The Case Files: Taylor Rene Parker (Part 1)
A desperate web of lies, a faked pregnancy, a henious murder, and the woman who died fighting for her unborn baby.
Trigger warning: The crime scene details in this story are graphic and very disturbing. Investigators involved called it one of the worst they’ve ever seen. Please read at your own discretion. I kept most of the gory details in the first section, and there are no crime scene photos in this article.
“Someone killed my baby! Someone killed my baby!”
Jessica Brookes’s hysterical screams when officers from the New Boston Police Department (NBPD) arrived at her daughter’s home must have been harrowing enough to make their blood run cold. At approximately 10:18 AM on October 9, 2020, a dispatcher in New Boston, Texas received the gutted mother’s heartwrenching call. The criminal affidavit states that officers went to 200 Austin Street and met Jessica. She was screaming over and over.
“Someone killed my baby!”
Jessica had been at work when she got a call from her daughter’s husband, concerned that he couldn’t get a hold of his wife. Jessica assured him she’d go check on her at home. On the way, she stopped at her granddaughter’s daycare to see if she was there. Fear and dread overtook Jessica when the daycare worker said “Kynlee’s not here.”
She continued on to her daughter, Reagan’s, house, and contemplated calling the cops. Jessica called her husband, Marcus. He told her to go to Reagan’s house and at least see if her car was there.
Alarm set in when she pulled up and saw the garage door open. It was never simply left open. When she got out of her car, she spotted streaks of blood on the driveway. She tried convincing herself the streaks were from the dogs cutting their paws, that it happened often. It became harder to remain convinced as more blood streaks led up the driveway into the garage.
“There’s a bloody fingerprint on my baby’s doorknob,” Jessica later recalled during the trial. “So I take my work shirt because I knew something was wrong, and I turned the doorknob, and the door opened just enough I could see a bloody shoeprint on the kitchen floor.”
In shock, she backed out of the door.
“If my baby’s in there and she’s hurt, I’ve gotta get to her,” she said, describing how she opened the door and entered the home. Her worst fears had come true.
Reagan lay on the floor, face down, with an arm over her head, her blond hair stained crimson. The usually clean and well-cared for home was in a bloody disarray.
“I knew she was gone, but I said, ‘Reagan! Reagan! It’s Momma! Talk to me, please!’ She didn’t answer,” Jessica explained.
She was surrounded by the eerie silence of the home, the blood-drenched scene, and her daughter’s lifeless body. The devastated mother fell to her knees, then called 911.
“I said, ‘Somebody’s murdered my baby! She’s dead! There’s blood everywhere! Somebody needs to come!’”
Marcus and his best friend, Chris Hughes, arrived at the scene. Jessica tried to stop Marcus from going inside, not wanting him to see their beloved daughter in that state, but he rushed inside anyway. When he emerged outside, he had a hand over his mouth, asking, “Why? Why?”
He collapsed in the driveway and began having chest pains.
Marcus, on the stand, relived wondering where Kynlee, Reagan’s three-year-old daughter, was, but neither he nor his wife could bring themselves to enter the home again, terrified of what they would find if they did. Chris went around the house to find the front door locked. Marcus began yelling from around the back: “She’s in there! She’s in there!”
Kynlee finally responded in a faint voice to Marcus calling out for her. But something inside of him still couldn’t bear to cross that horrific living room, to step over or around his daughter’s body.
So, Chris did it for him. He made his way through the pools of blood, calling for the toddler down the hall and in each room he looked, until he reached the back bedroom. Kynlee hid beneath a blanket, frightened. Her terrified eyes took a moment to recognize Chris. Upon seeing a familiar face, Kynlee stood up on the bed, jumped to floor, and ran into his arms. He picked her up and covered her head with the blanket so she wouldn’t have to see the scene, carrying her out the front door.
Reagan’s husband, Homer, arrived soon after. After struggling to keep him from going inside, he finally relented and stayed outside until police arrived.
Body camera footage showed officers entering the home to find a white female on the living room floor, face down in a large pool of blood. Crimson stains were found on the floor, furniture, walls, appliances, and other areas. A happy home had become a house of terrors.
Below a series of ultrasound photos on the fridge, investigators found a bloody hair print. A child’s bathing suit, soaked in blood, lay on the living room floor, potentially used to wipe something off, detectives thought. A used diaper sat atop a pool of blood in the living room on the floor next to the couch. Texarkana Texas Police Department crime scene investigator Marc Sillivan stated during the trial he didn’t think it wound up there until after the murder.
A huge blood stain mixed with what appeared to be clumps of Reagan’s hair on the edge of the couch. Investigators surmised her head may have been against the couch at some point during the murder. Bodily fluid soaked into the couch.
Also on the living room floor was a blanket, soaked in blood and what investigators believe was amniotic fluid.
A four-pound jar from the Hancocks’ wedding, filled with blue and pink sand, lay on the living floor, covered in blood as though used as a bludgeoning weapon. Investigators believe it was the weapon used to cause the fracture to Reagan’s skull, based on the semi-circular indentation to her left temple which matched the bottom of the jar in shape and size.
In the dining room, investigators found another jar on the floor, also from the wedding, smeared with blood.
Bloody swipes covered the front door, along with more blood-soaked hair smears, indicating that someone had been pushed up against the door during the altercation, and slid left then to the floor.
The wall around the woman’s body showed significant blood spatter to reveal a severe beating had taken place. She had fought for her life in her own home, where she was supposed to be safe.
Extensive defensive wounds covered her hands, including bruises, scrapes, stab wounds, and cuts to her palms and fingers. One finger had nearly been cut off while another was dislocated.
Two distinct set of prints were found throughout the crime scene, both shoe prints from shoes Reagan didn’t own. In the kitchen and hallway bathroom, watery blood stains covered the sink as though someone tried to wash up after the horrific deed. Whoever did this had walked through the bloody pools a lot, from the blanket on the floor and around the victim’s body.
Fingerprints found at the scene were deemed clear enough to be of use.
Reagan Michelle Simmons (aka Hancock) was identified as the victim, but officers learned she wasn’t the only one: Reagan was 34 weeks pregnant. They requested EMS to attend the scene to check on the baby.
The scene was grim. When EMS personnel rolled Reagan over, they discovered a massive slice across her abdomen, cut open from hip-to-hip. Her uterus had been removed and sliced open. Much to their horror, her unborn baby was gone.
The woman who didn’t give birth
About 15 minutes away at 9:37 AM, about an hour and ten minutes earlier in Dekalb, State Trooper Lee Shavers pulled over a Toyota Corolla. When he approached the vehicle, the woman driving had an infant in her lap. The affidavit states that he observed an umbilical cord still connected to the infant which seemed to come from the woman’s pants, as if she had just given birth. Shavers told Texas Ranger Joshua S. Mason, named on the affidavit, that the driver, Taylor Rene Parker, was performing CPR on the infant. EMS attended the scene to transport Parker and the baby to the hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma.
Texas Ranger Stacey McNeal searched Taylor’s car and home after the ambulance left. He found a loaded Taurus Judge revolver holstered in the passenger seat, which had five rounds in the chamber. There were no other weapons found in the car.
But he did find a blood-stained blanket and pillow in the passenger seat, pajama pants, a paper bag from McDonald’s, and more items which had blood on them. Bloodied paperwork sat on the dashboard, and he noted blood on the driver’s seat and center console.
McNeal also discovered a diaper bag that had some blood stains. Within it, he found clothes for a newborn baby, some which still had tags, diapers, and baby blankets.
Meanwhile, LifeNet EMT Kelly Gerald tended to Taylor and the baby in the ambulance. Her vitals were normal, and he saw no evidence of hemorrhaging. He later recalled that he believed her claim that she’d just gone through the trauma of giving birth and might have been losing her baby. Kelly had lost a child himself, so he empathized with the woman.
LifeNet EMT Paramedic Elton Crossland also recalled that Parker told him she had been driving down the road when her water broke and she claimed the baby “just came out.”
But Elton had his reservations. Blood and amniotic fluid make for a messy event. The amniotic fluid on the baby was dried and flaky, which indicated it had not just been born, at least not as recently as Taylor claimed. The umbilical cord’s condition also indicated that some time had passed since the baby had been born.
“To us, it was obvious that the baby was not born in that car,” he said during the trial.
The infant had no heartbeat and no breath when they arrived at the scene. After getting her into the ambulance and giving her epinephrine, intubating her, and keeping up with CPR while helping her breathe with a bag mask, they got her heartbeat back. Elton said they were relieved to have potentially saved the child.
Idabel Police Department Det. Johnny Voss also visited the hospital to figure out what was going on with this mysterious woman from the traffic stop and the baby. The nurse cried as she let him into locked ward, and led him to the infant, hooked up to machines despite the fact she showed only the faintest signs of life. He gazed at the faint heartbeat on the monitor while the nurse held the baby girl’s hand.
“It’d beep, and then it’d flatline, and it’d beep,” Voss said later at the trial.
“I said, ‘If this baby’s still alive? Why are we here? Why is this baby not being flown to another hospital?’” he recalled, adding that doctors determined she wouldn’t survive a flight to another hospital.
“What are we supposed to do?” he asked in anger and confusion.
“Nothing,” replied the tearful nurse.
Voss had to leave the room at that realization. Despite it all, the baby was pronounced dead later at the hospital. The nurse had stayed with the infant so she didn’t die all alone.
Hospital staff returned a baffling observation to Trooper Shavers: Parker had not given birth to the baby with which she was found. Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Chad Dansby responded. Taylor admitted to him that she had gotten into a “physical altercation” with Reagan and had abducted the baby.
Mason interviewed Wade Griffin, Taylor’s boyfriend, who informed Mason that Parker told him and the people around them that she was pregnant. Griffin added that Parker was supposed to pre-register with the Idabel hospital to be induced for the baby’s birth on Oct. 9, 2020, and that he was supposed to meet her there at about lunch time for the event. They’d even held a gender reveal party to celebrate the coming child.
When Mason interviewed Parker, however, she admitted the truth: her pregnancy had been a lie. There was no baby. No date to be induced. No gender to reveal. She’d carried on a faked pregnancy in front of Wade and their families. She told Mason that during the altercation with Reagan, she’d used a scalpel to remove the infant from the woman’s womb and abduct it to complete the illusion she’d paraded before the world.
McNeal went to the crime scene on Austin Street to confirm Taylor’s story. He also searched the home she shared with Wade. Photos show a small cabin which was set up as a small home for someone expecting a baby and already had a young daughter. A baby swing sat in the living room, and a crib and baby clothing were set up in the bedroom. The loft had been furnished and decorated to host a children’s play area.
Wade’s F-350 super-duty pickup truck was also included in the search warrant. In it was a carseat for a newborn. But McNeal found nothing related to the murder, nor any apparent weapons in the truck or the house.
During the autopsy, a scalpel was found lodged in the back of Reagan’s neck, a detail not seen at the crime scene. Dallas County Medical Examiner Dr. Melinda Flores also found more extensive cuts, scrapes, bruises, and blunt force trauma Reagan suffered. Dr. Flores found over 100 stab and slash wounds on Reagan’s body, including 39 on her scalp. She had also been slashed several times around her neck.
Reagan had a broken nose and five skull fractures, which indicated five separate blows at least to the head. Dr. Flores surmised that the blows were from both the flat end and the claw end of a hammer, while other blows were consistent with the wedding jar. The medical examiner couldn’t rule out the possibility of ligature strangulation, but couldn’t be positive due to the damage to Reagan’s neck. She ruled the death a homicide.
This had been more than an “altercation.” It was a mortifying murder that shocked the nation. One woman celebrated the coming of her child, while another faked a pregnancy, eying up Reagan and her unborn baby to sadistically take as her own. Taylor had fallen so far into a complex web of lies that even the man who lived with her didn’t know up from down, or what the truth really was until it was far too late.
Reagan Hancock
A young mother’s death devastates friends and family
Reagan Michelle Simmons Hancock was born on Nov. 14, 1998 to parents Jessica and Marcus Brooks in Hope, Arkansas. Hope and love is what she would embody to her friends and family, as her obituary states she “had a beautiful soul and was a joy to all that knew her.”
Reagan married Homer Hancock in 2019, and had their daughter, Kynlee, who was three at the time of her mother’s death. Their second daughter was on the way, who they had named Braxlynn Sage.
“She was beautiful and the precious little sister to Kynlee and leaves behind a host of relatives,” the obituary says of the infant.
The mother-to-be was due on Nov. 10, 2020.
Reagan was a member of the J-C Cowboy Church in Lewisville, Arkansas, and worked as a Customer Service Representative for Flying Burger in Texarkansas, Texas. The obituary describes her as “an amazing wife, mommy, daughter, sister and friend.”
Jessica recalled that she and Reagan were close and talked daily. She revealed that Reagan had hired Taylor Parker to take her engagement and wedding photos. Jessica didn’t think Reagan and Taylor talked much again until Reagan announced her pregnancy, as she was contemplating having Taylor do a pregnancy photo session, too. But Taylor had told Reagan she had medical issues, preventing the session from ever happening.
However, Taylor and Reagan apparently got together on Oct. 7, which surprised Jessica, as she didn’t know her daughter to hang out with Taylor much.
“Our beautiful daughter Reagan Hancock and her precious unborn baby girl Braxlynn were murdered yesterday by Satan in the flesh,” Jessica posted to Facebook following the deaths.
“Our family, friends, & community are rocked to the core!” she added. “Our Reagan was one of the most precious people you would ever meet.”
Taylor Rene Parker
A history of lies webs into the perfect illusion doomed to shatter
Shonna Prior watched for years as her daughter pulled one manipulation after another blatantly over peoples’ eyes, especially when it came to Taylor’s medical issues.
As a student at Chapel Hill elementary school in Mount Pleasant, Taylor was active in basketball, baseball, and competition cheerleading. Shonna said Taylor was typical student who got good grades. But in the third grade, stomach issues plagued her daughter.
“Come to find out she had a teacher that was not giving her any feedback and her stomach was in knots,” Shonna testified during the trial. “The teacher didn’t give us a lot of feedback, either. I was digging into what the problem was, and Taylor would just say, ‘My stomach hurts, I can’t go to school today.’”
Shonna added that Taylor seemed to be fine when she started fourth grade the next year.
Taylor was 12 when her parents split up in 2005. Shonna and Taylor’s father, Morton, initially tried maintaining custody by switching out of the house while the kids remained at home, but it caused issues. Shonna claimed Morton would refuse to leave and they’d end up fighting in front of the kids.
Zachery, Taylor’s brother, testified at Taylor’s trial about how Morton allegedly took him to a drug house, though he said at the time, as a kid, he didn’t realize what it was. He didn’t recall Taylor ever being there, but admitted that Morton often used the kids as pawns in the divorce. Morton often put himself before his children; a pattern Zachery said he now recognizes in Taylor.
Taylor and her brother, Zachery, would often go to their grandmother’s house when it was Shonna’s turn to have them, but she never forced them to stay if they didn’t want to. Taylor tended to spend more time at her father’s, while Zachery often stayed with his mother. Morton eventually moved in with his mother, Peggy, and Taylor went with him.
“She was a heavyset lady. She used food as comfort,” Shonna said of Peggy during the trial. “She tried to comfort Taylor in the same manner, and she just – she gained a lot of weight. She’s 13, and she gained it really quick.”
At 14, Taylor weighed about 250 pounds as she entered high school.
“She didn’t want to be that heavy…She wanted to be skinny like the rest of her friends and she just couldn’t,” Shonna stated.
Taylor wouldn’t finish high school. She got pregnant at 17 and dropped out before giving birth to a baby girl. The baby’s father wasn’t involved in their lives. Shonna only met the father, Donald Whiteside Jr, once in 2009 but said she doesn’t recall him and Taylor having much of a relationship prior to the pregnancy. He allegedly jumped jobs often to avoid having his wages garnished so he wouldn’t have to pay the court-ordered child support for his daughter.
Shonna also discussed how her sister, Taylor’s Aunt Katie, took her to Tijuana for gastric bypass surgery in October 2014. Taylor’s primary doctor told them that Taylor’s weight was beginning to cause heart problems.
“She was overweight,” Shona told the court. “She was having little TIAs, like a little mini, and that she needed to drop weight and drop all of the weight. And I believe at that time, she weighed about 300 when all of those issues started coming up.”
Taylor eventually married Tommy Wacasey, and they had a son in 2014. After the baby’s birth, Taylor opted for a tubal litigation, but Shonna didn’t know about it until years later.
In August 2015, Taylor had to have surgery to find out the reason she was having pelvic pains and bleeding. While she was under anesthesia, the doctor approached Shonna and Tommy with a difficult decision Taylor couldn’t make while under the drugs. It was endometriosis and Taylor also had an ectopic pregnancy, the doctor said. A hysterectomy was the recommendation once the doctor got in to see the damage.
Shonna said the doctor described scar tissue, webbing, and “something about the gastric sleeve.” When the doctor gave them a couple of options, Shonna told her to do what she had to do. Tommy expressed concern that Taylor would be upset by the hysterectomy, but Shonna stood her ground.
“At that point, that wasn’t my concern. My concern was for the physician to do whatever she thought was necessary. And that’s what I told her to do – whatever she would do with a family member,” Shonna said.
“I don’t think she was upset until after they got home,” Shonna added. “She expressed a little bit of anger about having a hysterectomy. I think she was planning on having more children.”
However, Shonna told Taylor’s defense attorney she didn’t think it changed her relationship with her daughter. But at one point, Taylor asked if she could have Shonna’s uterus, allegedly in the form of a text message, according to court documents.
“Can I have your uterus?” Taylor said in the message.
“WTF why!” Shonna responded. “Do you think its detachable???”
“Well it would be a hyst for you. No more period etc. Slovack would take it from you. And yes it’s detachable. Cut here snip there! Same thing y’all did to mine. Lol,” Taylor told her.
Taylor conveniently never told her mother about the tubal litigation in 2014, or about her search for surrogates. She simply blamed her mother solely for the hysterectomy.
It seemingly wouldn’t be the end of Taylor’s medical problems.
Around Thanksgiving 2015, Shonna told the court that it was the start of Taylor’s stroke-like symptoms. Taylor called her mother and told her she had woken up at 4 a.m. one day with a headache and saw stars. Later that day, at church, Taylor’s grandmother remarked that Taylor’s face looked different.
“They thought she was having a stroke. One eye was drooping, heavy,” Shonna said.
Taylor initially said she would run some errands then take a nap, but it got so bad, she went to the ER. She was originally admitted into the ICU at Titus Regional Medical Center, then spent two weeks at a hospital in Tyler. However, doctors found no signs of a stroke, and diagnosed her with complicated migraines.
“Sure did look like a stroke, though,” Shonna remarked, adding that Taylor’s face was also droopy.
Shonna told the court that Taylor had to learn how to walk again, couldn’t stand up, needed help to shower, had to learn how to talk again, and that she had vision problems after.
“First, the color went out, and she could see gray. The neurologist was – I want to say she was looking for what caused that, but they really couldn’t tell us what caused that. They really didn’t do any extensive eye testing until they referred her,” Shonna said.
After being discharged from the hospital, Shonna stayed at Tommy and Taylor’s for a few weeks, but told Taylor’s defense attorney she never felt played throughout that ordeal.
Mount Pleasant neurologist doctor Dr. Saud Kahn was the next medical professional to assess Taylor’s baffling condition. He referred Taylor and her mother to a Dallas neurologist out of concern that a possible spot on an MRI could maybe have been the development of multiple sclerosis. Shonna added that it was Dr. Khan who called it a possibility, not Taylor.
“He is the one who put the idea in our family’s head because we were searching for an answer, wanting to know why her right side wasn’t working,” Shonna said.
Former friend called Taylor’s potential MS diagnosis a “good little attention-getter.”
In May 2016, a friend introduced Taylor to woman named Caitlyn Glass, who had just been diagnosed with MS. They formed a small support group with another friend and MS patient. The trio got matching tattoos of the Celtic symbol to represent new beginnings.
Caitlyn, in her testimony at the trial, said she and Taylor had different symptoms, but Caitlyn had recently been diagnosed and she still had a limited understanding of the disease. Caitlyn experienced vision problems, numbness and tingling, and couldn’t walk sometimes. Taylor’s symptoms seemed genuine, so Caitlyn didn’t doubt her new friend.
But one pattern became too obvious to ignore. When Caitlyn would be admitted into the hospital, Taylor would come visit, then be admitted to the hospital herself for a supposed MS flare-up.
“All the times I was in the hospital, I look back on our experiences, and it made no sense she was there for what she was saying she was there for,” Caitlyn told the court. “It was a good little attention-getter for her, in my opinion.”
Taylor went as far as to be present when doctors discussed Caitlyn’s treatment and care. She even attended some of Caitlyn’s doctor’s appointments with her, and then started seeing the same doctor who diagnosed Caitlyn.
Caitlyn revealed that Taylor stopped seeing Dr Khan.
“He did believe with the migraines but did not believe she had MS at all and did not want to treat her for it,” Caitlyn said.
Taylor told Caitlyn about former hospital admittances and about the supposed stroke she’d had. Like Taylor, Caitlyn also had to learn how to walk again, but that was from her MS, not a stroke.
This pattern was only the beginning of a string of inconsistencies Caitlyn noticed in her new friend. She said that when her MS flared up, she would end up in the hospital, be on an IV of steroids for a few days, and have a series of scans done.
But doctors had given Taylor a Stradol nose spray, which is a synthetic opioid painkiller for migraines. Caitlyn explained that Taylor was never admitted to the hospital for MS symptoms, but released with instructions to manage pain.
“Looking back, it’s kind of crazy because she used it a lot. She’d go through those bottles pretty quick. I don’t even take pain meds, narcotics, like that,” Caitlyn said.
The friendship further fell apart when Taylor joined the same Jeep club Caitlyn was part of. Taylor, still married to Tommy, convinced her husband to buy a Jeep they couldn’t afford. Tommy would testify that he took on the debt to make his wife happy.
Caitlyn told the court that she was living with her mother with her kids, and Taylor would often come to the house. On Caitlyn’s days off and even on days before she went to work, Taylor would show up. Taylor wore out her welcome quickly, especially when Caitlyn’s daughters, younger than Taylor’s girls, informed their mother that Taylor’s daughter was trying to pit the kids against each other.
Caitlyn’s daughters no longer wished to play with Taylor’s kids. Still, they were coming over a lot. Too much.
“She would pawn her kids off on my mom multiple times,” Caitlyn said.
The troubling behaviors of mother and daughter appeared to stem from what Taylor painted as a marriage in shambles. Taylor seemed to use it as an excuse to flirt with other men in the Jeep club. She didn’t stop there.
“She was acting a lot like that her marriage was falling apart, so it was almost like her flirting was okay,” Caitlyn said, adding that Taylor was “full of herself” after her plastic surgery.
“She was very superficial,” Caitlyn testified.
On some of the club’s outings, Taylor would blatantly cheat on Tommy. One woman caught Taylor with her husband. On a camping weekend, Taylor spent the night in the tent of another member.
Caitlyn’s breaking point was watching her close friend and Taylor indulge in an affair. She called Taylor out on it. Taylor declared that Tommy was abusive, but Caitlyn claimed that Taylor would throw herself into walls or furniture just to bruise herself to keep up the facade. Club members never bought the ruse.
The friendship finally fell apart for good when, as Caitlyn described, Taylor “faked a big fight with Tommy and ran off to El Dorado to this other man’s house and stayed the weekend.”
When that friendship ended, however, Caitlyn and her husband took time to get to know Tommy, and said they remain friends.
Caitlyn also learned just how deep Taylor’s lies ran. Taylor at one point told Caitlyn that her daughter’s father died in a car crash, but this lie was exposed by the mother of Taylor’s new boyfriend. It didn’t take long for Taylor to pull Hunter Parker into her grasp after splitting up with Tommy.
Despite the friendship being over, Taylor continued to construct stories about her own life which mirrored true events in Caitlyn’s past. Taylor suddenly claimed a deeper meaning to the matching feather tattoos the two had gotten as friends on their collarbones when she began telling people that the ink was something to do with a car wreck she had been in. Caitlyn claimed it was simply a cool design.
Caitlyn had, however, been in a terrible car accident and suffered muscle damage to her arm; a story Taylor had taken on as her own.
On social media, Taylor began portraying herself as a medical school student without ever saying it outright.
“A lot of it was putting it out there and letting people assume. It was attention grabbers. She never flat out said she was a nurse,” Caitlyn said.
The one truth Taylor did tell Caitlyn, though, was that she’d had a hysterectomy. So by the time Taylor announced she was pregnant, Caitlyn knew it was yet another falsity. Taylor had repeatedly blamed Tommy for the hysterectomy yet didn’t even mention the tubal litigation she willingly underwent in 2014. But Caitlyn, a nurse, knew the odds of her former friend actually conceiving.
“I’m not an idiot,” Caitlyn said in court, going on to describe Taylor as “a very good con artist, really. Very, very believable. As friends as long as we did, you start catching on to all her lies, and that’s why our relationship started to fall apart.”
“She’d get mad and try to sway the conversation as much as she could so that we didn’t talk about it,” Caitlyn added. “Or when we did, it was always about how it was somebody else’s fault.”
The pattern of behavior that would eventually lead Taylor to a heinous murder had been set. Next time, we’ll delve into how she took her second husband for a ride, and then escalated even further with the boyfriend who followed after. It wouldn’t be long before she took him on the emotional, mental, and financial rollercoaster of his life. She reeled him in like a fish, then plunged him deep into shadowy waters before pulling him out repeatedly until he didn’t know if he was drowning or breathing from one moment to another.
She did it to everyone around her. Not everyone believed her lies, but many remained silent and let it play out until it was to late, until she had already gone too far and shed blood for the sake of keeping alive the lies she had been telling.
Maybe she desperately wanted it to be real. The money, the baby, the life she promised the man who would come to find the woman he loved was a manipulative and pathological liar.
Maybe she needed it to be real, like the way weight loss and plastic surgery gave her the appearance of beauty and yet didn’t fill whatever voids she felt were in her life.
Maybe the web simply became too much and she didn’t know how to get out but to keep going, to do anything to make sure it still seemed real. Yet it was an innocent woman and an unborn baby who would pay the ultimate price for one woman’s elaborate deceptions.
Sources
KTAL
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/taylor-parker-trial/taylor-parker-trial-testimony-reveals-cruel-details-in-babys-death/?ipid=promo-link-block2
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/taylor-parker-trial/ex-boyfriend-takes-stand-in-taylor-parker-capital-murder-trial/
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/taylor-parker-trial/testimony-taylor-parker-shopped-doctors-for-faked-illnesses/?ipid=promo-link-block5
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/taylor-parker-trial/former-friend-testifies-in-taylor-parker-trial/
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/taylor-parker-trial/state-rests-in-taylor-parker-capital-murder-sentencing-trial/
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/taylor-parker-trial/taylor-parkers-mother-we-figured-the-lie-would-be-exposed/
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/graphic-testimony-in-taylor-parker-capital-murder-trial-details-brutal-violent-attack/
https://www.ktalnews.com/news/crime/taylor-parker-trial/taylor-parker-trial-mother-recounts-finding-reagan-hancocks-body/
KSLA (Parker’s life before 2020)
Https://www.ksla.com/2022/10/18/prosecution-looks-into-parkers-life-before-murder/
Reagan and Braxlynn’s obituary
https://www.texarkanafuneralhome.com/obituary/reagan-braxlynn-hancock