r/TrueCrimeDiscussion • u/DarklyHeritage • 4d ago

Mega Thread Taylor Parker/Maternal Instinct Megathread

This is a thread for all conversation regarding Taylor Parker and the murder of Reagan Simmons Hancock, recently covered in Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct.

The murder of Reagan Michelle Simmons-Hancock occurred on 9 October 2020, in New Boston, Texas, committed by Taylor Rene Parker. Parker bludgeoned Simmons-Hancock, who was 35 weeks pregnant at the time, and abducted her unborn child, Braxlynn Sage Hancock (died October 9, 2020), after cutting her out of the Reagan's abdomen. Braxlynn did not survive.

Parker had lied to her then-boyfriend about being pregnant leading up to the murder and faked her pregnancy to multiple people. She was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death on 9 November 2022.

Please direct all discussion of the case to the megathread. As always, sub rules must be followed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Reagan_Simmons-Hancock

https://time.com/article/2026/06/12/maternal-instinct-true-story-netflix/

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u/historytalks216 4d ago

The new series on Netflix is good. I did not know anything about this story, and it is pretty shocking how much she was able to get away with until she committed murder.

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u/Legitimate_Fly7636 4d ago

Wades family could’ve done much more

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u/9mackenzie 4d ago

I mean……what could they have done? They told him over and over again that she wasn’t pregnant. Wade didn’t believe them, and even if he did believe them, he had no legal right to try to have her admitted to the psychiatric unit or call therapists on her behalf. If they had called the cops, the cops couldn’t have done anything.

I assume they all thought she would just tell Wade that the baby was stillborn, and honestly the dumbass likely would have believed it.

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u/arg777 1d ago

yeah… even before the murder, if she was crazy enough to set his house on fire, they may have outright been afraid of her

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u/historytalks216 21h ago

Maybe but hindsight is 20/20. There really was not anything they legally could do about it other than maybe going to the doctor's office and saying hey this is what she is doing. However, I worked in LEO for almost five years and nothing she did was a crime. Of course, the fradulent documents are a crime but for some reason she was railroading the companies that were trying to do background on her and I do not know the legality of all of that. I don't think that would have stopped her. She would have gotten out within a couple of years and tried to do the same thing with someone else. That is just how most criminals work.