Warning: This article contains discussion of themes which some readers may find distressing.
The extent of Taylor Parker’s repeated false health claims came to light after she killed her pregnant friend and took the victim’s unborn baby, a crime that ultimately led to a death sentence. Parker, born in December 1992, is currently on Texas death row at the TDCJ’s Mountain View Unit after being received by the state prison system in November 2022. In November 2025, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed her capital murder conviction and death sentence, and a petition for review was later filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2026.
The 2020 case is revisited in the Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, which premiered globally on June 12, 2026, and examines how Parker, now 33, fatally attacked her pregnant friend in a stabbing investigators said involved more than 100 wounds. Netflix says the film focuses on Parker’s lengthy deception, the killing of Reagan Simmons-Hancock in Bowie County, Texas, and the aftermath that exposed the crime.
Police stopped Parker on October 9 after noticing her driving dangerously. When officers approached, she was holding a baby she insisted she had just delivered. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Parker killed a 21-year-old pregnant woman on October 9, 2020, to take her unborn child.
Once she was taken to hospital, medical staff found no evidence that she had recently given birth. That discovery led investigators to question where the child had come from. The documentary explains that Parker had spent nine months pretending to be pregnant in front of relatives and others around her, before cutting the baby girl, Braxlynn, from her friend’s womb.
Her former partner, Wade Griffin, described her crimes as ‘unimaginable’ and ‘hard to explain’.
The film also outlines other deceptions Parker allegedly told before carrying out the killing, showing that the fake pregnancy was only one part of a wider pattern. Court records reviewed in the 2025 appeal note that Parker had a history of faking pregnancies, including buying a fake belly and staging events to convince Griffin she was expecting a child.
Her former friend Abby Bell said:
“Taylor previously told her friends she’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, was in treatment for cancer, had a brain tumor, and had suffered a stroke.
“After it kept happening and happening and happening over and over, I started being like, ‘Maybe she’s not really sick’.”
Bell went on to say:
“What those in her new community couldn’t have known was that Taylor had undergone a hysterectomy years earlier, making pregnancy impossible.”
During the trial, the judge concluded the murder had been carefully planned and said Parker had spent months searching for a baby she could present as her own. In its 2025 opinion, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said the evidence showed Parker had undergone a hysterectomy, could not bear children, and nevertheless faked a pregnancy before attacking Reagan Hancock and performing a crude C-section to remove the baby.
Forensic psychologist Gary Brucato also spoke about the kind of killing he believed had taken place.
“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,” he said, speaking with the Guardian.
The psychologist added:
“You find a person who is trying to assert predictability into a relationship where they think they think they wouldn’t be able to live without their partner.
“Their sense is that they would become a catch to this person if [they] could just have a child.”