Murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock

On October 9, 2020, Taylor Rene Parker killed Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who was 36 weeks pregnant, inside Simmons-Hancock's home in New Boston, Texas. During the attack, Parker cut into Simmons-Hancock's abdomen with a scalpel and removed the unborn child, later named Braxlynn Sage Hancock; the infant did not survive. Parker, then 27, had befriended Simmons-Hancock while working as her engagement and wedding photographer, and for roughly ten months beforehand had falsely told her boyfriend and others that she herself was pregnant.

Parker had become a mother at 17 and had a second child during a later marriage; after complications from an ectopic pregnancy and a failed tubal ligation, she underwent a hysterectomy that left her unable to have more children. Following two divorces, she began a relationship in 2019 and told her boyfriend she was expecting a baby, sustaining the deception for months with a prosthetic pregnancy belly, fabricated ultrasound images, a gender-reveal party, and a maternity photo shoot. As her claimed due date passed in late September 2020, she gave shifting accounts of the delay, first saying she would give birth in Texas on October 5, then claiming days later that she would instead deliver at a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma, on October 9 — the date she killed Simmons-Hancock.

Parker drove to Simmons-Hancock's home in New Boston, where Simmons-Hancock and her three-year-old daughter were present. Simmons-Hancock suffered blunt-force trauma and multiple stab wounds inflicted at several locations inside the house before she died; her daughter was found unharmed, hiding in her bedroom. Parker then cut the baby from Simmons-Hancock's body and fled toward Oklahoma.

A Texas Highway Patrol trooper stopped Parker for erratic driving in De Kalb, Texas, and noticed an umbilical cord on her body; Parker claimed she had just given birth in her car. She was taken to a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma, where the infant was pronounced dead. Hospital staff found that Parker had no uterus and had not given birth that day, and DNA testing later confirmed the baby was Simmons-Hancock's biological child rather than Parker's. An autopsy attributed Simmons-Hancock's death to sharp- and blunt-force injuries sustained during the attack and extraction, and a separate medical examiner ruled the infant's death a homicide caused by trauma during the forced delivery.

Parker was extradited to Texas and charged with capital murder, murder, and kidnapping; a Bowie County grand jury indicted her in December 2020, and prosecutors announced in January 2021 that they would seek the death penalty. A second capital murder count, covering the infant's death, followed in March 2021. At trial in September and October 2022, prosecutors presented evidence of internet searches Parker had made about inducing early labor and faking a pregnancy. A jury convicted her of murder, capital murder, and kidnapping on October 3, 2022, and on November 9, 2022, the trial court sentenced her to death on the jury's unanimous recommendation.

Parker's first appeal was rejected by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in November 2025, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a further appeal in May 2026. She remains incarcerated on death row at the Patrick O'Daniel Unit and was the first woman sentenced to death under Texas law in a decade. Simmons-Hancock's widower filed a wrongful-death civil lawsuit in October 2022, and a documentary about the case began streaming on Netflix in June 2026.