Spoilers.
As humans, we’re storytellers. We’ve been telling stories since we walked on the land. In the caves. Around campfires. On farms. In cities. And now, in Netflix documentaries. Documentaries like the newest one, Jessica Dimmock’s 2026 documentary, Maternal Instinct.
There is the story Taylor Parker tells, of course. She’s someone who seems to have Munchausen syndrome, wherein she pretends to be sick for the love and attention sickness affords someone, particularly on social media, where context may be missing. A Texas woman, Taylor pretended to have strokes, cancer, and so on with her friends, so much so, that they stopped being her friends because it became weird. At that point, around 21 years of age, she already had two children as well. Thereafter, she decided to have a hysterectomy. That means she can never have children again. The surgery removes the uterus. A uterus is needed for fetal development during a pregnancy.
Taylor meets Wade, who likes that Taylor is presenting herself as a country girl, given that he’s a country boy. He doesn’t seem to ask many questions of Taylor or her past, including her seemingly impending abundant inheritance from her grandmother or her rocky relationship with her mother that could imperil said inheritance. The story Wade is telling — a story one must always remember when watching true crime documentaries such as this one — is that he never truly loved Taylor. He cared for her, sure, but love? Nah. But would someone like Wade, victim in his own right though he may be, admit to loving someone like Taylor after what she did?
Only months after meeting Wade, she announced that she was pregnant. Wade wanted to name his baby girl … Clancy. But of course, Taylor is unable to become pregnant. It seems that she faked the pregnancy announcement, faked the gender reveal, faked the ultrasounds, and faked appearing pregnant via a fake silicon pregnancy costume of some sort. But eventually, the rubber was going to meet the road, as they say. What would she do then? Wade’s family and friends were on to her, including Wade’s mother, and his hilarious friends, Stephanie and Cody. It helps that Taylor’s ex-friends and the hospital that did the hysterectomy were in Wade’s ear about the pregnancy being fake. Nonetheless, unfortunately, he defended Taylor and was incredulous about those hints. He told himself a story.
We tell stories. Those stories don’t take into account the worst possible outcome. Our brains aren’t wired to imagine that anyone in reality could partake in the worst possible outcome. That’s why Wade’s mother, reticent about alienating her son, didn’t do more, and imagined that Taylor would feign a miscarriage. She was 10 months into her “pregnancy,” after all. But the worst did indeed happen. Taylor had befriended a woman named Reagan, who she had taken photographs for at Reagan’s wedding. Reagan already had a child at 17, and was then soon pregnant with her second child. That was Taylor’s way out — the story she began telling herself, apparently. She ensured that Wade was sent on a wild … hog chase, as it were, away from town, and that Reagan would be home. She brutally cut Reagan’s baby out of her stomach, killing her, and then pretended as if the newborn baby was her own. The nurses and OBGYN at the nearby hospital quickly understood that it wasn’t her baby, and the police became involved. She was charged with murder, convicted, and then sentenced to death row.
I should mention that leading up to the fake pregnancy and resulting murder, Taylor also tried to fake a litany of real estate scams and identity fraud leaning on the purported story of her grandmother being rich and Taylor receiving the inheritance. Anything that then went wrong was the result of her awful, interfering mother. What all this, including the pregnancy, amounted to for Taylor in terms of any discernible benefit, is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t seem money. Perhaps it really does go back to a perverted case of Munchausen syndrome. Regardless, it’s impossible to imagine being Reagan’s mother or stepfather, or the stepfather’s friend, who are interviewed about having found Reagan’s murdered body. And then having discovered that Regan’s 3-year-old daughter was still in the house. Goodness.
The story I would tell here is that, contrary to the framing at the end of the documentary, where those around Taylor feel a certain amount of guilt and regret, I do not blame anyone close to Taylor. Wade, despite how oblivious he appeared to be, does not warrant blame. Nor do her previous associates or the doctors and nurses who felt bound by HIPPA. Taylor is responsible for Taylor’s actions. Even so, as one considers what she did, it’s just difficult to wrap one’s brain around why she did it, how she kept up the litany of lies, and why something that largely seemed a harmless, if nevertheless fucked up, mendacious life, led to violent murder. Because, after all, the baby she stole from Reagan also died. The story we always wonder with criminals like Taylor, too, is how they could possibly think they would get away with it.
With true crime documentaries, the story we tell ourselves is that we wouldn’t be a Wade. Or whomever else was connected to Taylor. We don’t know that. The other story we tell ourselves is that Taylor is some human aberration. Unfortunately, she’s all too human. She’s one of us, which is what makes stories like Taylor’s all the more haunting.
Milam's Musings 