Taylor Rene Parker was unable to have more children but had told her partner she was pregnant
A woman who murdered her heavily pregnant friend before cutting the unborn baby out of her body has been sentenced to death.
Taylor Rene Parker repeatedly stabbed 21-year-old Reagan Michelle Simmons-Hancock and caved her skull in with a hammer before trying to steal her infant daughter in New Boston in October 2020.
The 29-year-old was found guilty of murder in September, and after a month-long trial in Bowie County, a jury this week returned a death verdict. Parker is now at Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, where female death row inmates are housed.
Parker had faked a pregnancy for months, including using bogus ultrasound scans, holding a gender reveal party and posting fictitious pregnancy updates on social media, in a desperate bid to convince her boyfriend she was having their daughter. At the same time she was searching for a victim.
The mum-of-two was unable to have any more children after a hysterectomy, which she kept secret from her partner.
Parker befriended Hancock because she was pregnant and a court was told she had watched videos detailing how to deliver babies preterm at 35 weeks – which is how far her victim was when she was killed.
On the day of the murders, 9 October, Parker told her partner she was going to hospital to be induced to deliver their baby, according to TXK Today.
That morning she bludgeoned Hancock and stabbed her more than 100 times in her own home before using a scalpel to remove her unborn daughter, Braxlynn Sage Hancock.
She then fled with the infant, who later died, while her victim bled to death in front of her three-year-old daughter.
Hancock’s mum, Jessica Brooks, called Parker “evil”, saying: “My baby was alive still fighting for her babies when you tore her open and ripped her baby from her stomach.”
Her sister, Emily, added: “You need to understand what you took from me and my family.
“No more celebrating her birthday. I was barely 19 when I got the call my sister was gone. ‘She will never be my maid of honor. If I visit my sister I have to go to a gaveyard and see a headstone. I will never get a text or phone call from her again.’
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