On the morning of Oct. 9, 2020, Taylor Rene Parker — also known as Taylor Morton, then 27 — killed 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock at Simmons-Hancock’s home in New Boston. Simmons-Hancock was about 35 weeks pregnant. Parker cut the unborn child from her body and fled with the baby toward Oklahoma.

A Texas state trooper stopped Parker a short time later, near De Kalb, and found her with the newborn, whom Parker claimed she had just delivered on the side of the road. The baby, Braxlynn Sage Hancock, was pronounced dead at a hospital. Parker was arrested the same day.

The investigation revealed what prosecutors would later put at the center of the trial: Parker had faked a pregnancy for months — staging announcements, sonogram images and a gender reveal — as her relationship with her boyfriend, Wade Griffin, depended on a baby that did not exist. As her claimed due date approached, prosecutors said, she targeted a young mother she knew.

No. As of June 2026, Taylor Parker does not have an execution date. She remains on death row at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice while the final stages of her appeals play out.

Here is where things stand. Parker’s direct appeal ended on Nov. 7, 2025, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld her conviction and death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court then declined to take the case on May 29, 2026, leaving the sentence in place.

That exhausts the front-line challenges — but not the entire process. Death-penalty cases move next into habeas corpus review, a separate track in which courts weigh issues outside the original trial record, and which can run through both state and federal courts. Only after those appeals conclude would a Texas court schedule an execution. That is why no date exists today, and why one is unlikely to be set in the near term.

TXK Today will update this guide as soon as an execution date is scheduled. For the latest developments, see our Courts coverage.

Reagan Michelle & Braxlynn Sage Hancock

November 14, 1998 – October 9, 2020

Reagan Michelle Simmons-Hancock was 21 years old, a wife and young mother from New Boston with a toddler daughter, and weeks away from delivering her second child. Her family sat through every day of the trial that followed, and the loss of Reagan and Braxlynn has remained an open wound in the New Boston community.

TXK Today’s coverage of this case has always aimed to keep the victims at its center. This guide exists because renewed national attention — including the Netflix documentary — sends thousands of people searching for the facts; the facts begin with Reagan and Braxlynn.

Parker’s 2022 trial in Bowie County was among the longest and most heavily attended in the county’s modern history. Seating a jury took most of the summer; the guilt and punishment phases together ran for weeks in the fall.

Prosecutors methodically reconstructed the months of fabricated pregnancy that preceded the killing — the faked sonograms, the gender reveal, the approaching “due date” that left Parker, in the state’s telling, with a lie she could no longer sustain. The punishment phase brought dozens of witnesses on Parker’s long pattern of deception.

On Nov. 9, 2022, the jury returned a death sentence — a rarity for a woman in Texas, and the outcome TXK Today reported from the courtroom as Simmons-Hancock’s family looked on.

Parker is on death row for women at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, one of only a handful of women awaiting execution in Texas.

Her direct appeals are exhausted, but the case continues in habeas corpus review, and no execution date has been set. (See Has an execution date been set? above for the full picture of where her appeals stand.)

“Maternal Instinct” premiered globally on Netflix on June 12, 2026. The documentary, directed by Jessica Dimmock and produced by Story Syndicate, revisits the case and the deception that preceded it.

For those coming to the story through the film: the documentary dramatizes events that played out in a Bowie County courtroom over two years, all of which TXK Today covered firsthand — the complete archive is below.

The investigation (2020–2021)

• Woman charged with capital murder and in Bowie County jail (Oct. 2020)
• Grand jury indicts woman accused of murdering friend and stealing her unborn baby (Dec. 2020)
• State will seek death penalty (Jan. 2021)
• Second count of capital murder (March 2021)
• Held without bail (March 2021)
• Judge sets 2022 trial date (April 2021)
• Pretrial court appearance (Oct. 2021)
• Defense seeks change of venue (Dec. 2021)

The trial (2022)

• Hundreds summoned for juror qualification (June 2022)
• Jury selection complete (Aug. 2022)
• Capital murder trial underway (Sept. 2022)
• State and defense rest (Sept. 2022)
• Sentencing phase begins (Oct. 2022)
• State rests in sentencing phase (Nov. 2022)
• Taylor Parker sentenced to death (Nov. 9, 2022)

The appeals (2025–2026)

• Death sentence upheld by Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (Nov. 2025)
• U.S. Supreme Court won’t take up the case (May 2026)

This guide is part of the TXK Today Guides series — plain-language explainers on the stories and institutions that shape life in the Texarkana region. Spot an error or an update we should make? Email [email protected].