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Published 08:48 26 Jun 2026 GMT
Taylor Parker is the Texas woman who murdered her pregnant friend, cut her unborn baby from her womb, and tried to pass the child off as her own.
She is currently on death row, although no execution date has been set, and thanks to a Netflix documentary called Maternal Instinct, which landed on 12 June 2026, her case is being seen by millions of people for the first time.
If you have just finished watching it and have questions, this is everything you need to know.
Taylor Parker is currently held at the Patrick L. O'Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas.
This is the facility where the state of Texas houses its female death row inmates.
Parker is 33 years old and, as of June 2026, the youngest woman on Texas death row.
Her day-to-day existence on death row is a world away from county jail, where she spent the period between her arrest and trial.
Parker herself has said as much. According to court documents and reporting that has emerged since the Netflix release, Parker told people that the O'Daniel Unit was 'the Hilton compared to the county jail,' adding that during her pre-trial detention she had been housed alongside inmates who 'ate faeces and blood.'
Texas death row for women is a small population.
There are currently seven women on the unit. Inmates are held in single cells, have access to educational programmes, and are allowed limited contact visits.
It is, by any measure, a more controlled and quieter environment than general population.
For Parker, who had caused chaos throughout her time in county jail, that structure appears to suit her.
Prosecutors alleged that while in custody awaiting trial, Parker fabricated medical emergencies, attempted to tamper with witnesses, tried to frame another inmate, and altered jail clothing in order to pursue relationships with other inmates.
She was accused of making threats toward staff. The pattern of manipulation, they argued, never stopped.
No. As of June 2026, Taylor Parker does not have an execution date.
Texas does not set an execution date until a prisoner's appeals are fully exhausted.
Parker's direct appeals are now spent, but she still has habeas corpus review ahead of her.
That is a separate, often lengthy strand of the appeals process, and it commonly takes several more years to play out.
Only once that concludes, and assuming she loses, would Bowie County's trial court set a date.
Here is where her appeals currently stand.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld her conviction and death sentence on 6 November 2025.
Her lawyers then filed a petition asking the United States Supreme Court to review the case, arguing she had not received a fair trial and challenging the kidnapping conviction in particular.
On 29 May 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear it. Her death sentence stands.
Parker became the seventh woman sentenced to death in Texas, and the first woman in the state to receive a death sentence in 12 years when she was sentenced in November 2022.
Taylor Rene Parker was born on 8 December 1992.
She grew up in East Texas, had two children from two previous relationships, and had been married twice by the time she committed the crime that put her on death row.
Following complications from an ectopic pregnancy, Parker underwent a hysterectomy in 2015.
She was left unable to have more children. After her second marriage ended in 2019, she met a man named Wade Griffin at a rodeo.
Within months of starting a relationship with him, she told him she was pregnant.
She was not. She could not be.
What followed was 10 months of increasingly elaborate deception.
Parker wore silicone pregnancy bellies, staged a gender reveal, shared fake sonogram images, and told Griffin she was also about to inherit a large sum from a wealthy grandmother.
She forged official-looking documents and cheques to support those financial claims.
She made plans for an extravagant future on land she did not own, with money she did not have, and a baby she could not carry.
Court evidence showed she had searched online for terms including 'order cheap pregnancy silicone belly', 'how to find a birth mother', 'video of c-section', and 'how to deliver a baby pre-term at 35 weeks.'
The prosecution said she had been planning this for months.
Reagan Simmons-Hancock had met Parker when Parker photographed her wedding.
The two became friendly. Reagan was 21 years old and 36 weeks pregnant on the morning of 9 October 2020, when Parker arrived at her home in New Boston, Texas.
Reagan's mother came to the house later that day after her daughter stopped answering her phone.
Inside she found a scene that investigators described as one of the most violent they had encountered.
Reagan had suffered more than 100 stab wounds and blunt force injuries. Her unborn daughter, Braxlynn Sage Hancock, had been cut from her womb.
Reagan's three-year-old daughter was found alive and unharmed in a bedroom.
Less than half an hour after the attack, Parker called 911 from a highway and told operators she had just given birth on the roadside and her baby was not breathing.
A Texas state trooper pulled her over near De Kalb and found her performing CPR on the newborn.
She told the officer she had been on her way to meet Griffin at a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma.
At McCurtain Memorial Hospital, doctors examined Parker and found no evidence she had recently given birth.
She had previously had a hysterectomy. An Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent began interviewing her that same day.
Braxlynn Sage Hancock was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Parker was arrested that afternoon and extradited back to Texas, charged with capital murder, murder and kidnapping.
Parker went to trial in Bowie County in September 2022.
Her defence team did not argue that she had not killed Reagan.
Their focus was on whether the capital murder charge was appropriate, which depended on whether the jury accepted that Parker had also kidnapped Braxlynn.
Prosecutors argued the killing was the result of months of deliberate planning and presented the search history, the faked pregnancy timeline, and the fact that Parker's supposed due date had already passed without a baby.
They also told the jury about Parker's behaviour in custody: the fabricated medical emergencies, the alleged witness tampering, the attempts to frame another inmate.
On 3 October 2022, after roughly an hour of deliberation, the jury found Parker guilty of capital murder, murder, and kidnapping. On 9 November 2022, she was sentenced to death.
Parker had two children from relationships before Wade Griffin: one from her first marriage, one from an earlier relationship.
Both were minors at the time of her arrest in October 2020.
Neither child has been publicly identified, and detailed information about their circumstances after Parker's arrest has not been released.
They have not featured in any of the coverage surrounding the Netflix documentary.
Parker also had four adopted children from her second marriage, according to court records, though accounts of the exact family structure differ across reporting.
What is clear is that several children were left without their mother as a result of what she did.
Reagan Simmons-Hancock's three-year-old daughter was also left without hers.
Wade Griffin was Parker's boyfriend at the time of the murder.
He is a roofing company supervisor and hog farmer who met Parker at a Texas rodeo in 2019. Parker told him within months of their relationship starting that she was pregnant with his child.
He was not involved in the crime and has never been charged with any offence connected to it.
Griffin testified at the trial and described the fake pregnancy in detail.
Parker had taken maternity photographs with him, told him the name she had chosen for the baby, and made plans for their life together on the strength of an inheritance she claimed was coming.
None of it was true.
He has not spoken publicly about the case since the Netflix documentary's release.
Texas abolished the last meal tradition in 2011, so Parker will not be permitted to choose what she eats before her execution.
She will receive whatever is on the standard prison cafeteria menu that day.
The reason the tradition ended comes down to one man.
Lawrence Russell Brewer was a white supremacist convicted of the racially motivated murder of James Byrd Jr., who was dragged behind a pickup truck for three miles in East Texas in 1998.
On the day of his execution in September 2011, Brewer ordered an enormous final meal: two chicken-fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover's omelette, a large bowl of fried okra with ketchup, three fajitas, a pound of barbecue with half a loaf of white bread, a pint of ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts.
When the food arrived, he refused to eat a single bite of it, telling prison staff he was not hungry.
Texas State Senator John Whitmire, who chaired the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, was furious.
He contacted the Texas Department of Criminal Justice directly and called the tradition 'extremely inappropriate.'
The director agreed, and an 87-year custom came to an end overnight.
Every person executed in Texas since that day has gone to their death eating whatever the prison was already serving.
For context on how different this is to other states, some of history's most notorious killers have chosen remarkable final meals in places where the tradition survives.
Texas offers no such option. Even in states that do allow it, the public reaction to elaborate last meal requests can be fierce.
The parallels between the Parker case and that of Lisa Montgomery are difficult to ignore.
Montgomery was executed by the federal government in January 2021 for an almost identical crime: she had strangled pregnant 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in Missouri in 2004, cut her unborn baby from her womb, and attempted to pass the child off as her own.
Montgomery was the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years. She said nothing before she died.
The key difference between the two cases is jurisdiction.
Montgomery was a federal case, which is why she was executed despite being a woman, at a time when no state had executed a woman in years.
Parker's case is a Texas state matter, which puts her in line behind the state's own execution schedule rather than the federal one.
Yes. Parker sits alongside a small number of women across the country who are either on death row or actively facing execution.
The most high-profile case right now is in Tennessee, where Christa Pike is scheduled to be executed on 30 September 2026, which would make her the first woman executed by any US state in more than 200 years.
Pike was convicted of the torture and murder of a classmate in 1995, when she was just 18.
She has spoken publicly about why she believes she should not be put to death, arguing the sentence is disproportionate given her age at the time and the involvement of others in the crime.
Parker's case and Pike's make an instructive comparison.
One faked a pregnancy and planned a murder over 10 months. The other was 18 and acted in a moment of jealous rage. Both received the same sentence.
Maternal Instinct premiered on Netflix on 12 June 2026.
It was directed by Jessica Dimmock and produced by Story Syndicate.
The documentary uses police footage, court testimony, and interviews to tell the story of the fake pregnancy, the murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock, and the investigation and trial that followed.
Parker herself does not appear in the documentary. Director Jessica Dimmock has said that Parker's legal team declined the interview request, citing her ongoing appeals.
The film's release brought immediate attention from the public and the media.
McCurtain Memorial Hospital, where Parker arrived claiming she had just given birth, issued a statement a week after the documentary went live asking Netflix viewers not to visit the facility.
"The events portrayed were real and remain a matter of public record," the statement said, "but they also represent one of the most painful chapters in the lives of the victim's family, the New Boston community, and the healthcare professionals who responded that day."
Where is Taylor Parker now?
Taylor Parker is held at the Patrick L. O'Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas, on the state's female death row. She is 33 years old and the youngest woman currently on Texas death row.
Does Taylor Parker have an execution date?
No. As of June 2026, no execution date has been set. Texas does not schedule executions until all appeals are exhausted. Parker's habeas corpus review is still ongoing, a process that commonly takes years.
What did Taylor Parker do?
Parker murdered 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock on 9 October 2020 in New Boston, Texas. Reagan was 36 weeks pregnant. Parker stabbed and bludgeoned her to death, then cut her unborn daughter Braxlynn Sage Hancock from her womb and tried to pass the baby off as her own. Braxlynn died at hospital. Parker had spent ten months faking a pregnancy, including wearing silicone bump prosthetics and staging a gender reveal, despite having had a hysterectomy in 2015.
Why won't Taylor Parker get a last meal?
Texas abolished the last meal tradition in 2011 after white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered a massive meal before his execution and then refused to eat any of it. All Texas death row inmates now receive the standard cafeteria meal on the day of their execution.
What is Maternal Instinct on Netflix?
Maternal Instinct is a true crime documentary directed by Jessica Dimmock, released on Netflix on 12 June 2026. It tells the story of Taylor Parker's fake pregnancy, the murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock, and the trial that ended in Parker's death sentence.
What happened to Taylor Parker's children?
Parker had two biological children from previous relationships at the time of her arrest in October 2020. Neither child has been publicly identified and their current circumstances have not been disclosed. They have not featured in the coverage surrounding the Netflix documentary.
Who is Wade Griffin?
Wade Griffin was Parker's boyfriend, a roofing company supervisor and hog farmer who met her at a Texas rodeo in 2019. Parker told him she was pregnant within months of their relationship starting. He was not involved in the crime, was never charged, and testified against Parker at trial.
How many women are on death row in Texas?
Seven women are currently on death row in Texas as of June 2026. Parker, at 33, is the youngest.
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