The calculating way Taylor Parker fooled so many people for so long with fake pregnancy

After watching Maternal Instinct, people have been left wondering how Taylor Parker managed to fool so many people with her fake pregnancy for so long, and the director of the Netflix true crime documentary has revealed the answer.

Parker tricked her friends, family and own partner, Wade Griffin, into thinking she was expecting a baby for 10 months. She went to extreme lengths, doing a whole gender reveal and pregnancy photoshoots, before murdering Reagan Simmons-Hancock and stealing her unborn baby from her abdomen in a chilling crime that rocked Texas.

Her mother was the only person who knew Taylor couldn’t be pregnant because she had had a hysterectomy a few years prior, but didn’t say anything to anyone.

Speaking about how nobody noticed the pregnancy was fake to Tudum, the film’s director Jessica Dimmock explained that Parker had a calculating method of telling different stories to everyone, so she would never get caught out. She would use that, alongside the huge trust everyone had towards her, to her advantage.

Credit: Netflix

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“Jessica [Brookes], Reagan’s mother, says at the beginning of the film that in a small town you can trust easily. And [Taylor] really exploited that sense of trust and used that to her advantage. I also found it shocking that she was so bold, that she would do it in a place where everyone knew each other, because people were talking — and their sleuthing was working,” she said.

“They were finding each other and they were finding her relatives. But she was very good at keeping people away from each other. She had an ability to tell two different lies about the same circumstance to two different people so they would not trust one another. There might be a culture of not wanting to rock the boat, or people feeling it wasn’t their business, that she was relying on — and it didn’t work because some people made it their business.”

Parker is now behind bars on death row at the Patrick O’Daniel Unit, a prison in Gatesville, Texas that only houses female prisoners. She is one of only seven women on death row in Texas, and the youngest.

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Featured image credit: Netflix