I decided to watch Maternal Instinct, the true crime documentary by Jessica Dimmock (Unsolved Mysteries, The Texas Killing Fields) that landed on Netflix on June 12, after seeing a comment on social media that couldn’t help but pique my curiosity: “It’s one of those stories where every minute you think nothing more shocking could happen, and then it does.” And indeed, this very American true story of deception and manipulation, which culminated in unprecedented violence, has something both hypnotic and aberrant about it. Even though it all begins with a scene we’ve seen countless times on screen: a young woman, stuck in her car on the road, calls 911 for help because, right there at that moment, she is giving birth to her daughter.
The young woman in question is Taylor Parker, but hers is anything but a story of a sudden birth heralding great joy. Far from it. As the documentary delves into the reconstruction of the facts, her seemingly idyllic love story, rooted in the most redneck part of East Texas, creaks more and more until it collapses under the crushing weight of lies. (Warning! Don’t read on if you don’t want to spoil the “surprise” with SPOILERS!).
In 2019, Taylor began a relationship with Wade Griffin, an unassuming carpenter and wild boar hunter leading an extremely ordinary life—a life that was immediately turned upside down by her thoughtful attentions, as well as by her financial extravagance. She claimed to be the millionaire heiress of an oil company, even though all her funds were frozen due to a feud between her grandmother and her mother.
After a few repossessed cars and failed real estate investments, and in the face of Wade’s family’s initial suspicions, Taylor announced she was pregnant and began a sort of performance—both online and offline—in which she celebrated her pregnancy with great fanfare: staged photos of her riding a horse with her baby bump, a gender reveal, a flood of posts, medical records and ultrasounds sent to family and friends, and purchases of cribs and baby clothes. It’s a shame, however, that Taylor—already a mother of two—had undergone a hysterectomy (i.e., the surgical removal of the uterus) at some point and therefore could no longer have children. The baby bump she flaunts in her social media photos and has her visiting loved ones stroke is a silicone prosthesis purchased online, complete with a mechanism to simulate fetal kicks.
As the months go by, her mother-in-law and friends grow increasingly suspicious, and, above all, her due date approaches. Now well into her tenth month, in October 2020, Taylor takes drastic measures to escape the web of inextricable lies she herself had woven: a few months earlier, she had worked as a photographer at the wedding of a young woman from New Boston, Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who was expecting a baby girl at that very time; Taylor goes to her home and brutally murders her. Her insane plan was to steal Reagan’s baby, who unfortunately was stillborn after being brutally extracted from her mother’s womb. After her emergency call, officers found Taylor in her car with only a few traces of blood and a tiny body in her hands; hospital tests, of course, found no signs of childbirth or pregnancy in the woman.
Maternal Instinct tells a story so violent and disturbing that it feels like a horror movie, but the real horror lies in realizing just how ordinary and real Taylor Parker’s manipulation is. Obsessed with her social media image, she was morbidly attached to a few friends whom she then abandoned when they began to doubt the truth of her stories, especially as the young woman invented one illness after another, complete with uplifting posts from her hospital bed. Taylor used disposable phones, fabricated emails from lawyers, relatives, and real estate agents, distorted her voice on the phone, and sent anonymous threatening letters to Wade, her relatives, and herself. There was obviously no millionaire grandmother or abusive mother.
To keep people close to her, she was willing to make up all sorts of lies—lies that kept snowballing until she completely lost control. On October 3, 2020, Taylor Parker was sentenced to death. The documentary reconstructs her heinous story through video testimonies and, above all, interviews with the various witnesses to her schemes: Wade and his family, her old friends, and even the relatives of Reagan Simmons-Hancock. Everyone is still reeling from all that pain and manipulation, and especially in the case of Wade and his family, there is also the burden of inescapable guilt: Should we have pressed our suspicions? Should we have said something? Could we have done more?
Even the doctors and healthcare professionals who knew about her hysterectomy couldn’t reveal anything—not even in the face of Taylor’s posts about her much-touted pregnancy—due to strict privacy laws. Only one of them, to a persistent friend who kept asking questions to confirm her suspicions, managed to say: “Trust your guts,” trust your gut, your instinct. To those watching, their guts twist constantly, especially when they think that, in this age of constant exposure, of constant exaggerated and affected storytelling about ourselves, of people inventing lives that don’t exist—we all know them.
