When a Texas state trooper pulled over a car driving erratically near De Kalb, Texas, on the morning of October 9, 2020, the woman behind the wheel had a newborn in her lap and red-stained clothing. She told the officer she had just given birth on the side of the road. When doctors examined her at the hospital, they found no physical evidence that she had ever been pregnant at all.
That moment, and everything that led to it, is the story at the center of Netflix’s new documentary, Maternal Instinct. The film began streaming on June 12, 2026, and within days viewers were flooding social media with warnings to brace themselves. Viewers reported feeling “nauseous” after watching the documentary. One viewer wrote: “I literally cannot believe what I’ve just watched. This is the most unbelievable story I have ever watched (keep in mind I have seen all these documentaries on Netflix). I can’t believe this woman got away with this for so long.” That level of reaction, from an audience that regularly watches the darkest corners of true crime, says something.
The documentary unravels one woman’s web of deception and the tragedy it brought upon those who trusted her most. It is directed by Jessica Dimmock and produced by Joshua Levine, Samantha DeMaria, and Jon Bardin. The feature hails from Story Syndicate, the production company behind heavily-viewed Netflix docs like Unknown, Harry & Meghan, and Depp v. Heard. But the case it documents is unlike almost anything that production company has tackled before.
Who Was Taylor Parker
The murder of Reagan Michelle Simmons-Hancock on October 9, 2020, was a case of murder and fetal abduction in New Boston, Texas. Taylor Rene Parker bludgeoned and killed Simmons-Hancock, who was 35 weeks pregnant, before cutting the unborn baby from her abdomen. The infant, named Braxlynn Sage Hancock, did not survive.
According to Netflix’s Tudum, the film follows the story of Taylor Parker, a young woman claiming to come from a wealthy family, who fell for Wade Griffin, a local hog trapper in a small East Texas town. She falsely claimed to be on the verge of inheriting millions from a wealthy grandmother, promising to buy Griffin a multi-million-dollar ranch in Oklahoma, forging official-looking documents and checks in a misguided attempt to carry out the ruse. The lies weren’t just about a pregnancy. They were about an entire life she had invented.
Despite having worked at a staffing agency and an OB-GYN clinic, Parker falsely claimed to be the heiress to an oil fortune and told Griffin she was pregnant. Parker faked two separate pregnancies involving Griffin. She first claimed she was carrying twins in 2019, but was later said to have been involved in an accident she claimed caused the loss of the pregnancy. When that story ran its course, she started another one.
What makes the deception so extraordinary, and so difficult to watch unfold in the documentary, is how comprehensively it was staged. Over the next nine months, she sustained the deception using a silicone pregnancy belly and fake ultrasound images, even hosting a gender reveal party and maternity photoshoot. At the gender reveal party, a cow with a pink bow around its neck revealed she would be expecting a girl. She pulled off the pregnancy ruse with the help of a silicone belly and sonogram she had purchased online, per court records.
None of it was possible, because Taylor Parker had undergone a hysterectomy years earlier. After welcoming her first two children, Parker had a tubal ligation after suffering from preeclampsia with her son. Two years later, she had an ectopic pregnancy, a dangerous condition where the egg implants in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus. During surgery to resolve the issue, doctors discovered she had “complex cysts and scarring from endometriosis” and performed a hysterectomy with her then-husband’s permission. She knew she could not have another child. She went ahead with the pregnancy fiction anyway.
The Crime
Evidence presented during the investigation and trial showed Parker had spent months pretending to be pregnant in an effort to maintain her relationship with Griffin. Investigators later determined that Parker had searched online for pregnant women before focusing on Simmons-Hancock, whom she already knew through photography work connected to Simmons-Hancock’s engagement and wedding.
Reagan Simmons-Hancock was 21 years old, already a mother to a three-year-old daughter, and weeks away from delivering her second child. Her mother described her: “She was only 17 when she was pregnant with her first one, Kynlee, and they were each other’s worlds from the beginning.” Parker had taken Reagan’s engagement and wedding photographs. They were, by all accounts, friends.
During the trial, a state police investigator testified that Parker conducted intensive research on how to fake a pregnancy convincingly. On the day of the murder, she watched a video on the physical examination of an infant delivered pre-term at 35 weeks. The planning was deliberate and specific.
Parker brutally attacked Hancock inside her home, before removing the unborn child from her womb. Simmons-Hancock was slashed more than 100 times with her unborn baby Braxlynn Sage Hancock stolen from her womb. She was also beaten with a hammer. Simmons-Hancock’s three-year-old daughter was in the home at the time, but left unharmed. Simmons-Hancock’s body was later discovered by her mother, who arrived at her daughter’s home after being unable to reach her.
Parker was en route to a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma, with the baby when she was stopped by a state trooper. The baby died at the hospital, and Parker was arrested. Doctors at the hospital who examined Parker found no evidence of childbirth after she claimed to have had the baby on the side of the road.
The Trial
Parker agreed to be extradited back to Texas to face charges. On October 15, 2020, she returned to Texas and was booked into the Bi-State Detention Center, charged with capital murder, murder, and kidnapping. On December 11, 2020, a Bowie County grand jury formally indicted Parker for kidnapping and capital murder for the deaths of Simmons-Hancock and her unborn daughter.
On September 12, 2022, Taylor Parker stood trial before a Bowie County jury for the capital murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock and murder of the victim’s fetus. During opening statements, Assistant District Attorney Kelley Crisp submitted that Parker had a motive for murder, and that she had conducted a sophisticated scheme to dupe her boyfriend and others into believing she was pregnant, despite her inability to conceive following her hysterectomy.
Jurors heard from 142 witnesses over the course of 25 days. The defense made one central argument: that the baby was already deceased at the time of the attack, which would have lowered the capital murder charge to murder. The defense argued the fetus of Braxlynn wasn’t alive and breathing at the time of Simmons-Hancock’s death; therefore, a kidnapping didn’t occur and asked for an acquittal of the capital murder charges. However, a doctor for the prosecution testified that baby Braxlynn arrived at the hospital with a heartbeat. Ultimately, the charge held, and Parker was sentenced to death.
Jurors returned with the sentence after deliberating for just over an hour. In a statement to the court, Simmons-Hancock’s mother addressed Parker directly as an “evil piece of flesh demon.” “My baby was alive still fighting for her babies when you tore her open and ripped her baby from her stomach,” Jessica Brooks said.
Following her sentencing, Taylor Parker became the seventh woman on death row in Texas. She was also the first woman in the state to receive a death sentence in 12 years, since Kimberly Cargill was sentenced to death.
The Appeals
Parker’s legal team filed 25 points of error with the conviction on direct appeal. Her attorney Caitlin Halpern argued before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that the State’s evidence was intended to manipulate the jury into trivializing Parker’s life. The argument centered partly on claims that prosecutors had fat-shamed Parker in front of the jury, introducing evidence about her weight loss and personal relationships in ways the defense said were prejudicial rather than relevant.
The court’s opinion was written by Judge Lee Finley. “Finding no reversible error, we affirm Appellant’s conviction and sentence of death,” wrote Finley.
On May 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Parker’s appeal against her death sentence. Her direct appeals are now exhausted. She remains on Texas death row with no execution date set. Separate habeas corpus proceedings can continue, and Texas executions are typically scheduled by the trial court only after all appeals run their course, a process that often takes years.
According to reporting from the Texarkana Gazette, Parker claimed in her appeal that Braxlynn was born dead, making her unable to be kidnapped, and therefore Parker should not be eligible for the death penalty. Based on testimony from a flight paramedic and a doctor, the judges determined “a rational juror would find beyond a reasonable doubt that Braxlynn was born alive at the time Parker kidnapped her.”
Parker is currently housed at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, the primary detention facility for female death row inmates in Texas.
What Wade Griffin Told the Documentary
One of the most quietly devastating threads in the film is the story of Wade Griffin, the man Parker was trying to keep. He appears in the documentary and speaks about what he knew, when he knew it, and what the years since have cost him.
Early in the relationship, Griffin said Parker indicated she was pregnant but claimed to have had a miscarriage, before telling him again in January 2020 that she was pregnant. At no point did Griffin have any knowledge of her previous medical history, making him entirely a victim of the manipulation.
During his 2022 court testimony, Griffin confirmed he lost his job following his involvement with Parker. “Pretty much ruined my whole reputation. Slandered my name, my brothers, my mom,” he said, adding it was the worst thing he had ever had to live through.
His appearance in the film adds a layer of tragedy that extends past the crime itself. “I didn’t really have no words for nothing at that point,” Wade recalls in the documentary. “It was unimaginable, what she did.” His final line in the documentary is: “The whole point behind it all, I really don’t know.”
How the Maternal Instinct Documentary Approaches the Story
Directed by Jessica Dimmock, who also made The Texas Killing Fields and Unsolved Mysteries, the film investigates the chilling 2020 crime. The Hollywood Reporter described it as “a tough watch but a well-made documentary,” noting that Dimmock doesn’t give the story away all at once. It was a purposeful creative choice, Dimmock said, one that “in some ways is the closest thing that mirrors what happened to the victim and the victim’s family.” The film takes its time getting from its shocking opening to its even more shocking conclusion.
Dimmock was herself unaware of Parker’s crimes before being approached to direct. It was first-time documentary producer Samantha DeMaria who brought the story to Story Syndicate. Dimmock told the Hollywood Reporter: “It’s hard to compare tragedies, because every time, for whoever is involved, it is the worst thing. I don’t want to make light of anything else, but there’s a cruelty to this.”
Not every review has been positive. The Texarkana Gazette’s film critic described the film as “a disappointing, sensationalist flop that gives a brutal killer the exact spotlight she craved,” arguing that by focusing almost entirely on the perpetrator, Netflix delivers a disrespectful disservice to the Hancock family and the victims who lost their lives. The critic noted that it takes 78 minutes of a 96-minute documentary to reach the moment where the film confirms: “Taylor’s in jail. Best we can tell, looks like she killed a woman and cut her baby out of her and passed it off as being hers.” That split in critical opinion, between those who found the pacing deliberate and effective and those who found it misplaced, reflects a wider debate about how true crime handles victims versus perpetrators.
The film has also prompted viewers to question how items such as fake pregnancy bellies, ultrasound pictures, and pregnancy tests are so easily available for purchase online. The ease with which Parker assembled the props for a ten-month deception sits uncomfortably once you know what the deception was building toward.
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What Stays With You
The case of Taylor Parker sits in a category so specific and so extreme that most people, encountering it for the first time, react the way the Netflix audience has: with a kind of stunned disbelief that the world can contain something like this. Even seasoned true-crime viewers who described the documentary as a remarkably difficult watch admitted they needed to take breaks. The graphic nature of Parker’s actions, combined with the tragic reality that the baby girl did not survive, makes this one of the heaviest documentaries Netflix has released in a very long time.
But what the documentary keeps returning to, underneath all the crime scene detail and courtroom testimony, is Reagan Simmons-Hancock. She was 21. She had a toddler daughter at home who was asleep in another room during the attack and woke up to what came after. Reagan was weeks away from delivering her second child. Her family sat through every day of the trial that followed, and the loss of Reagan and Braxlynn has remained an open wound in the New Boston community.
The horror of the case is undeniable, and the documentary doesn’t pretend otherwise. What it asks you to hold alongside the horror is the ordinary reality of the woman at the center of it, a 21-year-old with a daughter who loved her, a husband, a pregnancy she was excited about, and a friend she trusted. That friend was the one who had taken her wedding photos. Some of the most calculated violence in this story was preceded by the most ordinary intimacy. That’s the part that doesn’t leave you.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.