Netflix’s Maternal Instinct returns to one of Texas’ most disturbing murder cases, tracing how Taylor Parker lied about a pregnancy and ended up convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2022. The 96-minute documentary puts Reagan Simmons-Hancock at the center of the story again, and it does so now because Parker’s case remains alive in court and in prison, even as the facts behind it have long been grimly settled.
The reason the case still lands so hard is the victim. Simmons-Hancock was 21, married to Homer Hancock, pregnant with her second child and still raising a young daughter at home when Parker came back to her house the next day and killed her. Parker then extracted the unborn baby and tried to pass the infant off as her own before calling 911 from her car when the baby was not breathing. Police stopped her after that call, and doctors determined she had not given birth.
Long before that final day, Parker had already built a false life around the pregnancy she said she was carrying. She lived in New Boston, Texas, about 160 miles northeast of Dallas, with Wade Griffin and told him they were expecting a baby girl in September 2020, even though she had undergone a hysterectomy and could not have children. She bought baby clothes, wore a fake pregnancy belly and persuaded a friend to host a gender reveal party. When Griffin confronted her after the due date passed, the story she had built began to crack.
That earlier deception is what gives the documentary its force. Parker had also entered Simmons-Hancock’s life in a way that made the betrayal personal. In 2019, she was hired to photograph Simmons-Hancock’s wedding, and the two women remained friendly after that. Friends later described Simmons-Hancock as someone who was trying to be there for Parker when she seemed overwhelmed, with one saying it never felt as if Parker were some random stranger and another noting that she seemed almost like part of the wedding party because she appeared in so many selfies. The trust was ordinary, and that is what made the violence so savage.
Parker has said the horror did not fully register at first. She told herself, “You didn’t do what they said. It’s lies,” before saying her realization came when she had to face the autopsy photos. In prison, she added, “It’s the hardest thing to admit, but I do not believe in g,” leaving the thought unfinished. That broken sentence matters because it shows what the documentary leaves hanging in plain sight: not only what Parker did, but how she still tries to explain it to herself.
The legal result is not in doubt. A jury convicted Parker of capital murder in 2022 and sentenced her to death, and she is now imprisoned at the Patrick L. O'Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas. Her appeal failed in November 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case in May 2026. Maternal Instinct does not reopen the verdict, but it does remind viewers that the punishment is still waiting at the end of a case built on a lie, a stolen baby and a 21-year-old woman who never got to bring her daughter home.
