Final 24 Hours of Taylor Rene Parker + Last Meal + Last Words on Texas Death Row Inmate

I don’t know what was wrong with me. Cuz I’ve never been a bad person. I don’t think you are. She was not a hardened criminal. She had no violent history, no prior arrests, no record of any kind. She was a 27-year-old woman from a small Texas town, a freelance photographer who shot weddings and engagement sessions, who posted baby bump photos on Facebook, who attended gender reveal parties and smiled in every picture.

 And on the morning of October 9th, 2020, she drove to her friend’s house in New Boston, Texas, carrying a hammer, a scalpel, and a plan she had been building for 10 months. Reagan Simmons-Hancock was 21 years old, 8 months pregnant. Her 3-year-old daughter, Kenley, was asleep in the back room. By the time Reagan’s own mother walked through that front door a few hours later, two lives were gone.

 This is the case that stopped Texas cold, the case that prosecutors called one of the most premeditated, most calculated acts of violence in the state’s modern history, the case that put a 29-year-old woman on death row, the youngest female inmate in Texas’s capital punishment system, and kept her there through every appeal she has filed since.

Welcome to Convicted Criminals. Hit subscribe, turn on the notification bell so you won’t miss our deep dive drops, and this is the story of Taylor Renee Parker, of Reagan Simmons-Hancock, and of a lie so elaborate, so sustained, so methodically constructed that the people closest to it never saw it coming until it was already over.

To understand what happened inside Reagan Hancock’s home on that Friday morning, you have to go further back. You have to understand who Taylor Parker was, and more importantly, who she needed everyone to believe she was. Taylor Renee Parker was born December 8th, 1992. She grew up in Bowie County, northeast Texas, the same rural stretch of land near the Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana state lines where this story would eventually end.

 She was charming, social, the kind of person who could walk into a room and hold a conversation with anyone. She had an eye for photography, a natural warmth in front of people, and as trial testimony would later make unmistakably clear, an extraordinary capacity for deception. By her mid-20s, Parker had already lived several lives.

 She had a daughter, Emersyn, from an earlier relationship. She married a man named Tommy Wacasey, had a son named Trey, and by 2014 had undergone a tubal ligation following complications from a prior pregnancy. The following year, in 2015, she had a full hysterectomy. The procedure was medically necessary. It was also the end of any possibility of biological pregnancy.

 She would not tell a romantic partner this fact for years. The marriage to Wacasey ended. Then came a second marriage to a man named Hunter Parker, whose last name she kept. That relationship ended as well. By the time she met Wade Griffin in the summer of 2019, Taylor Parker had lost custody of both children. She was rebuilding, or at least performing the act of rebuilding.

 She had reinvented herself online, presenting as a successful real estate agent, hinting at family wealth, crafting a life online that bore little resemblance to the one she was actually living. Wade Griffin was a roofing company supervisor from Sims, Texas. They met at a rodeo in July 2019. Within days, they were exchanging messages.

 Within weeks, they were spending evenings together and meeting each other’s families. Griffin would later describe the relationship as an emotional roller coaster from almost the start, but he was drawn in, and Taylor Parker knew exactly how to keep him there. The lies began almost immediately. Within the first few weeks of dating, Parker told Griffin she was pregnant with twins.

 She then engineered an elaborate story involving a farm accident, fabricating text messages from a fake persona she called Mark Morton, pretending to be her own father, setting up a scenario involving a broken piece of farm equipment that struck her stomach and hurt one of the babies. When the fictional pregnancy ended in a fictional loss, Griffin grieved.

 He had no idea none of it had ever been real. He didn’t know about the hysterectomy. She had never told him. Trial testimony would later reveal the full architecture of Parker’s deceptions during this period. She told Griffin’s family she was the heir to a family fortune. She claimed her own mother had stolen her inheritance and hired a hitman to have the couple killed.

 She said she had hired a private detective who foiled the plot. She fabricated emails, she fabricated texts, she built entire scenarios, characters, crises, stakes out of nothing, and she maintained them with the kind of consistency that requires not just dishonesty, but discipline. Griffin’s sister-in-law testified at trial that nobody in Griffin’s family was fully sold on Taylor Parker.

 There was a sense, she said, that he wasn’t fully invested in the relationship, and perhaps that is the most important fact of all, because it appears to be the one Taylor Parker could not accept. By the beginning of 2020, she had made a decision. She would give him what he wanted most, a child, a family, a reason to stay.

In February 2020, Parker told Wade Griffin she was pregnant. She was not. She would never be. But she had 10 months to figure out how to make it real. What followed was not impulsive. What followed was a campaign. Parker wore maternity clothes. She posted on Facebook about her pregnancy, chronicling fetal development, describing symptoms, sharing the emotional beats of an expectant mother.

She wrote about feeling the baby move. She described difficult nights, swollen feet, the particular exhaustion of the third trimester. Wade Griffin’s family saw the posts. His friends saw the posts. And Wade himself, who had once been skeptical, began to believe. The couple staged a gender reveal party in Sims, Texas.

 Pink or blue. Friends showed up. There were decorations. There was anticipation. And there was Taylor Parker, standing at the center of it all, stomach visibly rounded, because she had purchased a prosthetic baby belly, a silicone garment designed to simulate a pregnancy from the outside. She showed Griffin fake ultrasound images.

 She attended OB/GYN appointments, not as a patient, but to observe, to learn, to absorb the language and rhythm of prenatal care so she could reproduce it convincingly at home. Court testimony confirmed she visited maternity clinics in Texarkana and Idabel, Oklahoma, claiming to be a patient. She gathered information. She watched.

 Then, in mid-September 2020, something shifted. Parker’s phone data, later forensically analyzed by Texarkana police detective Kevin Berkleyo, showed a dramatic intensification of her activity starting around September 15th. An anonymous text had been sent to Wade Griffin. It told him Taylor was not pregnant.

 It said hospitals in the area were on high alert in case she tried to steal a newborn from a maternity ward. Griffin confronted Taylor. She had an explanation ready. She always had an explanation ready. But Griffin reached out to her ex-husband, and the ex-husband confirmed what the anonymous text had claimed. This was the moment the walls began closing in.

From September 15th forward, Berkleyo testified, Parker’s search activity became relentless. She searched for OB/GYN clinics, maternity stores, teen pregnancy support groups. She visited locations in Texarkana, Longview, Shreveport, Mount Pleasant, Paris, and Idabel, sometimes multiple times in a single week.

 She wrote down the license plates of visibly pregnant women outside clinics and searched those plates to find their home addresses. She researched midwifery certification. She looked up how to complete out-of-hospital birth certificates. She watched YouTube videos on vaginal and cesarean deliveries. She researched how to perform a C-section.

She was not planning to fake a birth anymore. She was planning something else entirely. Three days before the murder, an intentional fire was set at the home where Taylor and Griffin had been living, a fire that knocked out the power and plumbing. The investigation would later connect Taylor Parker to it. Two days before the murder, Parker had a scheduled induction at a clinic in Idabel, an induction for a pregnancy that did not exist.

 A bomb threat was called into the clinic that morning, forcing the cancellation of all appointments. Investigators would later connect Parker to that threat as well. On the evening of October 8th, 2020, Parker drove to Reagan Simmons-Hancock’s home in New Boston. The two women sat together. They talked. Berkleyo’s cell phone analysis showed Parker left just before 10:00 p.m.

 Whether she slept that night is unknown. What is known is that her burner phone, a second device she had activated the day before the murder, was making data connections at 12:15 in the morning between 3:11 and 3:30 in the morning. Five calls were placed from that burner phone to McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel.

 Some lasted over 6 minutes. At 3:45 a.m., a brief call went from Griffin’s phone to Parker’s burner. Griffin was getting ready to leave for Winwood, Oklahoma, where Parker had arranged a livestock sale with an unsuspecting rancher, a deliberate errand designed to keep him occupied and hours away from where she was going. By early morning on October 9th, 2020, Taylor Parker had already loaded her vehicle.

 She was carrying a hammer, a scalpel, a fake hospital badge, a diaper bag. She was on her way to New Boston. Reagan Michelle Simmons-Hancock was, by every account from people who knew her, exactly the kind of person this description suggests. Young, warm, a devoted mother to her toddler daughter, Kenley, excited about the birth of her second daughter, now days away.

 She had met Taylor Parker in 2019, when Parker photographed her engagement session and later her wedding. The two had stayed connected through Facebook. Parker had been attentive, reacting to pregnancy posts, texting occasionally. The night before her death, Reagan had let Taylor into her home without suspicion.

 They had sat together and talked. There were no signs of forced entry on October 9th. That means Reagan Hancock opened the door. What happened next unfolded over a period that forensic experts would later describe as neither quick nor merciful. Parker attacked Reagan with a hammer, striking her repeatedly in the head.

 The medical examiner confirmed her skull had been fractured. Then came the knife. Reagan was stabbed and slashed across the face, neck, chest, abdomen, and back. A crime scene reconstruction expert testified that the blood spatter, the wound distribution, and the physical evidence pointed to a sustained struggle.

Reagan fought. The deep cuts on her palms and fingers, the defensive wounds, told that story. She was barefoot, 8 months pregnant, and she fought with everything she had. She was also strangled. Dallas County Medical Examiner Dr. Joni McClain testified that Reagan Simmons Hancock was alive, conscious, fighting for a significant portion of the attack.

This was not an ambush that ended in seconds. This was a sustained assault against a woman who refused to stop fighting for her life and for her baby. When Reagan could no longer fight, Parker used a scalpel. She performed a crude, improvised cesarean section on Reagan Hancock’s body. The cut was not surgical. It was not clean.

 One medical expert who testified at trial stated it plainly. This was not a clinical procedure. This was brutal, but it extracted Braxlynn Sage Hancock from her mother’s womb, and Braxlynn was alive. A jailhouse informant would later testify that Parker, in a moment that defies easy description, held the newborn up to Reagan’s cheek before leaving.

 According to the informant, Parker whispered to the baby, “Tell Mama bye.” Then she walked out of the house, got into Wade Griffin’s 2009 Toyota Corolla, and drove away. In the back room, 3-year-old Kinley Hancock was still in the house. She was alone. By 9:30 in the morning, a Texas State Trooper had clocked Parker speeding north toward the Oklahoma border.

 When the trooper made the traffic stop, Parker jumped out of the vehicle holding Braxlynn Sage and screaming that she had just delivered the baby on the side of the road and that the infant wasn’t breathing. She begged for help. The trooper called for emergency medical services immediately, but something didn’t add up.

 Parker showed no visible signs of having just delivered a child. There was no umbilical cord, no afterbirth, and she was, as the trooper would later describe, frantic in a way that didn’t match someone who had just given birth. She was too composed in the wrong places and too hysterical in the wrong ones. EMS arrived and transported both Parker and Braxlynn Sage to McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma.

 There, medical staff made the findings that would unravel everything. Parker had absolutely no physical indicators of recent childbirth. When doctors examined her further, they confirmed what her own medical records already showed. Taylor Parker had no uterus. Her hysterectomy had been performed 5 years earlier.

 Pregnancy was a biological impossibility. The baby she was holding had not come from her body. And Braxlynn Sage Hancock, pulled from the womb of a dying woman and driven miles without medical care, was fading. Medical personnel were able to briefly restore a heartbeat, a fact the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals would later cite as evidence that she had been born alive.

But the damage was catastrophic. Braxlynn Sage Hancock was pronounced dead not long after arrival. Back in New Boston, Reagan’s mother, Jessica Brooks, had grown worried. Reagan had missed a scheduled appointment. Jessica drove to the house. She found the front door unlocked. She walked inside. The 911 call she made describes what she found.

She told the dispatcher, “My daughter is dead. She’s pregnant. Her stomach is cut open. The baby is gone.” Within hours, investigators had connected the report from the Oklahoma hospital to the crime scene in New Boston. A woman claiming to have just given birth, who had no uterus, had been stopped speeding away from the town where a pregnant woman had just been murdered and surgically opened.

Parker was detained by Oklahoma authorities. She initially maintained her story, but under sustained questioning, she admitted she had been in a physical altercation with Reagan Hancock. She admitted she had taken the baby. By 10:20 that morning, she was in custody. In a jail phone call to her mother recorded shortly after her arrest, Taylor Parker did not ask about Reagan. She did not say her name once.

She said, “I messed up real bad.” The capital murder trial of Taylor Renee Parker opened on September 12th, 2022, inside the Bowie County Courthouse in New Boston. Judge John Tidwell presided over the 202nd Judicial District Court. Security was tight. National media had arrived, and the prosecution, led by First Assistant District Attorney Kelly Crisp, was not seeking a life sentence.

They were seeking death. The trial lasted nearly 3 weeks. Prosecutors built their case methodically, presenting jurors with the full architecture of Parker’s deception, not just the murder itself, but the 10 months of calculated preparation that preceded it. Detective Berkley’s cell phone analysis mapped Parker’s movements and search history in meticulous detail, showing the jury the pattern of escalation that began with fake pregnancy posts and ended with a scalpel.

 Reagan’s mother, Jessica Brooks, took the stand. She described walking into her daughter’s home. She described what she found. Jurors were shown crime scene photographs. The courtroom was silent. Homer Hancock, Reagan’s husband, testified about the couple’s relationship with Taylor Parker, how she had photographed their engagement, photographed their wedding, how his wife had trusted her.

Medical experts testified about the nature of Reagan’s wounds, that the attack had not been quick, that Reagan had been conscious and fighting, that the manner of her death reflected sustained and deliberate violence rather than a sudden act of passion. Parker’s Google search history was entered into evidence.

 In the weeks before the murder, she had searched how to perform a cesarean section at home, how to fake pregnancy symptoms, how to obtain fake ultrasound images. On the morning of October 9th itself, hours before she drove to Reagan’s house, she had watched a YouTube video on the physical examination of an infant delivered preterm at 35 weeks.

 The defense argued mental instability. They raised borderline personality disorder. They told the jury that Parker had been failed by people around her, that she was a damaged person who had never received the help she needed. Parker’s lead defense attorney, Jeff Heralson, told the jury there were layers to every human life and shades of gray, and that words can be used to dehumanize.

 It wasn’t enough. On October 4th, 2022, after slightly more than an hour of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of capital murder. Kelly Crisp, First Assistant DA, said after the verdict that Parker had an answer for everything, right up until she didn’t. The penalty phase began.

 Days of victim impact testimony followed. Jessica Brooks addressed the court directly. Speaking to Parker, she said, “My baby was alive. She felt every single pain. She fought for her babies, and you smashed her skull. You ripped her open and took her baby. You deserve to be removed from this earth.” The jury deliberated for just over an hour.

On November 9th, 2022, they returned with their answer, death. Judge John Tidwell looked at Taylor Parker and read the order of the court. Then he turned to the bailiff and said four words, “Take her to death row.” Parker showed no visible emotion. On November 14th, 2022, Taylor Renee Parker, 29 years old, the youngest woman on Texas death row, was officially processed into the state prison system and transferred to the Patrick O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas.

 She became the seventh woman to join Texas’s female death row population. She lives in a 60-square-foot cell enclosed by a solid steel door. She is permitted out for showers and a daily 2-hour recreation period. No execution date has been set. Under Texas law, a death sentence carries an automatic direct appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court.

Parker’s legal team raised 25 separate points of error. They argued the venue should have been moved due to pretrial publicity. They argued certain evidence had been improperly admitted, including, notably, extensive testimony about Parker’s weight loss surgery and physical appearance, which her attorneys characterized as a form of prosecutorial fat-shaming designed to make the jury devalue her of Criminal Appeals on September 17th, 2025.

 On November 6th, 2025, Judge Lee Finley delivered the court’s opinion. It was unanimous. All 25 points of error were overruled, finding no reversible error. The court wrote, “We affirm appellant’s conviction and sentence of death.” The court specifically addressed the kidnapping element, the legal hinge on which the capital murder charge turned.

 Parker’s defense had argued that Braxlynn Sage was not legally born alive when taken, and therefore could not be a kidnapping victim. The court rejected this entirely. Medical testimony from the first responders, the hospital physicians, and a jailhouse informant who testified that Parker herself said the baby was alive when she took her, provided more than sufficient basis for the jury’s finding.

First Assistant DA Kelly Crisp, who had prosecuted the case from the beginning, responded to the ruling. The court, she said, rightly concluded that Braxlynn Sage was alive when she was violently extracted from her mother, and therefore that the verdict handed down by the jury of Bowie County was just and right.

 The horror and sadness of this case, Crisp said, will never be forgotten by any of us who worked on it. As of April 2026, Taylor Parker remains at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville. Her attorneys have filed a petition for certiorari, a request for the United States Supreme Court to review the case. That petition remains pending.

 If denied, the case moves into the federal habeas corpus process, which can extend for years or decades. Texas has historically been the most active execution state in the nation, but the average time between sentencing and execution, even in Texas, now stretches well beyond a decade. Parker is 33 years old. Reagan Simmons Hancock was 21 when she died on the floor of her own home, fighting for her life and for her unborn daughter.

Kinsley Hancock, who was 3 years old that morning and alone in the back room of that house, is now seven. Braxlynn Sage Hancock, who was pulled from her mother’s womb and carried across state lines in the front seat of a car, lived long enough for medical personnel to briefly restore her heartbeat. She was pronounced dead on October 9th, 2020.

Neither Reagan nor Braxlynn had a chance. The lie was 10 months in the making. The plan was precise. The execution, if Texas law eventually carries it out, will come at the end of a very long road, but the sentence is final. The conviction is upheld, and the name Reagan Simmons Hancock is one that the state of Texas has formally sworn will not be forgotten.

There is a particular quality to premeditated violence that separates it from every other category of crime. Not the act itself, but the time before it. The ordinary days, the Facebook posts, the gender reveal party, the dinner at Osaka’s the night before, the way Taylor Parker looked at Reagan Hancock, a woman who trusted her, who welcomed her into her home twice in 2 days, and saw not a friend, not a person, but a solution to a problem.

10 months, every one of those days, Reagan Simmons Hancock was alive, walking around, growing her daughter, planning for a future that was already, in someone else’s mind, already foreclosed. That is the part of this case that doesn’t leave you. The sentence is death. The conviction stands, and somewhere in a 60 square foot cell in Gatesville, Texas, Taylor Parker waits.