Death penalty sought for woman convicted of killing expectant Texas mother to steal her unborn baby
Prosecutors asked a Texas jury Wednesday to sentence a woman to death for killing a pregnant woman and stealing her unborn daughter from her womb. The appeal came as the penalty phase of Taylor Parker's capital murder trial began for the October 2020 murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock and theft of her unborn baby. The Bowie County jury previously found Parker guilty of capital murder.
Prosecutor Kelley Crisp told jurors that the evidence would show Parker, 29, faked a pregnancy and repeatedly lied before killing Simmons-Hancock, 21, at the woman's New Boston home on Oct. 9, 2020, to get the infant she claimed to have been carrying. The baby also died.
Parker's attorneys hope to persuade the jury to spare Parker's life and let her serve life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Defense attorney Jeff Harrelson said they would show that Parker was mentally ill.
During the trial, a state police investigator testified that Parker conducted intensive research on how to fake a pregnancy convincingly. On the day of the killing, she watched a video on the physical exam of an infant delivered pre-term at 35 weeks, Special Agent Dustin Estes said.
After the killing, Parker was stopped by a Texas state trooper in DeKalb, Texas, 12 miles northwest of the crime scene, CBS DFW reported. She told the trooper she had given birth on the side of the road and that the baby was not breathing, an official said.
The station reported Parker was then taken to a hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma, where the baby was pronounced dead.