In the early hours of October 9, 2020, tragedy struck New Boston, Texas, as 21-year-old Reagan Simmons Hancock, who was expecting a child, was brutally murdered. The assailant was Taylor Parker, Hancock’s former wedding photographer.
Parker, engaged in a months-long deceit of faking her own pregnancy, committed the horrific act of extracting Hancock’s unborn child to pass off as her own, according to court documents.
This chilling crime is now the focus of the Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct. Notably, the film does not feature interviews with Parker, who is currently on death row in Texas after her conviction for capital murder and abduction.
Director Jessica Dimmock shared with Oxygen in an exclusive interview that the decision to exclude Parker from the documentary was deliberate.
“We chose not to speak with Taylor,” Dimmock revealed, emphasizing the importance of highlighting the voices of those affected by Parker’s actions. “While Reagan and her family suffered the most, there were others deceived and hurt by Parker, including coworkers and past friends. Their perspectives were crucial to the story.”
In addition to speaking with Hancock’s family—who hope the film will lead to legislative change to protect pregnant mothers—Dimmock and her team highlighted interviews with Parker’s ex-boyfriend Wade Griffin, his loved ones, and other members of their community who were affected by her web of lies and violent 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.