NEW BOSTON, Texas (KTAL/KMSS) – On day three of the Taylor Parker trial, prosecutors continue to build their case against the woman accused of faking a pregnancy and killing a pregnant mother to take her unborn baby was not only a capable running a big con but audacious about it.
Testimony Wednesday morning detailed a $20M real estate deal Parker attempted to pull off despite only having part-time office jobs at a staffing agency and an OBGYN clinic.
On the stand, real estate agent Rusty Lowe testified that Taylor initially told him she was an heir to the Blackburn syrup fortune when she first reached out to him in early December 2019 about a property in McCurtain County called Pecan Point, which was listed at $4.7M. The deal would have required a payment of $200,000 upfront on the $3.5 million Parker offered in what’s known as an “earnest payment,” typically paid after a contract is signed and a real estate deal as a show of good faith that the buyer intends to purchase a property.
While Lowe dealt mainly with Parker directly via text and sometimes phone calls, she and her boyfriend, Wade Griffin, came out to view the property, and both names were on the contract. It was noted during testimony that Parker used the hyphenated name Taylor Parker–Griffin, even though she and Griffin were not married.
Lowe said the couple seemed oddly urgent about their interest in the property and showed up to see it in a vehicle that “kind of didn’t match the situation. “Still, Lowe said, “We always give people the benefit of the doubt, but we have to vet that. “
Over the next four months, Lowe says he tried to work with Parker to verify the funds for the earnest payment, only to run into roadblocks as each source of funding for the deal fell through, and Lowe was never able to get anyone he was corresponding with via email at the banks involved on the phone.
When a purported $7 million wire transfer from the inheritance failed to come through, Parker moved on to claiming the money would come from an oil and gas lease. When that failed, Parker claimed her Uncle Butch would give her the money to make the deal, which at this point had grown to include two other properties totaling around $20 million.
The money never came through.
As Lowe testified, prosecutors showed the jury emails, wire transfer receipts, a copy of the oil and gas lease, and letters he received from what he was led to believe were contacts at Parker’s bank and, later, contacts at her uncle’s bank.
Lowe had a landman in Tyler review the oil and gas contract, who looked it over and told him it was “red hot” and not a legitimate lease.
Lowe says he and others in his office tried to reach out to Shelly Linx, whose name was on the correspondence from Shell Western Global as the person representing Parker, and verify the existence of wire fund transfers totaling nearly $370 million. They could never find her. Emails shown to the jury show those emails came from shellylinx.westernglobal@aol.com. As Parker’s defense team pointed out on cross-examination, it’s not likely that correspondence from a global energy company would be coming from an AOL address.
Lowe testified that Parker would “scold “him when he tried to reach out to Linx and other contact names in the banking correspondence and that she grew especially upset and animated when he tried to reach her Uncle Butch.
Lowe said he had his suspicions, but that was why they continued to try to vet Parker’s funding. Parker’s defense attorney suggested he continued to try to make the deal despite being strung along because he had more than $1.15 million in commissions at stake.
But Lowe says he just dropped it and let it go when Parker texted him in late April to tell him the deal was off because her mother had duped her and made the whole thing up. The inheritance, the oil and gas lease, and the money from Uncle Butch never existed. Neither did Shelly Linx or any of the other contacts Lowe believed he had been corresponding with over the past four months.
Parker’s purported attorney, Blake Lawington, did not exist, either.
After Parker’s defense team cross-examined Lowe, First District Attorney Kelley Crisp returned with one more question.
“The implication in the courtroom this week has been that these invented people or the lies themselves are so fantastical that people would have to be ignorant to buy into it. Have you ever seen someone or encountered someone like Taylor Parker that was so convincing in conning you?”
“No, I’ve never encountered anyone like this. She believed it. There’s no doubt in my mind she believed it.”
Parker, now 29, is charged with kidnapping and capital murder in the death of 21-year-old Reagan Simmons Hancock and the fetal abduction and murder of Simmons’ baby girl, Braxlynn. Parker could face the death penalty if convicted.
The affidavit filed for Parker’s arrest described a gruesome scene discovered on the morning of October 9, 2020, by Simmons’ mother when she went to her daughter’s house on Austin Street in New Boston. Simmons was face-down in the living room, “with a large abundance of what appeared to be blood throughout the house,” not only on the floor but on furniture, walls, appliances, and other items in the home. Simmons had been cut open, and her baby, 35 weeks along, was gone.
Just before Simmons’ body was discovered that morning, a Texas state trooper pulled Parker over in De Kalb and found the dying newborn in her lap, umbilical cord still attached and tucked into Parker’s pants. The baby girl was pronounced dead at the hospital, where doctors also determined Parker had not given birth.
When investigators arrived and interviewed Parker, she confessed, telling them she was in a physical altercation with Simmons and abducted the unborn child.
Prosecutors told the jury during opening statements Monday that Parker pretended to be pregnant and schemed to find one to claim as her own, not because she wanted to have a baby but because she was desperate to keep her then-boyfriend. The mother of two was unable to bear any more children of her own after having her tubes tied and a partial hysterectomy long before she met Wade Griffin.
Testimony in the first two days of the trial delved into Parker’s relationships with Griffin, as well as friends, co-workers, and ex-husband. Prosecutors laid out a history of lies, faked illnesses, and manipulation. She told friends she had the hysterectomy because her uterus had become “eaten up” with Stage IV cancer.
“I’m just mind-blown that I ever believed anything she said,” former close friend Abby Bell said on the stand.
Parker also claimed she had miscarried twins and told a co-worker she lost a baby girl due to complications after giving birth to her. The co-worker had confided in Parker that she had buried her baby several months before.
“She preyed on me,” the former co-worker said of Parker, who allegedly went on to offer her $20,000 to carry her baby as a surrogate. Later, she says Parker told her they had gotten a surrogate but that she slept with her husband and got pregnant. In a cruelly tone-deaf comment, Parker allegedly told the co-worker that she hoped the surrogate miscarried.
“She’s very calculated. She navigates and controls conversations. She plays on emotional trauma, and she doesn’t care,” another former co-worker.
Taylor Parker’s ex-husband testified that he did not learn of his wife’s partial hysterectomy until a doctor mentioned it during an ER visit after they were married. He testified that Taylor did not want to talk about that omission but began pushing for the couple to find a surrogate. She told him they could get a loan and use money from an inheritance to pay for it.
He also recounted a far-fetched story Parker fabricated to explain why a man who was supposed to deliver the cash from her grandmother’s inheritance never showed up: he was in a wreck, and the EMTs made off with the money. The man, who prosecutors believe was Taylor using a spoofed number, texted Hunter a photo of a bag full of cash to prove the inheritance was real. Hunter recounted how the same image was the first result that popped up when he googled “blue duffel bag full of cash,” drawing muted snickers from some in the gallery in an apparent response to the audacity of the failed ploy.
When confronted with questions, Parker said, “she would bury herself in more lies.”
Hunter and Taylor separated in April 2019, less than one year after marriage. Taylor was dating Wade Griffin within weeks and announced in a Facebook post on March 14, 2020 that they were expecting a girl.
The couple was having serious enough relationship trouble by August that a co-worker says Parker talked her into posing as her sister and calling Griffin to dig for information about where he stood in the relationship.
As their relationship grew rockier, Parker allegedly fabricated more than a pregnancy. She again used spoofing apps, this time to fake text conversations with family members so she could screenshot them and send them to Griffin to support her claims and defend herself against his family’s growing suspicions about her.
All the while, Taylor Parker gushed in Facebook and Instagram posts about her relationship with Wade and their excitement about the pending September 2020 arrival of their baby girl, who she named Clancy Gaile. Her social media featured dozens of baby belly selfies and updates on non-existent visits to the doctor’s office.
In addition to purchasing a prosthetic pregnancy belly, data extracted from Parker’s devices revealed extensive evidence of her efforts to maintain the appearance of pregnancy while resorting to increasingly desperate measures to find a baby as her fake due date approached.
Forensics expert and Texas Rangers Lt. Jared Brown testified that it all added up to show that Parker faked her pregnancy, took steps to report the baby as her own, lied about an inheritance from her grandmother that she claimed could be used to pay for surrogacy, “and ultimately planned and carried out the murder.”
