This article contains graphic descriptions of murder, child murder, and fertility trauma. Please take care while reading.
In March 2019, Taylor Parker‘s mother, Shonna Prior got a text message from a friend. Included in the message was a Facebook post screenshot about Parker’s baby’s gender reveal party. Congratulations on the grandchild, the message said. The problem was — Prior knew her daughter had had a hysterectomy.
About seven months later, in October 2020, Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who was 21 at that time, was found brutally murdered in her home about 160 miles outside Dallas, Texas, near where Parker lived. Parker was stabbed and beaten, and 35 weeks pregnant when she died. Someone cut Simmons-Hancock open and tore the baby from her stomach. The newborn infant was missing, and Simmons-Hancock’s 3-year-old daughter was home when it happened.
The same morning Simmons-Hancock was killed, Parker was pulled over for a traffic violation. In the car, was a child, later named Braxlynn Sage Hancock. Parker told the police she had just given birth on the side of the road, but the newborn wasn’t breathing. The child was declared dead at a nearby hospital, CBS News reported.
A fake pregnancy lasting nearly 10 months
Taylor Parker and Reagan Hancock-Simmons were only briefly acquainted. Parker took Hancock-Simmons and her husband, Homer Simmons, engagement photos. After that, Parker and Hancock-Simmons were “somewhat friends,” Homer told the jury on the stand. According to the prosecution, Parker researched fake pregnancies, faked ultrasounds, wore false stomachs to look pregnant, and even had a gender-reveal party before she murdered Hancock-Simmons just to keep her boyfriend, Wade Griffin, happy.
In the meantime, Hancock-Simmons’ murder was carefully planned with burner phones, online research about delivering children via Cesarean, and trial runs to Hancock-Simmons house, the prosecution alleged. Shonna Prior, Parker’s mother, said in court that she lost contact with her daughter after she and Griffin got together, and she knew Parker couldn’t be pregnant, even when she got the congratulatory text message. “We figured the lie would be exposed,” Prior said.
Emergency surgeries and a purported stroke
At first, Taylor Parker denied murdering Reagan Hancock-Simmons and her unborn child. When doctors confirmed Parker had not given birth, she admitted what she did in chilling hospital interrogation footage. During the investigation, it was revealed that Parker had engaged in fraud to collect disability benefits, lying about a list of past health problems including a pulmonary embolism, seizures, and a stroke.
It was suggested that the stroke could have affected her thinking when the murder happened, but some doctors failed to find signs it ever occurred. However, another expert testifying at Parker’s trial did say they found “abnormalities” in her brain, KTBS reported. One confirmed health issue Parker faced came in 2015 when she underwent surgery for ovarian cysts. While Parker was under anesthesia, doctors told her mom and her ex-husband, Tommy Waycasey, that they found a tubal pregnancy and signs of endometriosis.
Waycasey said on the stand he permitted doctors to perform an emergency hysterectomy while Parker was unconscious, according to WGNO. When Parker woke up, she “flew off the handle,” and demanded to know why he didn’t wait so that she could consent, Waycasey said.
Parker was given the death penalty
Still, psychological evaluations ruled Taylor Parker sane and fit to stand trial. Parker admitted what she’d done, although she characterized it at first as a physical confrontation that went too far, causing Hancock-Simmons to fall and hit her head. She did confess to cutting the baby from her stomach but she said she did it to save its life. In October 2022, Parker was convicted of murdering Hancock-Simmons and sentenced to death.
“The circumstances in which Reagan died are horrible and there is no doubt it was torture. But a mother died fighting for her child, That’s how she left the world. A woman who died fighting,” First Bowie County Assistant District Attorney Kelley Crisp said after the verdict was announced, according to the Texarkana Gazette. Today, Parker remains just one of seven women on death row in Texas.