Mere hours after the tragic event, Taylor Parker found herself in a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma, appearing bewildered and in shock. She had just committed the brutal murder of Reagan Simmons Hancock and forcibly removed Hancock’s unborn child.
Parker—who was brought to the hospital via ambulance after claiming she had given birth to the baby herself—continued to insist that she was the child’s mother, even after a doctor confirmed that couldn’t possibly be true, according to body cam footage captured Oct. 9, 2020.
Despite her initial composure, Parker, then 26, eventually broke under the pressure of law enforcement interrogation. Her story shifted multiple times, but she admitted to a violent altercation with Hancock, attempting to deflect responsibility onto the deceased mother in her inconsistent narrative.
Amid tears and confusion, Parker was recorded saying, “I don’t know what happened,” and expressing distress with exclamations like, “Oh God, no. Oh s–t.”
Here’s a closer look at Parker’s interrogation while she lay in the hospital bed, along with her initial statements to officers regarding the day of Hancock’s death:
Body camera footage from a female officer of the Idabel Police Department began rolling outside Parker’s hospital room, capturing a nurse’s grave remark: “this is a big deal.”
The body camera footage, captured by an unidentified female officer with Idabel Police, began outside Parker’s hospital room as one nurse uttered, “this is a big deal.”
The officer then walked outside to talk with another law enforcement official and explained why authorities believed Parker was lying about giving birth.
“Ok, she’s in there, she refuses to have a vaginal check to make sure she’s not hemorrhaging,” the female officer told him. “They’ve done an ultrasound and HCG and it doesn’t show that she’s been pregnant.”
HCG—often dubbed the “pregnancy hormone”— is a hormone produced by the placenta that begins shortly after a fertilized egg implants in the uterus and continues to produce hormones for weeks after a woman gives birth.
OSBI Agent Challenges Taylor Parker’s Account at Hospital
Not long after doctors confirmed that Parker had no signs of the hormone in her body, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent Chad Dansby arrived to confront the mom of two.
“So what happened this morning?” Dansby asked. “Did you just go into labor on the side of the road?”
Parker explained that she had been planning to deliver a load of hogs with her fiancé Wade Griffin, but opted to stay home after she “wasn’t feeling good” and started to have contractions, before going into labor.
After the officers explained that she could be at risk of hemorrhaging, Parker eventually agreed to let a doctor conduct a vaginal examination—but before he arrived, Dansby began to challenge her account of the events that day.
“Here’s the deal. I’m just going to be upfront with you,” he told her, according to the footage. “I’ve been talking to the DA down in Bowie County and they’ve been working on a case down there and we know that you had a hysterectomy sometime back and that you claimed to be pregnant for a while, but, you really weren’t. So, we’re trying to figure out where this baby came from.”
He added that he knew she “didn’t give birth this morning.”
“What do you mean?” Parker replied. “I just told y’all what happened.”
Dansby warned her that the doctor would be able to tell whether she had given birth or not, but she continued to insist that she’d told the truth.
Yet, just minutes after the doctor arrived around 1:07 p.m., he can be heard in the footage telling Parker, “So, it surely doesn’t look like a baby came out of there.”
Investigator Asked Whether Parker Was a “Cold-Blooded Murderer”
Even with the doctor’s finding, Parker continued to insist that she’d given birth to the infant, leading Dansby to press her further.
”So what happened? Like I told you Taylor, this isn’t my first rodeo,” he remarked, per the body camera footage. “There’s people who do stuff just because they are very evil people, they’re real bad people. I’ve dealt with them. I’ve dealt with them my whole life, cold-blooded murderers, serial killers, all of it. I’ve done it and here’s the thing. You seem like a nice person. I think you may be a little bit confused about some things and I get that.”
He explained that some people may “automatically assume the worst” if she didn’t come clean about what happened.
“Essentially what we have is: we have a dead woman in Texas and you took the baby out of her, which caused her to die,” he continued. “And my question is: is Taylor a cold-blooded murderer or is it something else? I mean, you know sometimes people they go through depression and you know some mental issues and things…that causes good people to make bad choices, alright?”
What Did Taylor Parker Tell Police Happened Before Reagan Simmons Hancock’s Murder?
Dansby continued to press her for another 15 minutes, before Parker gradually began to open up about what she alleged happened that morning.
Parker told Dansby the victim—who she never identified by name and only described as a photography client—called her the morning of Oct. 9, 2020 to check on her and asked her to come over.
“What happened then?” Dansby asked before Parker replied, “I don’t remember.”
But Parker slowly began filling in details as the interrogation continued, with Parker telling Dansby that the victim had called her “a liar” before the two got into a physical fight. According to her account, the fight began outside and eventually moved into the living room.
“We both hit each other,” she said in the footage, “and she hit her head on the table.”
Parker claimed that at some point Hancock grabbed a knife and must have fallen on it during their fight, explaining, “She had to of, because I didn’t stab her.”
She told Dansby that she had just been “trying to save” the baby—at Hancock’s insistence—after they both realized that Hancock was dying.
“I kept screaming for her to push,” Parker alleged. “She said, ‘Take her’.”
She claimed to Dansby the baby just “fell out” of Hancock’s stomach and she made the decision to take the child, tearfully telling the OSBI agent, “I really wanted to a baby.”
But prosecutors painted a vastly different picture of what happened in court, telling jurors that Parker faked a pregnancy for 10 months—buying an ultrasound picture and hosting a gender reveal party—before targeting the pregnant Hancock and attacking her at her home, according to Nextstar Media Wire.
Prosecutors argued that Parker “slaughtered” Hancock, according to court records, delivering 113 sharp force injuries and 39 blunt force injuries that broke Hancock’s nose and caused 5 skull fractures. Then, she performed a “crude c-section” on the baby and left Hancock’s older daughter alone in the home with her dying mother as she made off with the child, according to the documents.
Taylor Parker Told Officer “I Don’t Know What Made Me Do That”
After confessing to the deadly fight at the hospital, Parker reflected on her actions after Dansby left the room.
“I don’t know why I did it,” she told the female Idabel Police officer as the body camera continued to roll. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me because I’ve never been a bad person.”
Parker added, “I’ve never hurt anybody and I don’t know what made me do that.”
A short time later, the officer informed Parker that she was being placed under arrest.
“You’re gonna be under arrest, ok, and you know that, but you’ve got to understand we’re not here to hurt you, Ok?” the officer told her before walking her out of the hospital room in handcuffs and placing her in the backseat of the patrol car.
Taylor was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in November 2022. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request to review Parker’s case, per the Texarkana Gazette.