On October 9, 2020, Taylor Parker, a 27-year-old mother of two, visited her friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock at her home in northeastern Texas. Simmons-Hancock, who was 35 weeks pregnant with her second child, had something Parker felt she desperately needed: a baby.
What transpired next is the subject of Maternal Instinct, a hit Netflix true-crime documentary directed by Jessica Dimmock and released in June. If you watched the film, you might conclude that you know everything you need to know about Parker and her crimes. But you would be mistaken. What is remarkable—albeit in line with the demands of the true-crime genre—is just how much Maternal Instinct leaves out.
True-crime documentaries are entertainment. They tend to follow a formula with common elements: villains and victims, mystery and suspense, capture and catharsis. These stories typically adopt the tropes of horror films—eerie music, ominous foreshadowing—and offer the prosecution’s version of events, which favor a tidy and dramatic view of a killer’s means and motives. The defense’s job is to poke holes in these assumptions. By omitting vital details from defense teams—in Parker’s case and others—true-crime films portray the grisliest offenses as essentially incomprehensible expressions of wickedness, when the reality is invariably more complicated.
The documentary opens with an acquaintance of Parker’s observing that “there’s evil in our land” and that “evil people do evil things.” This is more of a spiritual explanation than a legal or clinical one. No one can know the fundamental character of another person’s soul, but Maternal Instinct hardly tries to understand Parker’s. Parker is clearly guilty of committing two horrifying murders. Her evident mental illness does, however, challenge the claim that her actions could be explained only by inveterate evil.
[McKay Coppins: The gross spectacle of murder fandom]
As Maternal Instinct recounts, in the months prior to that October morning in Simmons-Hancock’s home, Parker, a divorced mother of two, had staged a fake pregnancy. She had gone to great lengths to convince the people around her—including her fairly new boyfriend—that she was expecting. She’d padded her belly, fabricated medical documents and ultrasounds, and claimed that coronavirus-pandemic restrictions mandated that she see her doctors solo. But unbeknownst to her boyfriend and others, Parker was infertile, having undergone a hysterectomy years earlier.
To keep her lies from being exposed, Parker sought a newborn child to make her own. According to police, she arrived at the house of her very pregnant friend with a scalpel and bludgeoned the 21-year-old Simmons-Hancock with what was likely a hammer, then wrestled her to the floor, sliced her uterus open, and extracted her unborn child. Parker then fled the scene with the infant, leaving Simmons-Hancock to die; the infant died later that day. In 2022, after two years in prison and a weekslong trial, Parker was found guilty of capital murder by a Texas jury and sentenced to death.
Maternal Instinct is meant to paint a portrait of a criminal and her crime, but Parker, who remains on death row, was neither interviewed nor consulted for the documentary—nor were her defense attorneys or their expert witnesses, though Dimmock and her team offered them a chance to comment before releasing the film. Dimmock explained to me that she’d declined to interview Parker out of respect for Simmons-Hancock’s family and friends, and because she doubted that Parker would be truthful or remorseful.
True-crime stories about female killers tend to be especially titillating. Men are about nine times more likely to commit murder than women—who are assumed to be, as the Cornell Law School professor Sandra Babcock put it, “peaceful, nurturing, mothering, caring, obedient.” Murder “seems so out of step with how we view women, how we perceive the stereotypical woman as being,” Babcock, who specializes in gender rights and the death penalty, told me.
Parker’s trial gave rise to a profusion of lurid headlines: “Texas Woman Allegedly Stabbed Mom-to-Be 100 Times, Then Tried to Steal Baby from Womb,” reported People magazine; “Neurologist: Taylor Parker’s Brain Is ‘Broken;’ Defense Rests,” offered the local NBC affiliate KTAL News. Body-cam clips of Parker’s interactions with police spread on YouTube and TikTok. The coverage inspired Maternal Instinct and sets its tone; Dimmock told me that much of her team’s preliminary research into Parker’s case came from the news articles and video clips disseminated online.
Maternal Instinct includes interviews with Parker’s former friends and acquaintances, who describe the broad scope of Parker’s lies over the years, including her many allegedly fictitious ailments and her claims that she was due to receive a multimillion-dollar inheritance from her oil-baron grandparents, who were, in reality, of no particular means. To maintain her deceptions about the pregnancy and other matters, Parker owned multiple cellphones for sending fraudulent messages, fabricated official letters, and used voice-altering software to place anonymous calls.
Randi Chavez, an investigator brought on by Parker’s attorneys, met with Parker for hundreds of hours over the course of a year. Chavez retained experts to assess Parker’s mental and neurological health, and she interviewed people who knew her, including relatives and fellow prisoners. What she discovered was that Parker had displayed symptoms of profound mental illness for many years.
To stipulate that Parker’s mental illness played a significant role in her ghastly crimes is not to suggest that she should have been found either incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity, both of which are exceedingly rare outcomes. Her defense instead presented evidence of her mental illness as a factor that ought to have spared her from the death penalty, but not from punishment altogether. (The American Psychiatric Association, the American Bar Association, and other professional groups have called for a ban on the death penalty for those with severe mental illness.) Yet like Parker’s jury, Maternal Instinct does not take Parker to be seriously mentally ill.
At Parker’s trial, the prosecution called upon the forensic psychiatrist Michael Arambula to testify that Parker showed signs of borderline personality disorder, a condition marked by intense mood swings, unstable relationships, impulsivity, fear of abandonment, and feelings of emptiness. But Arambula’s testimony undermined the seriousness of the illness by likening it to intentionally malicious behavior. Borderline personality disorder, he told the jury, is “probably the most manipulative of the personality types.” Parker, he said, had a “pleasant and engaging demeanor atop a core of rage.” He denied that mental illness had contributed to Parker’s murders, insisting to the jury that the uncommon brutality of her crimes did not mean that she was delusional. Members of Simmons-Hancock’s family have likewise adamantly maintained that Parker is “evil” rather than “crazy.”
But Arambula delivered his testimony without ever meeting or interviewing Parker. He drew his conclusions from a review of Parker’s medical records. The defense’s mental-health experts, who’d actually met Parker, came to very different conclusions.
At trial, the defense called a psychiatrist, a neurologist, and a social worker, all of whom confirmed that Parker suffered from a personality disorder that was exacerbated by a personal history of trauma and abuse. They found that Parker’s teenage mother had been negligent, disengaged, and hostile to her daughter before abandoning the family when Parker was a teenager. Her father, meanwhile, had abused methamphetamines, and when Parker was 12, he’d taken her to a house frequented by drug users, where, she said, a man raped her. Maternal Instinct neither reported nor probed those allegations.
After Parker’s conviction, lawyers working on her appeals invited more experts to expand this evidence. Nicole Anders, a clinical psychologist for the defense who met with Parker in January 2025, confirmed that Parker displayed traits associated with borderline personality disorder and argued that this condition—which Anders discussed in the context of Parker’s history of trauma and abuse—significantly altered her ability to reason or function. In a declaration submitted to the court, Anders stated that the trauma and sexual abuse Parker endured as a child had left her hypervigilant, prone to delusion, and desperate for emotional connection. “Although these coping strategies may be maladaptive in the long term,” Anders wrote in her clinical report, “they are rooted in survival instincts. When safe, consistent caregiving is absent or unpredictable early in life, the nervous system adapts to prioritize protection over connection or reason.”
Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, told me that personality disorders form when a patient’s ways of coping with traumatic experiences become deeply ingrained. “We all develop some kind of psychological armor,” Malkin said, which “are just ways of protecting ourselves in vulnerable moments when we’re ashamed, when we fear rejection, when we’re sad and helpless.” For Parker, coping with her mother’s rejection, her father’s destructive irresponsibility, and her own desolate loneliness meant developing delusional fantasies and resorting to extreme people-pleasing behavior. Winning the affection of others sometimes meant lying to them about what she had to offer. Borderline patients, Malkin said, “are people who live on the edge of neurosis and psychosis,” meaning that they alternate between struggling to solve everyday problems and losing touch with reality altogether.
According to experts who spoke with Parker during and after her trial, those delusions centered on her fertility. In 2014, six years before the murders, Parker sought a routine tubal ligation to prevent further pregnancies, but the procedure failed. When a gynecologist confirmed to Parker a year later that she was pregnant, Parker was relieved. She concluded that it was a sign from God that she was meant to have another child. But during a subsequent surgery to remove a cyst on her right ovary, her doctor discovered that the pregnancy was ectopic and developing in her left fallopian tube. While Parker was still under anesthesia, her surgical team procured consent from her then-husband to undertake a total abdominal hysterectomy, removing Parker’s fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, and right ovary. Although Maternal Instinct notes that Parker’s hysterectomy left her unable to have children, the film neglects to mention how it happened or how she felt about it.
Parker was shattered when she awoke to find that she could no longer bear children. She confided in friends at the time and later told Diana Barnes, a women’s-mental-health expert brought in by her defense team, that she felt robbed of her identity and purpose in life. She became fixated on pregnancy and childbirth, took a job at a women’s health clinic to be near babies, spent her free time watching mothers and children at parks and stores, and desperately researched surrogacy and uterine transplants, even soliciting her mother for her uterus. As Parker’s obsession progressed, her marriage broke down, and her mental health unraveled. She told others that she had again become pregnant and miscarried, though that was not possible. She told Barnes that when she placed a mock pregnancy belly on her body in 2020, she felt as though it were really her flesh.
Parker was clearly unwell in the months and years leading up to the murders, a fact that Maternal Instinct elides. The documentary suggests that Parker’s crimes were carefully calculated out of selfishness and deceit: A malevolent young woman conspired to entrap her boyfriend with a fake pregnancy and needed a newborn to pull off the plot, so she brutally murdered a friend and stole her baby. But that version of events raises questions that can be answered only by Parker’s mental illness: Why was her desire for love and acceptance so overwhelming that it curdled into criminality? What made the prospect of having a baby with her boyfriend seem worth killing for? Suggesting that Parker’s evil nature alone explains her many schemes and lies is both reductive and unsatisfying.
The film does not explain how someone so adept at weaving elaborate falsehoods might fail to anticipate that staff at the hospital where she arrived with Simmons-Hancock’s baby would also inquire into her own condition. People who had doubted her pregnancy were bound to notice that Simmons-Hancock’s murder and Parker’s “birth” had coincided. But Parker was not thinking clearly, and had not been for some time.
[Atlantic documentaries: America is obsessed with serial killers]
Murder is, after all, not a good idea. Some people commit murder without having thought it through at all, but that sort of crime does not make one eligible for the death penalty. Murders that are eligible for the death penalty involve some degree of premeditation and intent. The presence of planning is usually taken to be proof that a murderer had a sober appreciation for what they meant to do, but it also suggests that something was seriously wrong with their capacity to reason; otherwise, they would have come to the conclusion that, whatever their predicament, murder could only compound it. This does not seem to have occurred to Taylor Parker.
The origins of many murders eligible for the death penalty seem to lie less in deeply rooted inherent wickedness than in particularly compromised minds. Such nuance is usually absent from true-crime yarns, however, because acknowledging mental illness and other impairments complicates simplistic narratives. The genre captivates audiences by dramatizing the worst human behavior, but these stories almost always neglect to illuminate the whole truth, which is stranger and more tragic than what passes for good TV.
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