In an America so often saturated with brutal crime stories, it takes special circumstances to truly register shock.
But the story of Taylor Parker, now sitting on a Texas death row after being convicted of murdering her pregnant friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock in 2020 and cutting her unborn daughter Braxlynn from her womb, is horrific in part because it appears almost against nature itself.
Such a terrifying act is also rare. Fetal abductions by maternal evisceration number just 15 in the US from 1987 to 2011, and perhaps 100 worldwide. Until 1973, none had ever been recorded in the US.
Parker’s case is now receiving the Netflix documentary treatment in the shape of Maternal Instinct, which airs next week. Parker was 29 at the time she set upon and killed her friend, taking her baby. Parker was arrested almost immediately, the blood of the mother on her hands and dead infant in her lap, and confessed in the Oklahoma hospital she was headed for to check, as any mother of a newborn might, that all was well.
At trial, Parker’s defense did not try to prove their client did not do it. Instead, her attorneys wanted to keep her off of death row.
If Parker had been convicted of kidnapping, she would have faced up to 10 years in prison. If found guilty of murder, 99 years or life. But if convicted of both, she would face life without parole – or death by lethal injection.
Prosecutors argued that Parker’s crime was elaborately premeditated and she had plotted for months to find a real baby to claim as her own.
A neurologist testifying for the defense said “something is very wrong with her brain”, describing Parker’s condition as “frontal lobe syndrome,” a condition that describes a complex web of cognitive, behavioral, emotional and motivational disturbances.
In October 2022, Parker was convicted of capital murder. A month she later was sentenced to death.
On appeal, lawyers argued Parker should not have been charged with capital murder because the baby may not have been alive when she was cut from the mother’s womb, so the aggravating crime of kidnapping was moot, because you cannot kidnap a person who has not been born. They also argued that Parker did not receive a fair trial due to extensive media coverage and social media commentary during the penalty phase.
Parker, 34, is just one of just seven women on death row in Texas, according to the Texas department of criminal justice. Her crime, conviction and sentence were upheld by the Texas court of criminal appeals, and last month the US supreme court said it would not review her case on grounds that she did not receive a fair trial. A date of execution has not been scheduled.
According to accounts, Parker fooled boyfriend Wade Griffin, a roofer with welding and hog-trapping side jobs, into believing she was pregnant. They even threw a gender-reveal party.
They had met at rodeo in 2019. Parker said she was heir to the Blackburn syrup fortune while trying to purchase a $4.7m estate, but she had only ever worked at a staffing agency and an OB-GYN clinic.
Griffin later told the court their relationship was an “emotional rollercoaster” and that she had found a way to his heart. She would have dinner ready when he got home from work. She helped care for the livestock and managed the household. She promised to deed him 800 acres of land.
Parker told Griffin she was “pretty much pregnant”, and began collecting baby clothes and babycare items. But Griffin did not know that Parker, who already had two children, had had a hysterectomy in 2019. Prosecutors contended that she faked her pregnancy and committed the crime to keep her boyfriend.
Investigators testified at trial that Parker had watched numerous videos on delivering and caring for babies. The scheme – and its swift unravelling – came together on 9 October 2020.
Parker drove to the home of her friend Simmons-Hancock, who she had met and befriended while photographing her engagement and wedding. Simmons-Hancock was seven and a half months pregnant. Parker slashed or stabbed Simmons-Hancock about 100 times, and removed her baby using a scalpel. The victim’s three year-old daughter Kynlee was found under a blanket in her bed, unharmed.
Parker, with the infant, fled the scene, but was pulled over by a state trooper for erratic driving. The trooper found her covered in dried blood while holding the dead baby with the umbilical cord still attached.
Parker claimed she had given birth on the side of the road, but medical staff at a nearby hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma, later found no signs of recent childbirth. During questioning, Parker admitted she had been in a “physical altercation” with Simmons-Hancock and had taken the baby from her friend’s body.
“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,” says forensic psychologist Gary Brucato of Boston College, the co-author of The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime.
Fetal abduction is rare, but not unheard of. It’s also a contemporary phenomenon. “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,” Brucato says. “Their sense is that they would become a catch to this person if [they] could just have a child.”
But the phenomenon also upends many conventions about maternal care. In 2021, Lisa Montgomery was executed for attacking and killing 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in Missouri in 2004, and stealing her unborn baby. The baby survived, and Montgomery became the first female prisoner to be executed by the US government since 1953.
Montgomery was known to have endured an extremely abusive upbringing and diagnosed with severe mental illness. “Women who commit such crimes also are likely to have been victimized themselves,” read a petition for clemency. “These are important factors that make death sentences inappropriate.”
Parker faces the death penalty in part because the Texas penal code considers a fetus an “individual” at any stage of gestation. Parker’s attorneys argued that the baby was born dead so could not, in fact ,have been the victim of kidnapping.
“In our view, the evidence at trial clearly showed that, tragically, the infant was not born alive, so as a matter of law could not be victim or target of a kidnapping,” says Caitlin Halpern, who handled Parker’s appeals petition.
Appeal lawyers argued that prosecutors portrayed Parker as “a sexual deviant” and a “terrible mother”, owing to public sentiment in Bowie county, where the crime and trial took place and where she was a denied request for change of venue.
The Texas appeals judges determined that based on testimony from a flight paramedic and a doctor, a “rational juror would find beyond a reasonable doubt that Braxlynn was born alive at the time Parker kidnapped her”. But Parker is the only witness to know for sure whether Braxlynn was alive.
In Halpern’s view, Parker’s crime “was so violent, upsetting and unusual that it blinded people to the technical and legal arguments, and perhaps made people less discerning about what would make for a fair trial”.
The rarity and brutality of the crime makes it hard to find empathy, Halpern acknowledges. “But the system doesn’t require empathy. It requires the law to be followed, and we think that really didn’t happen here.”