Taylor Parker, the woman convicted of killing her pregnant friend and taking her baby, will not be granted a final death row meal. A long-standing Texas practice was scrapped after another inmate abused the privilege, ending the option for everyone who followed.
The case has drawn renewed attention following the release of the Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, a 2026 true-crime film about the murder. Parker, whose full name is Taylor Rene Parker, was born on December 8, 1992, and is now 33. Prosecutors said she killed 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock in Bowie County, Texas, in October 2020 in an attempt to steal her unborn child after months of pretending to friends and family that she was pregnant.
Parker was convicted of capital murder by a Bowie County jury in October 2022 and sentenced to death the following month. Court records and prison data list the offense date as October 9, 2020, while Texas prison officials say she was received onto death row on November 9, 2022.
Parker is one of seven women currently on Texas death row, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. She remains housed in the state prison system while her case moves through the lengthy appeals process that typically follows a death sentence.
Wade Griffin, Parker’s former boyfriend, has now spoken publicly for the first time since the killing, describing what happened as
“unimaginable”
and
“hard to even explain”.
Investigators found that Parker had deceived Griffin for much of the year before the attack, staging a fake pregnancy and creating the impression that she was expecting a baby. Authorities said she later claimed to have just given birth after being stopped by police, but the infant did not survive.
However, when her execution eventually takes place, she will not be able to choose a final meal. Texas no longer allows condemned inmates to request one, and that policy traces back to the actions of Lawrence Russell Brewer.
Brewer, a white supremacist, was sentenced to death for the murder of James Byrd Jr. He and three other men were convicted after Byrd was chained to a pickup truck and dragged for three miles along a road near Jasper, Texas, in one of the state’s most notorious hate crimes.
As reported by the Houston Chronicle, Brewer placed an enormous final meal order that included chicken steaks, fried okra with ketchup, and a cheese omelette with ground beef, jalapenos and bell peppers.
He also asked for
‘triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, three fajitas, one pound of barbecue and a half loaf of white bread, pizza meat lover’s special, one pint of ‘homemade vanilla’ Blue Bell ice cream, one slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts and three root beers’.
Prison staff prepared the meal, but when it was brought to him, Brewer refused to touch it, saying he was not hungry.
After that, Texas senator John Whitmire moved to abolish the 87-year custom, declaring that no inmate on death row in the state would receive a
‘special meal’.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced in September 2011 that the practice was ending immediately. Since then, condemned inmates in Texas have been served the same meal available to other prisoners rather than a menu of their own choosing.
No execution date has been announced for Parker. As of June 2026, she does not appear on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s scheduled executions list, meaning any execution remains far off while appeals continue. Under current Texas rules, the meal she is served before her death will not be one she gets to select.