The documentary Maternal Instinct explores the murder of 21-year-old Reagan Simmons Hancock, a pregnant woman who was found dead in New Boston, Texas, with her unborn child stolen in October 2020. 

Investigators eventually connected the horrific murder to Taylor Parker, a 27-year-old woman who claimed to be pregnant, who was convicted in 2022 for killing Hancock and is now on death row in Texas. 

Structured as part-true crime investigation and part-psychological portrait, Maternal Instinct traces how Parker's efforts to maintain a false pregnancy ended in her violently killing Hancock, exploring questions about trust, manipulation, and the extent to which a constructed identity can be sustained before it breaks under pressure.

A pregnancy that was never real

Before investigators were tracing blood evidence or reconstructing timelines, the foundation of the case rested on something far less visible: belief.

In 2019, Taylor Parker began a relationship with Wade Griffin, a roofer and hog trapper living in northeast Texas. To Griffin and those around him, Parker presented a life marked by ambition and upward mobility. She spoke of a family inheritance tied to a syrup business, promised financial stability, and described future plans that seemed to expand as quickly as their relationship.

Central to that life, however, was a pregnancy.

According to testimony later presented in court, Parker claimed she was expecting a child early in the relationship and sustained that claim for months. She staged medical appointments, organized a gender reveal celebration, and created a consistent public narrative that reinforced the pregnancy as real. Friends and family later testified that she used padding to simulate physical changes and avoided independent medical verification by controlling access to information and providing fabricated ultrasounds.

The life built around deception

As the relationship developed, the pregnancy story became increasingly elaborate. Parker integrated it into daily life: shopping for baby items, discussing birth plans, and reinforcing the idea of a shared future built around the child.

But investigators later determined that none of these milestones corresponded to a real pregnancy. In the documentary, Griffin says that he believed Parker. Because she faked being pregnant during the pandemic, she was always able to claim that he couldn’t accompany her to doctors appointments due to COVID restrictions, preventing him from verifying anything on his own. 

At the same time, Parker formed a separate connection that would later become central to the case. She became acquainted with Reagan Simmons Hancock, a young mother from New Boston, Texas, who was herself pregnant and preparing for the arrival of her second daughter.

Hancock had interacted with Parker professionally, hiring her for photography work. That connection placed Parker inside Hancock’s orbit without raising concern at the time.

By October 2020, Hancock was in the final weeks of pregnancy.

The day everything changed

On the morning of October 9, Hancock was found dead inside her home in New Boston. Investigators later concluded she had been subjected to an extremely violent assault. She suffered multiple stab wounds and blunt force trauma, and her unborn child was surgically removed from her body.

Her three-year-old daughter was in the home during the attack but was not physically harmed.

The newborn, later identified as Braxlynn Sage, was taken from the scene.

What initially appeared as a contained domestic tragedy quickly expanded into a broader investigation once another development surfaced hours later.

A roadside stop and a collapsing story

Later that same day, police in Texas stopped a vehicle driven by Taylor Parker for erratic driving near De Kalb. Inside the car, Parker told officers she had just given birth and that the newborn was not breathing.

Emergency responders transported both Parker and the infant to a hospital in Oklahoma.

Medical staff quickly determined that Parker showed no signs of recent childbirth. They then confirmed she did not have a uterus, because she had previously undergone a hysterectomy, making pregnancy biologically impossible. DNA testing later established that the infant was not hers, but the daughter of Reagan Simmons Hancock.

The investigation and reconstruction of events

As investigators pieced together the timeline, prosecutors argued that Parker’s actions were driven by an attempt to maintain the pregnancy she had been falsely presenting for months. What had begun as a deception within a relationship, they argued, escalated into a violent attempt to produce a child she could pass off as her own.

Evidence presented at trial included forensic analysis from the crime scene, witness testimony, and medical findings that contradicted Parker’s account.

The prosecution described a sequence in which Parker traveled to Hancock’s home, carried out the attack, and left with the newborn before being stopped by police shortly afterward.

Trial, defense, and conviction

Parker’s trial began in 2022 and lasted several weeks, involving testimony from more than 100 witnesses, including forensic experts, law enforcement officers, and individuals connected to both Parker and Hancock.

The prosecution charged her with capital murder, arguing that the killing occurred during the commission of kidnapping — a key legal distinction under Texas law that made her eligible for the death penalty.

The defense challenged that interpretation, focusing on legal questions surrounding the status of the unborn child and whether kidnapping could be applied in the manner the prosecution argued.

On October 3, 2022, Taylor Parker was convicted of capital murder and later sentenced to death. Subsequent appeals have been denied, and she remains on death row in Texas as of 2026.

Since then, her case has continued to move through higher levels of judicial review without changing the outcome of her conviction. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld both the verdict and the sentence, and a later request for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the case was declined.

Texas’ death row includes only seven women, and Parker, now 33, is among them, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The Netflix series You said a firm goodbye to Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) last year. But author Caroline Kepnes, whose 2014 book inspired the hit show, is still spending time in the serial killer’s mind. 

In her latest book You First, Kepnes returns to Joe, this time chronicling his younger days. Set in post-9/11 New York, the book explores Joe’s burgeoning toxic masculinity as he comes of age with the internet. 

“I wanted to go back and see what it was like to be a lonely man at that time,” Kepnes says. “It’s always been interesting to me from the get go: why is his loneliness dangerous for so many women.”

We meet the seventeen-year-old high school dropout as he’s figuring out what he wants to do with his life while working at the bookstore Moody’s, where he later stalks his prey. This time around the object of Joe’s affection is Vail, an older writer on Sex and the City who uses her experience to groom and manipulate Joe, behaviors he then perpetuates in his subsequent abusive relationships. This is Joe Goldberg we’re talking about, though, so of course he gets the upper hand in the end.

Kepnes was also interested in exploring how romantic comedies (like Sex and the City) shaped Joe’s actions as he tries to make sense of his first relationship alongside the advent of Craiglist’s Missed Connections and AOL instant messenger.

“The way my mind works is, well what if John Cusack was a bad guy?” she says. “He’s unconsciously learning this lesson that when a girl says no, you just keep going after her and you don’t give up.”

You has always mirrored the culture. The first book was published the same year as Serial debuted, kicking off our burgeoning obsession with true crime and our tendency to romanticize the male perpetrators while often homogenizing their overwhelmingly female victims into cautionary tales. The adaptation landed in 2018 right in the thick of #MeToo (though it was conceptualized prior to the movement, Kepnes says) and while boy next door Badgley’s casting as Joe did nothing to assuage us of said romanticization of a killer, the show and the actor tried to shed light on the prevalence of male violence against women.

“There’s been this sixth sense with all things involved in You—we don’t do it intentionally but oh, there it is,” Kepnes says. “As a writer, I go online, I procrastinate, I talk to people. It’s the journalist in me—I’ve always kept up with what people are talking about.”

It’s that sense of community that Kepnes both mourns and celebrates with You First. 

“There was this feeling of interconnectedness. We were all [going through it] together,” Kepnes says of New York City after 9/11. “And here’s this person who doesn’t know how to connect with people, when we really did have more in-person interactions.”

Kepnes concedes that the retrograde ideas at the heart of the manosphere, which encompasses looksmaxxers like Clavicular, toxic masculinity influencers like Andrew Tate, and incels, the most prominent example of whom was the 2014 Santa Barbara mass shooter Elliot Roger, are nothing new. Rather, along with politicians espousing pro-natalist stances our fascination with tradwives, they’re throwbacks. It’s just that the internet has amplified what feel like responses to the feminist gains of the past decade or two, such as body positivity and autonomy and a widespread acceptance and adoption of lifestyles that don’t include marriage and motherhood. “When a woman is lonely, it’s like, girl, go to the gym or get a hobby,” Kepnes jests. When a man is lonely, he might take it out on a woman, like Joe does.

It’s for that reason that, on the surface, it may appear that Joe would acclimate to the manosphere but Kepnes begs to differ.

“He would be horrified. He would enjoy looking down on these men. It’s disturbing that those guys are out there and that they have followings, but they announce themselves. They’re not pretending to be something that they’re not and we know who they are. Joe is scarier. He’s capable of other things because he’s convinced that he’s above that,” she says. “Because of Joe’s anonymity and his moral code, part of the magic that he works on himself is that he [believes he] would never hurt a girl. He wouldn’t talk that way to a woman, about a woman. He wouldn’t rape someone. That’s always been interesting territory for me because it’s a license to do so many terrible things.”

In a way, the You series has been about the male loneliness epidemic before it had a name. “These books are always about loneliness at their heart,” Kepnes says. “How does Joe deal with loneliness and why does he justify this approach to it? What’s scary about that personality type is that they always find a way. Now it’s so much easier for them to find a way.”