On the morning of Oct. 9, 2020, Reagan Simmons Hancock, a 21-year-old pregnant woman from New Boston, Texas, was killed in a brutal attack carried out by her former wedding photographer, Taylor Parker.
According to court records, Parker had spent months pretending to be pregnant as part of an elaborate deception. Prosecutors said she attacked Hancock and removed her unborn baby in an attempt to pass the child off as her own.
The case is now the focus of Netflix’s new true-crime documentary Maternal Instinct. Parker does not appear in the film. She is currently on Texas’ death row after being convicted of capital murder and kidnapping.
Director Jessica Dimmock said that decision was deliberate. In an interview with Oxygen, she explained that the documentary was designed to focus on the people Parker harmed rather than giving Parker a platform.
“We decided not to interview Taylor,” Dimmock said, adding that the film needed to reflect the experiences of those most affected by the crime. While Hancock and her family were the primary victims, Dimmock noted that Parker also manipulated and hurt many others, including coworkers, former friends and people in her wider circle.
Along with interviews with Hancock’s family — who hope the documentary will help inspire legislation aimed at better protecting pregnant women — the film also features Parker’s ex-boyfriend Wade Griffin, members of his family and others in the community who were drawn into Parker’s lies and ultimately impacted by her actions.
Also featured are Parker’s doctors, who knew she couldn’t carry a child due to a past hysterectomy, but could not disclose the truth due to medical privacy laws.
Dimmock also brought together footage of Parker from before and after the crime, including body cam video from her emergency room interrogation, where she maintained that Hancock’s baby—who died at the hospital—was hers.
“We have her text messages. We have videos of her,” Dimmock said. “But it felt like, you know, I think as a director, ‘What is she going to say?’ From everything that I’ve read, from the way that the trial went, I don’t think she’s remorseful. There doesn’t really seem to be evidence that she’s remorseful. If she said she was remorseful, could I even believe her, and does that matter?”
“I just wasn’t sure that there was anything that she could say that would be additive, or that I could believe,” the director added, “and it felt disrespectful to those that she hurt the most to include her take.”
Parker, who has not spoken out from death row in the wake of the documentary, was last publicly seen at her sentencing trial in 2022. During the trial, prosecutors alleged that her pattern of deception had continued as she awaited her day in court.
In court documents filed by the Bowie County District Attorney’s Office and obtained by WDBJ, prosecutors argued Parker continued “her fraudulent pattern of lying and misrepresenting almost all aspects of her medical history and medical status” while behind bars, including allegedly taking part in a “massive fraudulent scheme directed at fabricating evidence, tampering with witnesses and ultimately attempting to frame a mentally fragile inmate” for her crime.
Prosecutors also argued, per KTAL, that Parker had continued to offer multiple “wild lies” of what happened the day Hancock died, including that she’d been targeted for kidnapping due to her alleged wealth and that Reagan was a casualty.
Parker’s defense attorney, meanwhile, argued in the opening statements of her sentencing trial that his client suffered from mental health issues that may have compromised her decision making.
In November 2025, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Parker’s conviction and death sentence.
Her attorneys, who contended Parker didn’t receive a fair trial and argued she should not have been convicted of kidnapping Hancock’s newborn, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review her case; however, they officially declined to hear her appeal in May 2025, KTAL reported.
Maternal Instinct is streaming now on Netflix.
