock’s home in Texas.
The investigation found that Simmons-Hancock had been stabbed more than 100 times. Prosecutors said Parker forcibly removed Braxlynn from her womb and then drove away with the infant. Appellate court records later said jurors had heard evidence that the baby was born alive before dying shortly afterward.
The case has frequently been discussed alongside a small number of US fetal abduction murders. A forensic review published in 2021 noted that no such case had been documented in the US before 1973 and that 15 cases of fetal abduction by maternal evisceration were reported nationwide between 1987 and 2011.