JUST IN: Taylor Parker’s Execution Date — What Maternal Instinct Didn’t Tell You | Texas Death Row

JUST IN: Taylor Parker’s Execution Date — What Maternal Instinct Didn’t Tell You | Texas Death Row

So, so what happened this morning? Did you just go into labor on the side of the road or something? >> No, man. My I was supposed to ride with my fiance and we we sell uh we own a whole bind facility and we were going to come through here, but I was having contractions and stuff and wasn’t feeling good.

So, I stayed at home and told him we would just meet here after he dropped the hogs at 7:00. and he got tied up. I mean, he’s on his way. >> October 9th, 2020, just [music] after dark near DeCalb, Texas, a state trooper lights cut through [music] the night behind a car weaving along a rural highway. Inside, a woman is screaming into her phone.

>> 911, what’s your emergency? >> I need an ambulance cuz I started having my baby. >> She tells the dispatcher she’s just given birth. In the car on the side of the road, she says she needs help now. [music] The trooper pulls her over. In her arms is a newborn baby. Her name is Taylor Renee Parker.

[music] She’s 27 years old. And right now, she is utterly convincing. There’s no blood, no hospital bracelet, no paperwork, just a frightened young mother and a baby that by every account she’s giving [music] was born minutes ago on the shoulder of a Texas back road. The trooper has no reason to doubt her. He escorts her toward the nearest [music] hospital across the state line in Idible, Oklahoma.

But within hours, doctors examining her would discover something that didn’t make sense. [music] >> She was carrying the baby in her lap. Doesn’t look like she had a baby. >> It doesn’t. >> No. >> She No. >> I don’t know what anybody wants me to talk about. >> Where’d this baby come from? >> It’s mine. >> Taylor Parker had not given birth.

Not that night. Not ever again. Not for five years. So, whose baby was she holding? Welcome to the last sentence. And this is our case of the day. Before we get into it, make sure you’re subscribed and drop a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. We’ve got viewers in every corner of the globe following these cases with us.

And I want to know who’s here for this one. Now, let’s get into it. To understand how Taylor Parker ended up on that roadside holding a baby that wasn’t hers, we have to go back further than most people realize. Taylor Renee Parker had already lived through more upheaval than most people experience in a lifetime.

She’d had her first child at 17. A second child, a son, followed during her first marriage. That marriage ended in divorce in 2017. But the real turning point according to her own brother’s later courtroom testimony came 3 years earlier in 2014 [music] when Parker underwent gastric bypass surgery. He would tell the court that something in her changed after that.

That same year she also had a tubal liation and in 2015 following complications from a failed procedure and an ectopic [music] pregnancy doctors performed a hyctomy. Taylor Parker would never be able to carry a child again. She remarried in 2018. [music] That marriage too ended in divorce by 2019.

Then in July of 2019 at a rodeo in Texas, she met a man named Wade Griffin. He worked as a roofing company supervisor out of Dangerfield and took on side jobs welding, managing livestock, and trapping hogs. The two started talking through social media, then meeting for dinners, then meeting each other’s families. Griffin would later describe the relationship as an emotional roller coaster.

Almost from the beginning, Parker began weaving a financial fiction around herself. She told Griffin she was due to inherit millions of dollars from a wealthy relative. She produced documents and checks to prove it. At one point, the two walked out of a dealership with a $63,000 tractor paid for with what turned out to be a fraudulent cashier’s check.

The tractor was later repossessed. She told Griffin she wanted to clear and fence a piece of family land, hired one of his friends for the job, paid him out of her own pocket for a single check, [music] and then claimed her mother had shut the whole project down. Griffin was left to cover what she couldn’t.

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And in January of 2020, [music] she told him she was pregnant. What followed was not a single lie, but a sustained architecture of deception. Investigators would later determine Parker had created entire fictional people to support her story, including a fabricated version of her own mother, a woman named Shona, complete with a fake phone number and email account used to send messages to Griffin as if from someone else entirely.

She faked a pregnant belly. She produced ultrasound images. She held a full gender reveal party attended by her own children and her father surrounded by people who had no reason to doubt what they were celebrating. She wasn’t unwatched. Dr. Christopher Mason, the OBGAN who had performed her tubal liation years earlier and who knew about her hysterctomy, came across her pregnancy posts on social media and recognized an ultrasound image that appeared to have come directly from his own office.

He knew it wasn’t possible, but bound by patient privacy law, he couldn’t say so publicly. What he could do was quietly call the hospital and ask staff to take extra precautions with any newborns. Closer to home, Griffin’s own mother, Connie, had her doubts. She noticed her son didn’t have custody of his own son and wondered why someone so eager for a relationship hadn’t pressed harder on that.

As Parker’s claimed due date approached and there was still no baby, Connie pulled Wade aside and told him something was wrong. He brushed it off and went back to work. The most direct warning came from someone who knew the truth better than anyone. Tommy Walkasy, Parker’s husband from 2011 to 2018, heard from his son that Parker was telling people she was pregnant with a girl.

Knowing that was impossible, he downloaded an app to send a message from a spoofed phone number, not wanting Parker to know it came from him. On September 16th, 2020, he texted Wade Griffin directly. In 2015, Taylor had a hyctomy. She is not pregnant. She can’t get pregnant. She is a con artist and is lying to keep you around. Griffin believed the message had come from Parker’s own mother.

He showed it to Parker and rather than the lie collapsing there, Parker began searching for information on home births and for hospitals outside the local area, places where no one would already know her history. She had originally told Griffin she’d give birth by C-section or induction at Titus Regional Medical Center on October 5th.

That plan fell apart after a fire damaged Griffin’s home, and a bomb threat was called in at the hospital itself. Parker shifted the story again, telling Griffin she would instead deliver at McCerten Memorial Hospital in Idabal, Oklahoma on October 9th, 2020. That same period in a separate corner of her life, Parker was working as a wedding and engagement photographer.

One of her clients was a young woman named Reagan Michelle Simmons Hancock, born November 14th, 1998, who had hired Parker for her own wedding photos back in 2019. Reagan was genuinely pregnant, due with a daughter in November of 2020. By the time Parker’s manufactured due date had come and gone, with nothing to show for it, [music] the people around her had been asking pointed questions for weeks.

What investigators would later uncover in her internet search history makes clear she wasn’t looking for a way out of the lie. She was looking for a way to finish it. Searches for how to deliver a baby pre-term at 35 weeks. searches for how to convincingly fake a pregnancy through to the end. This wasn’t panic.

This was preparation. By October 9th, 2020, Taylor Parker had no baby, a deadline she could no longer move, a community of people who had already celebrated a child that didn’t exist, and a friend whose own pregnancy had quietly become the only real one in the room. If you want to see exactly how far this deception was about to go, make sure you’re subscribed because what happens next is where this story turns from a lie to something far darker.

The morning of October 9th, 2020 began for Wade Griffin the same way dozens of mornings before it had. Taylor Parker told him this was finally the day she’d be induced at McCurten Memorial Hospital, just across the state line in Idable, Oklahoma. But first, she asked him to take care of something for her. go sell the hogs.

She’d handled the hospital herself and let him know when to come. He agreed the same way he’d agreed to nearly everything for the better part of a year. What he didn’t know, and what cell phone records would later reveal to investigators, was that Parker hadn’t simply gone to handle an induction that morning.

She had been in the immediate area of Reagan Simmons Hancock’s home, not once, but twice in the same narrow window of time, somewhere between 6:30 and 8:00 in the morning on both October 8th and October 9th. To investigators, the first visit would come to look like exactly what it was, a trial run. Parker and Reagan’s connection stretched back to September of 2019 when Reagan hired her to photograph her wedding to her husband, Homer.

Over the following months, the two women built something that looked from the outside like an easy friendship. They’d even spent time together in person just 2 days before the murder on October 7th. A visit Reagan’s mother would later say struck her as unusual since the two women didn’t typically socialize outside of work.

By that October morning, Reagan Simmons Hancock was 35 weeks into her second pregnancy. She and Homer already had a toddler daughter, Kinley. For their second child, they’d settled on a name, Braxlin Sage Hancock. That morning, Reagan didn’t show up for work. She didn’t drop Kinley off at daycare. A neighbor noticed the family dog loose outside the house and reached out to Homer, who hadn’t been able to get Reagan on the phone all morning.

Worried, he called Reagan’s mother, Jessica, who told him she’d drive over and check. On her way, Jessica stopped at the daycare first, hoping for some simple explanation. Kinley wasn’t there. With dread building, she continued on to her daughter’s house. Reagan’s car was still in the driveway.

The garage door, which was never left open, was standing wide, [music] and on the ground near the entrance, Jessica found a bloody footprint. At approximately 10:18 [music] that morning, the New Boston Police Department received a 911 call. A woman’s voice screaming barely coherent. >> New Boston 911.

What’s your emergency? >> I need an ambulance. I started having my baby. >> Someone killed my baby. Officers arrived to find Jessica inconsolable. Inside the home, they found Reagan Simmons Hancock dead. Her three-year-old daughter, Kinley, had been in the house through the entire attack. She was later found safe, hiding in a back bedroom, physically unharmed.

What investigators reconstructed from the scene and what would later be laid out in court through expert testimony described a violent struggle that moved through several rooms of the home rather than staying contained to one location. Among the items recovered as evidence were a claw hammer and a heavy glass jar filled with sand from Reagan and Homer’s wedding and monogrammed with the initial H, which investigators believed had been used in the assault.

A scalpel brought to the scene rather than found there, was also recovered. Bowie County Medical Examiner Melinda Flores would later testify that Reagan’s death resulted from a combination of blunt force trauma and sharp force injuries. Dallas medical examiner Steven Hastings ruled the death of the infant removed from her mother’s body at the scene, a homicide as well, citing bruising on the umbilical cord consistent with the trauma of the extraction itself.

Parker left the home with the newborn and began driving toward Oklahoma. In a detail that would only make sense in hindsight, Wade Griffin’s mother, Connie, happened to stop by her son’s house that same day. Inside, she noticed a baby bouncer set up in the living room and in the bedroom, a crib already stocked with supplies topped with a large pink bow.

In that moment, she had no reason to suspect anything was wrong. She would later say she’d always assumed that if the pregnancy wasn’t real, it would simply end quietly with a fake miscarriage, nothing more. Hours later, she would learn what had actually happened that morning. Not long after leaving the scene on a rural stretch of road near Decalp, Texas, Parker was pulled over by a state trooper for driving erratically.

She told him she’d just given birth in the car and was desperately trying to get help. It was the same woman seen near the Hancock home that morning and the morning before. It was the same baby she’d been trying to produce for 9 months. And the story she told that trooper on the side of the road was the final layer of a lie that had already cost two people their lives.

In the days that followed, Reagan’s mother, Jessica, would post to Facebook, writing simply that her daughter and unborn granddaughter had been murdered and that the person responsible was, in her words, evil in human form. Once Taylor Parker arrived at McCurten Memorial Hospital in Idabal, Oklahoma, the story she’d spent 9 months building began to come apart within minutes.

Hospital staff later captured on body cam footage can be heard reacting in real time as the situation unfolded. “This is a big deal,” one of them says as a group of nurses gathered near the station, visibly unsettled. When law enforcement arrived and grew concerned Parker might attempt to leave, a staff member warned them she was refusing a basic medical exam, telling officers she’s in there, she refuses to have a check to see if she’s hemorrhaging.

It wasn’t hard to understand why she refused. An hCG test and an ultrasound confirmed what her own medical history already made impossible. There was no pregnancy. There was no uterus to examine in the first place. A physical exam ruled out any possibility that she had given birth that day or recently or ever again.

Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent Chad Dansby began interviewing her at the hospital. By the end of that same day, October 9th, 2020, Taylor Parker had been linked to the death of Reagan Simmons Hancock and her newborn daughter, and she was arrested. On October 16th, 2020, she was extradited back across the state line into Texas and booked into the B-state detention center, charged with capital murder, murder, and kidnapping.

On December 11th, a Bowie County grand jury formally indicted her. On January 22nd, 2021, Bowie County District Attorney Jerry Rashelle announced his office would seek the death penalty. And on March 4th, 2021, Parker was indicted a second time. This charge specifically for the death of Braxlin.

What followed over the next year and a half awaiting trial would become some of the most revealing material in the entire case, not for what it proved about the murder itself, but for what it proved about the woman who committed it. Held in administrative segregation at bystate, what’s commonly known as solitary confinement, Parker was supposed to spend 23 hours a day alone in her cell with limited contact with the general population.

According to prosecutors, she didn’t stay contained to that isolation in any meaningful sense. Court filings alleged she repeatedly disrupted jail operations, fabricating grievances, and a long list of medical conditions at various points, claiming cancer, multiple sclerosis, a stroke, and a rare blood clotting disorder.

She threatened lawsuits against members of the jail staff. She also, prosecutors say, found a way around paying for it. Rather than have her jail account garnished to cover the medical expenses she’d racked up, she allegedly arranged for her own mother to purchase commissary items under the names of other inmates, who would then quietly pass those items along to her.

By February of 2022, she still owed the county more than $2,000 in unpaid medical bills. Then, in April of that year, 18 months into her detention, a former friend named Sarah Connors received a strange notification. Someone in her contacts had just become active on social media. The account belonged to Taylor Parker, reactivated under her original username, the same one she’d used before the murders.

Connors had never been friends with her on the app to begin with. Throughout her time in custody, Parker, by her own admission, never stopped writing. Court documents describe her as an avid reader of murder mysteries with family members regularly mailing her books, building an extensive personal collection in her cell.

She wrote short stories about murder of her own. At one point, she wrote directly to the FBI, professing her innocence and offering to help the agency solve other crimes in what prosecutors characterized as an attempt to build goodwill ahead of her own sentencing. But the most serious allegation to emerge from this period was something far more calculated than jailhouse storytelling.

Prosecutors say Parker masterminded what they called a sophisticated scheme to frame a fellow inmate for the murder she herself had committed. The target was a woman named Hannah Hollander, described in court testimony as struggling with addiction and suicidal tendencies. Someone prosecutors say Parker identified as vulnerable enough to manipulate.

The plan centered on two fabricated confession letters written entirely by Parker, but designed to read as though they’d come from Hollander herself. In them, the so-called real killer described being part of a plan in which Parker claimed she’d been abducted from the side of the road on the morning of the murder, drugged, and driven to the Hancock home, where she remained unconscious in the backseat of Wade Griffin’s car while someone else carried out the killing.

The letters contain specific details about the crime, including aspects of Reagan’s injuries that had never been made public. The kind of detail prosecutors argued only the actual killer could have known. To make the plan work, Parker recruited help from inside the jail. A jail house girlfriend, Lana Addison, was brought in to serve as what Parker called her lead witness.

A trustee named Phyllis Dawson, who went by Granny, was given a confession letter to copy and distribute once she was released, along with planted details meant to support a story about mysterious witnesses who’d supposedly seen something suspicious near the scene. Investigators later determined that the fingerprints on the unopened confession letter belonged to only one person, Taylor Parker.

Among the evidence eventually presented in court was a handwritten prayer devotional in which Parker asked God directly to let the blame for the murders fall onto Hollander instead of her. At no point in those private writings, according to the detective who reviewed them, did Parker ever appear to question what had actually happened that day.

When details of the plot became public, Bowie County First Assistant District Attorney Kelly Crisp dismissed Parker’s underlying claims outright, calling them simply wild lies. Perhaps the most telling document to surface from this period wasn’t part of the framing scheme at all. It was a 13-page letter read by another inmate, Shaa Joerger, who served as a trustee at the jail.

Joerger testified that Parker gave her notes and letters meant to be passed along to other inmates, to her own defense attorney, and even to the district attorney’s office, each one professing her innocence. But Joerger noticed something troubling as she read through them. Parker’s account of what happened kept changing. In one version, she insisted she hadn’t done it at all.

In another, written in her own hand, she admitted that she had, but only she wrote to save the baby. The shift unsettled Joerger enough that she turned the letter over to law enforcement herself. By the time Taylor Parker’s case reached a Bowie County courtroom, the question facing the jury was no longer simply what had happened on October 9th, 2020.

It was who exactly they were dealing with. Long before a single witness took the stand, [music] Taylor Parker’s case had already triggered a fight over where the trial would even be held. In December of 2021, her defense team requested a change of venue, arguing that two years of intense local media coverage made a fair trial in Bowie County impossible.

The request was denied. Jury selection alone, complicated by the sheer saturation of coverage in a county of roughly 92,000 people, consumed most of the following summer. The trial finally opened on September 12th, 2022 before a Bowie County jury. In her opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Kelly Crisp laid out the state’s case methodically, walking the jury through the months Parker had spent faking a pregnancy she knew was medically impossible.

And the internet searches investigators had recovered, showing she’d researched both pre-term delivery and how to convincingly maintain the lie. What the jury would hear over the following weeks went even further than that. Prosecutors presented evidence that in the period leading up to the murder, Parker had also searched for information on vulnerable pregnant women in the local area, looking into maternity shops, pregnancy clinics, even specific license plate numbers.

She’d researched average fetal weight at 29 weeks. She’d looked into midwife reertification requirements and the laws governing private adoption. Taken together, prosecutors argued the pattern suggested something more calculated than simple desperation. It suggested Parker may have been positioning herself to get close to expectant mothers under the guise of a medical role, with Reagan Simmons Hancock ultimately becoming the target she didn’t need to manufacture because she already had access to her.

The defense, for its part, began building toward a mental health argument early, introducing evidence of brain atrophy and unspecified psychological disorders through their own experts. The state countered with its own psychologists who conducted formal psychopathy assessments and ultimately described Parker as exhibiting traits consistent with cluster B personality disorder, marked by extreme impulsivity, a lack of empathy, and a striking absence of remorse.

Crucially, the state’s experts ruled out schizophrenia and concluded Parker was not legally insane. Whatever was wrong with her, by every clinical account presented in that courtroom, she had known exactly what she was doing. The case against her extended even to the moment she was pulled over. Texas State Trooper Shavers, who stopped her near DeCalb, would later have his account directly contradicted by physical evidence.

Flight paramedic Elton Crosslin testified that during the 34-minute transport from Decal to Idible, he managed to revive the infant’s pulse to 60 beats per minute, even though she still wasn’t breathing on her own. Investigators also pointed to the condition of the amniotic fluid on the baby’s body, already dried and flaking, and the umbilical cord blood already beginning to clot.

both signs that pointed to a birth that had happened well before Parker was ever stopped on the road, directly undercutting her claim that she’d given birth in the car only moments earlier. Closing arguments came on October 3rd, 2022. Assistant District Attorney Lauren Richards told the jury that the evidence showed Reagan Simmons Hancock had still been alive during part of the attack and that the defensive wounds found on her hands proved she had fought.

Richards reminded jurors that Braxlin had a recorded time of death of 1:22 in the afternoon, arguing that a baby without any sign of life could never have registered the pulse paramedics found, undercutting the defense’s central legal argument before they’d even made it. That argument, when it came, was brief. Defense attorney Jeff Harelson spoke for only about 8 minutes, focusing not on the broader facts of the crime, but on a narrow legal question.

Under Texas law, he argued kidnapping requires a person who has been born and is alive. His position was that the prosecution couldn’t prove Brax met that legal threshold. And on that basis, he asked the jury to acquit Parker of capital murder and convict her instead of the lesser charge of murder. The jury, a panel of six men and six women, did not find the argument persuasive.

After less than an hour of deliberation, they returned a unanimous verdict. guilty on both capital murder and kidnapping. Parker showed no visible reaction as the verdict was read. In the gallery, quiet crying could be heard from members of Reagan’s family. The trial then moved into its sentencing phase on October 12th.

In her opening statement, Crisp turned directly to address the jury’s likely question about how the case could possibly get worse than what they’d already heard. You know by now she is a con, an actress of the highest order and a fraud. Crisp told them, “Well, it can, and it’s about to.” Prosecutors used the sentencing phase to present aggravating evidence meant to justify the death penalty, including testimony reinforcing that Braxlin had still been alive in the moments after the extraction.

A fact prosecutors argued made the killing all the more deliberate. They also pushed back directly against a recurring theme from the defense, the idea that someone somewhere should have stopped this before it happened. Crisp reminded the jury that fetal abduction cases of this kind were almost unheard of nationally, and that asking jurors to fault the people around Parker for failing to predict something this rare missed the point of why they were in the courtroom at all.

The defense, in turn, leaned fully into its mental health argument. Harelson asked the jury directly what they knew about Taylor Parker’s mind. He was careful to clarify this wasn’t an insanity defense. Parker wasn’t legally insane and he wasn’t asking the jury to find otherwise. But he argued there was a difference between legal sanity and being well. She’s unstable.

He told them she’s unwell. Is that mitigating to you? You’ll make that decision. He pointed out that Parker had no prior criminal record and no documented history of violence before this case and asked the jury to weigh childhood trauma against the brutality of what she’d done. We submit to you an unwell flawed human being, he said, but a human being nonetheless. It wasn’t enough.

In her closing argument for the state, assistant district attorney Lauren Richards offered the jury a final quiet image to carry into deliberation. In her last minutes, she said of Braxlin, “We’ll never know what she saw, but what we know is that she spent her living and dying moments in the arms of the person who killed her, and that if anything else in the world deserves the death penalty on November 9th, 2022, after roughly 90 minutes of deliberation, the jury returned its decision.

” Judge John Tidwell read the verdict aloud and pulled each juror individually to confirm it. Parker sat still as it was read, though she could be seen shaking and crying as the sentence was formally handed down. With her conviction, Taylor Parker became just the seventh woman on Texas death row and the first woman in the state to receive a death sentence in 12 years since Kimberly Cargill in 2012.

Before Parker was led from the courtroom, deputies brought her to stand at the front so that Reagan’s family could deliver their victim impact statements directly to her face. Jessica Brooks, Reagan’s mother, did not hold back. “My baby was alive, still fighting for her baby. When you tore her open and ripped her baby from her stomach in front of her baby girl,” she said before turning the full weight of her grief into a single line directed at the woman who had taken her daughter and granddaughter from her.

She called Taylor Parker an evil piece of flesh demon. Reagan’s sister, Emily Simmons, spoke next, her relief and exhaustion equally visible. I’m overwhelmed with happiness. It’s over, she said, because she has been such a burden in our life for so long now that I haven’t been able to think about my sister without thinking about her.

Within hours of the sentence being handed down, Taylor Parker was on her way to state prison processing in Gatesville, Texas. The first stop on a journey that would end with her placement on death row, where she remains to this day. Taylor Parker’s direct path through the courts came to a close almost exactly 5 years after the murder.

On November 7th, 2025, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in an opinion authored by Judge Lee Finley affirmed both her conviction and her death sentence, rejecting all 25 points of error her defense had raised, including the argument that Braxlin had never technically been born alive, and the claim that a denied change of venue had cost her a fair trial.

That didn’t end it. On March 6th, 2026, attorney Caitlyn Halpern of the law firm Gibbs and Bruns filed a petition asking the United States Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing Parker had been denied a fair trial due to overwhelming media coverage and that prosecutors had introduced what the petition called prejuditial gender-based characterizations of her during trial.

On May 29th, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, offering no explanation for the denial. With that, Taylor Parker’s direct appeals were exhausted. Her case now moves into habius corpus review, a separate legal track that can stretch across both state and federal courts for years, sometimes longer, before anything resembling a final outcome is reached.

As of today, Parker, now 33 years old, is housed at the Patrick L. Daniel unit located 4 mi north of Gatesville on Farmtomarket Road 215 in Corell County, Texas. The facility has the capacity to hold up to 644 inmates. She is one of just seven women currently on death row in the entire state and shares that small isolated population with a name many viewers will recognize.

Yolanda Salivar, convicted of murdering singer Selena Kinttonia, is housed at the same unit. Life there is small in almost every sense. Parker’s cell measures roughly 6 feet by 14. Furnished with only the basics, a bed, a toilet, a sink, and a narrow barred window. She spends approximately 22 hours of each day locked inside it, required to wear a standard white prison tunic like every other woman on the unit.

Because she’s the youngest woman currently on Texas death row, she said the other inmates have taken to calling her simply the baby. Parker has not spoken publicly since her conviction in 2022 with one notable exception. In an interview given to the New Yorker as part of a larger feature on the nuns who ministered to the women on death row, she spoke candidly about both her past and her present.

She described conditions at the county jail before her conviction as far worse than what she experiences now, calling her current surroundings comparatively comfortable by comparison. When the team behind Maternal Instinct began work on the documentary that brought renewed national attention to this case, they made a deliberate choice not to seek an interview with Parker at all.

Director Jessica Dimmick explained her reasoning plainly in a June 2026 interview, saying that from everything she’d read and from how the trial had gone, she didn’t see evidence that Parker was genuinely remorseful and that even if Parker had claimed otherwise on camera, Dimmick wasn’t sure she could have believed her. The film, Dimmick said, needed to be told through the eyes of the people Parker had deceived and hurt, not through Parker’s own voice.

But in that one interview Parker did give, the most striking part wasn’t about her surroundings at all. It was about how she came to accept what she’d done. Parker told the magazine that for a long time after her arrest, she simply refused to believe the case against her was real.

I was in a full-on war in my mind, she said. I told myself, “You didn’t do what they said. It’s lies.” She described a moment during her own trial, sitting in a courtroom gone completely silent, when that resistance finally broke. “My realization came when I had to face the autopsy photos,” she said. What she said next is in its own way the most unsettling part of the entire case.

Parker told the magazine she has come to believe she doesn’t deserve to ever go home, even if some future appeal were to somehow grant her the chance. It’s the hardest thing to admit, she said. 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.

That she said is part of her own ongoing process of acknowledgement and acceptance. Whether or not Taylor Parker ever truly faces an execution date is at this point almost entirely an open question, and the numbers behind that question are striking on their own. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the average time a death row inmate spends waiting before execution is just over 11 years.

Other independent analyses of recent cases suggest the real figure may be running closer to 18 years now and climbing. Among the seven women currently on death row in Texas, one Erica Ivonne Shepard has been waiting since 1995. That’s over 30 years with still no execution date set for her either since Texas reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Only six women have actually been executed in the state. The last time it happened was in 2014. Given those numbers, Taylor Parker, who just turned 33, could realistically be in her 60s before the state of Texas ever sets a date for her execution, if one comes at all. So, here’s where this one leaves us.

Texas almost never actually executes women, and when it does, the process can take longer than most of us have been alive. The one filmmaker who got close enough to consider giving Taylor Parker a platform decided in the end that she didn’t deserve one. Parker herself says she’s accepted by her own account that she belongs exactly where she is.

The question now is whether you think the state will ever actually follow through and whether you think this sentence as it stands was the right call. Let me know in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe before you go. There’s a lot more cases waiting for you on this channel.