A desperate woman spent months plotting about how to steal her pregnant friend’s baby, and get away with it, with her extensive lies to the police seeing her dubbed an ‘actress of the highest order’
Taylor Parker, 32, found herself unable to tell her boyfriend, Wade Griffin, that she couldn’t conceive. She already had two children from previous relationships, but had undergone a hysterectomy, leaving her unable to have more children.
But instead of dealing with sharing this upsetting information with her partner, she began a terrifying and intricate scheme to get a baby of her own as her desperation mounted.
She first offered people she knew $100,000 (£86,000) to act as surrogates, but when that wasn’t successful, her attention turned to a pregnant acquaintance, Reagan Simmons-Hancock.
Reagan was 21, and Taylor had taken her engagement and wedding photos for her, with the two women becoming “somewhat friends” according to Reagan’s husband.
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During her trial, prosecutors alleged that Taylor had spent months plotting how to take Reagan’s baby – whilst faking her own pregnancy along the way.
Taylor is said to have ordered a pregnancy suit to wear, even throwing herself a gender reveal celebration and posting on her social media profiles about her ‘pregnancy’. If anyone close to her knew about her hysterectomy and the impossibility that she was carrying a child, they did not seem to intervene.
In October 2020 in New Boston, Texas, Taylor beat her victim over the head and stabbed her multiple times, before she removed the unborn baby, called Braxlynn Sage, from Raegan’s stomach, cutting her friend from hip to hip. Earning the horrifying nickname ‘Womb Raider’, she had told her boyfriend that she was due to be ‘induced’ that very same day.
Taylor committed the grisly act in front of Raegan’s three-year-old daughter, and her friend survived for some time after the attack before succumbing to her injuries.
The murderer took her friend’s placenta and put it in her trousers before leaving with the baby. She tucked the umbilical cord into her trousers, placed Braxlynn on her lap, and drove away in her car.
She was pulled over for driving erratically later that morning. Initially, the authorities believed her attempts to make it seem like she had just given birth – so they took her to a hospital.
Here, the lies quickly started to unravel, but with a blank stare she consistently kept up the deception to the police in a chilling scene, even offering up a name for the baby – who did not survive.
“What did you have, a boy or a girl?” One officer asked her as she lay in a hospital bed. “A girl,” she replied emotionally, adding that the name she had chosen was “Clancy Gail”.
“That’s a nice name,” the officer replied.
Taylor then confirmed she had two children already, 10 and six, before one of the officers said gently to her, “I’m just going to be up front with you…We know that if you had a hysterectomy some time back, and that you claimed to be pregnant for a while, but you really weren’t.
“So we’re trying to figure out where this baby came from. But you didn’t give birth this morning.”
Looking baffled and distressed, Taylor replied, “What do you mean?”
“What I just said, you didn’t give birth this morning,” the officer said. “And we want to know where this baby came from. So what happened?”
“I just told y’all what happened,” Taylor replied indignantly.
The placenta, which Taylor had put inside her trousers, had easily fallen away when medics had cut her clothes away, and later a glittery press-on fingernail was found inside it, which, it was argued in court, showed Raegan had likely fought Taylor to keep her baby inside her stomach during the attack.
During her trial, prosecutors said Taylor was an “actress of the highest order”, adding: “The lies and fraud go on and on; the layers of fraud are staggering. You are going to have to understand the fraud to understand what happened on October 9.
“This started months and months ahead of time until it passed the point of no return, and it ended up in homicide.”
Taylor sits on death row in Texas for her crimes after pleading not guilty during her trial, but she has since taken responsibility for what happened, claiming she was in “denial” about her actions until reality hit in the courtroom.
Speaking to the New Yorker, the convicted murderer said: “I was in a full-on war in my mind. I told myself, ‘You didn’t do what they said. It’s lies,’…My realisation came when I had to face the autopsy photos. Jesus hit me straight on, flesh to flesh. That courtroom was so silent, but I heard his voice loud and clear. He told me to open my eyes and see reality.”
Reagan’s mother, Jessica Brooks, gave a statement in court about her daughter and grandchild’s deaths, calling Taylor an “evil piece of flesh demon”.
The devastated mother added: “My baby was alive, still fighting for her babies when you tore her open and ripped her baby from her stomach.”
Taylor has said that she carries these words with her. “Every word spoken by the family I took with me that day. They were true words of pain and grief and love that I needed to hear to start my road to redemption.”
She is appealing her death sentence, but has no desire to leave prison, explaining: “It’s the hardest thing to admit, but I do not believe in going home for myself. My place is here. I stand firm on the belief you do not deserve to have something you took from another.”