Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | June 24, 2026
If you spent a portion of this past week letting Netflix’s true-crime machine completely upend your peace of mind with Maternal Instinct, congratulations on your terrible decision. It tracks the jaw-droppingly sociopathic actions of a Texas woman, Taylor Parker, who is currently sitting on death row for the 2020 capital murder of 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock and the fetal abduction of her unborn baby, Braxlynn. It is an exercise in pure horror.
(The rest of this piece is unsettling. Some of the more gruesome details are spared, but if this sort of thing upsets you, read no further.)
Director Jessica Dimmock made the deliberate creative choice not to interview Parker, centering the narrative instead on the victims, the coworkers, and Parker’s painfully oblivious, not terribly bright hog-trapper boyfriend, Wade Griffin. But as is always the case when a capital trial with more than 140 witnesses gets compressed into a streamlined documentary, a massive amount of context gets left out. If you dig into the official Texas Court of Criminal Appeals opinion and the local trial reporting, the reality of Taylor Parker’s web of lies is infinitely uglier, weirder, and crazier than even the documentary lets on.
What the documentary mostly skips, because it’s not exactly documentary friendly, is the single legal question the entire capital case turned on. It wasn’t whether Parker killed Reagan; she did, and her own appeal never seriously contested it. The question was narrower, stranger, and far more unsettling: was the baby Parker cut out of Reagan’s body legally a person at the moment Parker took her? Because if Braxlynn was not a person who had been “born and is alive,” then Taylor Parker did not commit capital murder under Texas law. And if she did not commit capital murder, she could not be sentenced to death.
Texas apparently does not put people to death for simple murder, which feels like a very un-Texas thing. Capital murder requires an aggravating circumstance from a strict statutory list, and the State’s theory here was a murder committed “in the course of committing or attempting to commit” kidnapping. So the prosecution needed a kidnapping. And here is where the law does something that feels almost perverse given the horrific facts: under the Texas Penal Code, you can only kidnap an “individual,” defined as “a human being who has been born and is alive.” A fetus is not an individual you can kidnap. A stillborn baby is not an individual you can kidnap.
Which means Parker’s death sentence rested entirely on the question of whether, for some window of time, Braxlynn was born — outside Reagan’s body — and alive. If the baby was already dead when Parker performed her C-section, there is no kidnapping, and therefore no capital charge, and therefore, no lethal injection.
To prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Braxlynn was “born” and “alive,” the State relied on medical testimony that the documentary mostly glosses over but the appellate record preserves in horrific detail.
To wit: The flight paramedic reached Parker’s stopped car and found a gray, ashen newborn with the umbilical cord still attached. Several things told him this baby had not just been born in that vehicle. The amniotic fluid on the infant was dried and flaky, which doesn’t happen in the moments immediately following a birth. When he cut the cord, the blood inside was already separated and clotting, a clear sign that time had passed. And there was no blood, no fluid, nothing in the car seat where Parker sat claiming her water had broken and “the baby just came out.” The “birth” had happened somewhere else, earlier.
As for the “alive” part? The paramedics performed CPR, intubated the baby, ran IV epinephrine, and got a faint pulse back. If a baby is stillborn, there’s no pulse to get back. Ergo, the baby must have had a pulse at some point, and therefore was “alive.” The OB-GYN also testified that the baby was a viable, roughly seven-pound, 35-week infant with no abnormalities, and that Parker’s C-section miraculously hadn’t harmed the baby.
And then there is the horrifically unsettling piece of evidence that’s almost too hard to consider, which may be why it was left out of the documentary (plus the fact that it came from a jailhouse informant). The informant, Shonnaree Yeager, testified that Parker confessed the sequence of events to her: she started cutting with a knife. It wasn’t sharp enough, so she got a scalpel from an animal kit in her car and finished the job.
And then, then, placed the baby against Reagan’s cheek and said “tell mama bye.” Uuuuuuugggghhhhh.
Afterward, Parker drove toward a hospital, not because the baby was in distress, but to manufacture a record that she’d given birth there. She only pulled over when she looked down and the baby had stopped breathing.
In other words, the evidence proves that the baby was alive because you do not tell a stillborn baby to say goodbye, and you do not drive a stillborn baby to a hospital to fake a birth record. That evidence, therefore, was enough to convict for capital murder and sentence Taylor to death.
Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
