NEW BOSTON, Texas (KTAL/KMSS) – The man prosecutors say Taylor Parker faked her pregnancy to keep took the stand Thursday morning in the twelfth day of her capital murder trial in Bowie County.

Parker, who was 27 at the time of the Oct. 9, 2020 murders, is charged with kidnapping and capital murder. The 21-year-old New Boston mother was strangled, beaten, and stabbed repeatedly, all with her three-year-old daughter in the house. Prosecutors have said they are seeking the death penalty due to the heinous and pre-meditated nature of the crime and because Parker showed no remorse. 

An “emotional rollercoaster”

Wade Griffin described his relationship with Taylor Parker as an “emotional rollercoaster.” The 27-year-old roofing company supervisor said he and Taylor met at a rodeo in July 2019 and started talking through social media. Before long, they were having dinners together and meeting each other’s families. 

He worked long hours at a roofing company in Daingerfield and did side jobs like welding, hog trapping, and managing livestock. He says Taylor asked him to do an estimate on clearing and fencing some family land in Bryans Mill, Texas.

She told him she was the only one keeping the property up and she wanted to get it cleared out. She claimed she had access to family money to pay for the work.

“It had grown up and had bushes and saplings on it. She was pretty much wanting me to get it back the way it used to be.”  

It would have been a $50,000 job.  

“I didn’t have no clue,” Griffin said. “I mean, I believed every word she said.” 

Including when she asked if Griffin’s friend Juan could work for him while she was getting everything together on the clearing job. She paid him his first check before telling Griffin her mother found out and shut it down. After that, Wade had to start paying Juan himself. He had promised his longtime friend a job.

“The day she told me Shona had put a stop to the spending and the equipment was pretty much stolen, the work wasn’t gonna happen, Juan broke down crying. He had four kids and couldn’t go without a job. ”

The fastest way to a man’s heart

Griffin says, from the beginning, Parker went to great lengths to make herself indispensable.

“I love to eat,” Griffin said on the stand, eliciting a few chuckles from the jury box and some observers in the courtroom.  

He says he would text the things he wanted to try for dinner, and she would have it ready for him when he got home. On top of keeping Griffin well-fed, he says she helped care for the livestock, kept up with the finances, and manage the household. She made it easy for him to rely on her.  

Talk of Taylor‘s family money came early in the relationship, but he testified that he did not ask too many questions because the relationship was so new and he felt it was none of his business. He admitted that he still did not dig very deeply even after he found himself in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt because he believed her claims that the money was coming.  

“She always had an excuse,” Griffin testified. “I’m just a boyfriend. It’s not like we were married, so I’m going by what she told me.” 

But within weeks, Parker took it to another level.  

“She was cooking. She was a good cook, pretty much the best I ever had. So I was excited,” Griffin recalled. He saw baby stuff on the counter and wondered what was going on. That’s when she told him she had gone to the doctor the other day. 

“’I’m pretty much pregnant,’” Griffin said she told him. “We were maybe two or three weeks in at the most.”   

Parker claimed she was having twins.  

Deceptions pile up

While the pregnancy Parker is accused of faking in 2020 before killing Reagan Hancock is the focus of her criminal trial, it was not her first. The pregnancy in August 2019 was just one of several deceptions that Parker orchestrated, starting just weeks into the relationship, and it ended with another elaborate deception.

Parker used VOIP app to text Griffin posing as her father, Mark Morton. He told Griffin he had been in a wreck and his bush hog was totaled. Parker told Griffin he was going to help him get the damaged farm equipment towed. While she and “Jace,” a man he was led to believe was a family friend, were helping Parker’s father, a winch snapped and a towing cable hit her stomach, which “hurt one of the babies.”  

It was not until after Parker was arrested for Reagan Hancock’s murder that Griffin learned that it was not her father, there was no wreck, there was no Jace, and there were no babies.  

But back in August 2019, Griffin did not know that Parker had a hysterectomy in 2015, which meant she had no uterus and could not bear children. He was just getting to know her and her complicated family dynamics. It wasn’t long before he started hearing about trouble between Taylor and her mother, Shona, and how she controlled the family money.  

Parker was telling Griffin that her grandmother had created an account where they were going to put proceeds from the family’s oil and gas royalties, and she was going to have access to it so she could fix up the family’s property. Through fabricated texts and emails, Parker had Griffin convinced she had the funds to pay for the clearing work, and for farm trucks and equipment to maintain it. But her mother was the executor of the account and did not want her spending it. Parker claimed Shona was harassing and threatening her, and Griffin started getting messages from “Mandy Body,” AKA “Mandy Boyd,” too. That was the email address and alternate identity Parker used to fake the harassment. 

In spite of the supposed family infighting and issues accessing the money, Parker had Griffin believing she was going to deed him more than 800 acres of land. By that time, he had still only known her a couple of weeks.  

“I’m kinda blown away,” Griffin testified. “I really didn’t know what to think. It all sounded good, I just couldn’t believe it was coming on so fast. Her parents texting me, her grandparents texting me telling me, ‘You get married, and this is what you’re pretty much looking at.’”  

Over the course of the trial, the prosecution has presented witnesses and evidence showing how Parker also had Griffin convinced that her mother ordered a hit on her, was involved in a shootout that was suppressed in the media and hung herself after she was taken into custody.  

Prosecutors say the “hit” ruse had multiple purposes, including getting Griffin to allow Parker and her 10-year-old daughter to move into his small cabin in Simms. With Shona “gone,” it also freed up Taylor’s alleged access to the family’s money. Parker told Griffin she had $6 million, and she had big plans for it. She wanted to buy some land and make money on it.  

It was Griffin who suggested Pecan Point. He knew the land and had worked for its current owner. He told her he knew the perfect place for that. 

 “She was glowing whenever I told her about Pecan Point and where it was and all that good stuff.” 

They met up with the realtor and checked out the property. It had great duck hunting and plenty of possibilities.  

“So that made me excited. It had a lot of grass cows and stuff on it,” Griffin said. “It was pretty much a dream come true.” 

They made an offer of $3.5 million, with $200,000 upfront. The deal eventually grew to include adjoining land in a purchase that would have totaled $20 million. Griffin was seeing dozens of emails a day with official-looking letters and documents.  

As Crisp put it, the numbers started “getting silly” when Parker faked checks for millions of dollars. Griffin even tried to cash one of those checks, for $8 million, at his bank. They told him it was a lot of money for a check, and that these amounts were usually transferred by wire.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Griffin testified. “I had never received or dealt with anything that large,” so it didn’t surprise him if banks had trouble dealing with that amount of money.”

Promises of money, mounting debt

Banking on money that would ultimately never come through, Griffin bought a brand-new $29,000 side-by-side ATV, a new $92,000 heavy-duty pickup truck for himself, and a new Nissan Altima for his mother. He also bought about 20 head of cattle for some $21,000. All of it was financed with the expectation that when the issues with the banks and the wire funds were resolved, they would all be paid off.  

Since that never happened, Griffin says he ended up saddled with debt, and by January 2020, he was feeling the pressure. On top of that, Taylor was demanding more intimacy in their relationship.

“I want you to take into consideration on my part you haven’t touched me, kissed me or anything in over a month. It’s lonely and that’s something I need in our relationship. You used to do it so I’d like it back,” Parker wrote in one message.

“I’ll pass,” was all Griffin wrote back.  

“Guess I’m just not a very affectionate, hands-on kinda guy, I guess you would say,” Griffin testified. “Plus, all the financial issues, all these fake people texting me, promising me, promising me that, and just constantly letting me down. I just wasn’t attracted. To the point where I was thinking, ‘This has got to be a trap,’” Griffin testified.  

“It was decent at the beginning. We were intimate a few times at the beginning. But all the rumors, the job, I’d financed the truck and the side-by-side financed the cows, and it was all falling on my shoulders and I think I just got in way over my head.” 

“Maybe she was more interested in that part of the relationship than you were,” Crisp said.   

“Yes.”  

So when she told him she was expecting again in late February, he was not particularly ecstatic.  

“When she told me, I was kinda in shock, but it come at the same time I had been telling her we are not financially able to keep everything we had done bought, it was ripping my bank account, none of the money was coming through and she knew I was getting pretty depressed over it.”  

And yet, Griffin continued to believe Parker had money coming to her. He recounted how she told him his old tractor needed an upgrade and that she would pay for it.

“And I said well, ‘We done got enough stuff already that I’m having to pay for and I don’t wanna have to finance something else.’ And she reassured me she would handle the tractor deal.”

They left the dealership with a $63,000 tractor. The cashier’s check was fake, and the tractor was repossessed.

“I told her, ‘Just like everything else, the money’s not coming through again.'”

“The jury’s got to be wondering, ‘How is she getting away with this?” Crisp asked Griffin, who said he was family friends with the dealership and it upset him because he felt like he had let people down.

“It was just throwing my name out there. ‘Wade done bought this, couldn’t pay for it, bought that, couldn’t pay for it.’ Just made me look bad all around.”

But when Griffin learned Parker’s family was planning to divide up some of their land and that he and Parker were going to get some of it, he wanted to believe. Parker’s aunt, Katie Joe, was texting them to let them know they were on board and willing to give them a little bit more so they could run cows on it. 

The real Shona Prior has two sisters, Molly and Katie. Griffin did not know it at the time, but he was not communicating with either of the real aunts. The screenshots Parker was showing him of her conversations with them were fabricated.  

A cast of fabricated characters

Griffin would later learn that the entire cast of characters he had been communicating with for months over all of the land and bank dealings were all made up by Parker in a series of elaborate and entangled deceptions.  

In addition to fake versions of Parker’s family members, there were entirely fabricated bank and oil company executives, a “hit squad” of Mexican mafia members, an attorney named “Blake Lawington,” and a law enforcement contact known only as “Cobern,” among others.  

“They had ages. She had background information about every person,” Griffin testified as First Assistant District Attorney Kelley Crisp walked him through a litany of Parker’s deceptions. “Once I started talking to you, it was like, well this person’s fake, that person’s fake, everybody’s fake.” 

Whenever he tried to call any of the purported contacts back, it would go to voicemail and they would text him back later with some excuse.  

Griffin said he is still untangling what was real and what was not.  

“In hindsight, there are still things you haven’t figured out,” Crisp asked. “Yeah, there were just so many pieces to the puzzle.”

As prosecutors painstakingly established in the first weeks of the trial, Parker had a plan and an explanation for everything. She told him she needed his phone so she could have a friend in IT put software on it to block Fake Shona’s hacking attempts. In reality, she needed the phone so she could block the contacts from her real family members to maintain control over his communications with them.

More than once, Crisp referenced the question she said he must have already been asked hundreds of times: How did he not know the stories Taylor Parker was telling were not true?  

“Who’s gonna go to this extreme to make up this stuff?” Griffin testified. “So I had no doubts about it.” 

But others still had questions.  

His close friend Cody Ott saw the checks bouncing and warned him that he and his wife did not believe Parker had all that money. Ott testified that he urged his friend not to quit his job until the money came through on the Pecan Point deal.

Of course, it never did.

Playing the pregnancy part

Parker continued to check in at the OB/GYN clinic on social media and share updates. Griffin says she would come home and tell him what the doctor said and “how the bloodwork looked good and all that.” 

Their friends, Cody and Stephanie Ott, hosted the couple’s gender reveal party in March. Parker wanted Griffin to bring a heifer with a pink bow to represent that the baby was going to be a girl. Parker posted the photos with the heifer calf on Facebook. His mother, his boss Roger Pate and his wife Angela, Taylor’s dad Mark Morton, Taylor’s daughter and her daughter’s grandmother were all there.

Griffin says he always liked the name Clancy, so the couple planned to name her Clancy Gaile.

In spite of his commitment to stand by the woman he believed was the mother of his child, Griffin says he did ask his mother if she thought a tummy tuck could explain why Parker did not seem to be growing the way most pregnant women do. She had her own suspicions already and told him a tummy tuck was not the reason his girlfriend did not appear to be pregnant. But his boss, who along with his wife thought highly of Parker, told Griffin she was a sweet girl and reassured him that her body type just didn’t carry a baby like smaller, more petite women.  

Parker certainly played the pregnant part, according to Griffin.  

“Every morning she’d say she was getting morning sickness and go in the bathroom, and I’d hear her throwing up in the commode.”  

She would tell him when the baby was moving a lot that day, or that she’d been kicking when he came home from work. But whenever he felt her belly, he did not feel any movement.  

He told his boss about that.  

“’You don’t need to have no doubts,’” Griffin says Roger Pate told him. “She’s pregnant. Quit thinking like that. Come September, you’re gonna be a daddy.’” 

Both Roger and his wife Angela had claimed they had felt the baby move. 

Parker had purchased a fake baby belly by the time the couple did their maternity shoot in August 2020. In some of the photos, Griffin has his hand over hers on the bump.  

”I did not have a clue. It was like her real stomach.” 

Griffin said he never saw any packaging around the house for a baby bump.  

“I’d have flipped out if I’d ever seen anything like that.” 

Even if he did ask questions, Griffin says Parker was ready for them.  

“I’d walk in the door and she’d already be ready with answers. She’d have proof of a text message, a phone call with grandma. If I pushed it, she’d pretty much make me look stupid. ‘I cannot believe you don’t believe me, I’m carrying your child.’” 

The same went for questions about the money.  

“You would make purchases relying on that, and when you got upset, it was your fault, and ‘Shona’ would berate you for only being in it for the money,” Crisp said. “You were always the bad guy.” 

So Griffin says he went along. He took time off from work to be there for doctor’s appointments.  

“But every time on the morning of or that night, she’d be like, ‘Oh, I know you took off to go to the baby doctor, but it’s COVID, so you’re gonna have to sit in the waiting room.’ So it was always an excuse why I could not go in there to ask or talk to the doctor. She put it perfectly, to where I couldn’t be in the room.” 

He ultimately told her he couldn’t keep lying to his boss.  

“’You can go and give me updates but I’m not gonna keep taking off,” he recalled telling her.  

“That’s not how it works”

Griffin says was determined to be there for the baby’s birth. He took family medical leave at the beginning of October, days before Parker said she was planning to go to Titus Regional Medical Center to have labor induced. By this point, the baby was three full weeks past its original Sept. 19 due date.  

“You know now that’s not how it works,” Crisp asked Griffin Thursday, asking if he understands now that deliveries can’t just be scheduled like one might set a dentist appointment.  

“I didn’t know nothing about that because I never had a kid and didn’t know how all that stuff worked,” Griffin said.  

Even when Parker’s ex-husband texted him anonymously to warn him that Parker could not possibly be pregnant and that all the hospitals in the area were on high alert in case she tried to steal a baby, Griffin was under the influence of the alternate universe Parker had created.  

He believed “all day long” that it was Parker’s mother, continuing her harassment campaign. He sent a screenshot to Parker.  

“If that’s not your mom, I don’t know what is.” 

“It fit her language,” Griffin explained. “I said, ‘Well, your mom’s trying to get in our business again! “I thought, ‘Man, I can’t believe she’s going to this extreme.’” 

That’s when the mean texts from “Mandy Body” started back up. She had gone radio silent after her supposed suicide in jail, but Parker told him just before they went to her aunt’s for Christmas that she was not dead after all. It was just a lie her law enforcement contact “Cobern” had told them, because he thought it best Wade did not know she was still alive.  

“He told her he just figured it was ‘best for you and Wade to tell that story,’” Griffin said. “So Taylor said she can’t deal with him anymore if he can’t be honest.” 

Griffin said he only had more reason to believe it was Shona after meeting her at that family’s holiday get-together. He said Shona glared at them when they walked in, so he thought she was “every bit the monster” Taylor made her out to be. He described how the real Shona “busted” into a room where they were wrapping gifts and ordered them to come out with everyone else.  

“No, ‘Hey, hi, I’m Shona,’ and I was like, ‘Wow, this woman is exactly what she portrayed her out to be, apparently.’” 

Now, “Mandy Body” was back and threatening their unborn baby, telling Griffin he was not welcome in the family and vowing to put a stop to it. She had already claimed to be behind the failure of the Pecan Point deal and regularly texted Griffin to let him know she knew exactly where he was and what he was doing.  

It did not occur to Griffin that Parker always knew exactly where he was and what he was doing, too. Even after his mother pointed that out to him. Not even after a bomb threat to the hospital that “Mandy Body” predicted in one of her messages came true, hinting Parker would get blamed for it if it happened.  

Griffin got that message well before Parker allegedly called one in on the morning she was supposed to be induced. It was the same morning his house caught fire.  

“Did you think this was getting too bizarre?” Crisp asked.  

“I thought it was odd my house gets caught on fire and then the bomb threat at the same hospital where we were supposed to have baby,” Griffin said. “I said, ‘This just don’t happen on its own.’ I told her, ‘I don’t understand how all this keeps happening. What is going on here?” I ain’t never been through something like this in my life.”  

But the bomb threat was real. She showed him the Facebook posts sharing the news that the hospital had been evacuated to the civic center.  

An answer for everything

“How or why are you still believing anything that she tells you?” Crisp asked.   

“She’s very believable. Anything I questioned, she had an answer for. I mean I could come home and be like, ‘What in the world?’ and she’d be like, ‘’Well, I’m just gonna tell you.’”   

“She always had an answer for everything. She had an excuse and a way to believe exactly what she was telling me. She had backup paperwork on all of it.” 

That included creating a paper trail for the pregnancy, Griffin said. She brought home a letter confirming her pregnancy. That’s one of the reasons why, even when friends questioned it, Griffin stood by her.  

“A few people might have said a few things like that. I’m like, ‘Man I’m just telling ya, she’s dotted her I’s, crossed her T’s from the healthcare paperwork and everything makes sense to me. You just might not see the whole picture.”  

Griffin knows now that he was the one not seeing the whole picture. He says he had no idea that Parker’s search for a baby intensified after he told her about the anonymous warning he received on September 16 that she was not pregnant and that she was “running out of time.”  

His mother tried to warn him the day after the bomb threat was called in. They had come over to take showers since the fire knocked out the plumbing at his cabin. While Taylor was in the shower, his mother pulled him aside.  

“I could tell something was wrong,” Griffin recalled. “Something was written all over her face.” 

She told him he needed to go back to work. She was worried his job was in jeopardy. It had already been four or five days and there was still no baby.  

“I don’t think she’s pregnant, Wade.” 

Connie Griffin testified last week that her son stormed out of the house when she confronted him that day. But Wade says it gave him enough pause to tell Parker about it when they got back to the house.  

“She’s concerned about you not being pregnant,” Griffin said he told Parker. “She’s not acted this way before, she’s pretty concerned about a few things. I’m on the fence about it. All these people are saying you’re not pregnant. But it’s getting to the point of my mom tells me, I don’t wanna not believe my mom. I’m gonna lose my job. He’s calling every day. Usually, when you take off on FMLA, it’s within a day or two.” 

“You weren’t telling her, ‘You go kill somebody and get me a baby,’” Crisp asked Griffin on the stand.

“Absolutely not, not at all.” 

“Did you think it would come to this?” 

“Not in a million years. I never thought this would happen.” 

Griffin says he and Parker had it out that night and he told her he would be going back to work and take the time off and come home or meet her at the hospital when the baby came. He says Parker insisted she would show everybody come Friday she was pregnant, and everybody would see that she had not been lying the whole time. 

Crisp says Parker was extremely angry with Connie Griffin after that, so made sure he saw screenshots of her conversations with “Fake Katie Joe” about how terrible he was to believe his mother over her. She even had “Fake Shona” message him to “gloat,” claiming she was seeing Taylor and Katie Joe’s text messages ripping into Connie and criticizing Wade for listening to her.

“How’s your mom doing? I love how you and your family treat her. They’re on my side now. Great job Wade. I’ll clap for you this time. I win every single time.”   

“You’re thinking this is real?” Crisp asked Griffin.  

“I don’t know what to think,” he testified. “I’ve got my mom telling me one thing, Taylor telling me another. But I’ve been with Taylor this whole time, so I’m going with her.” 

At this point, with “Shona” making threats and supposedly following their every move, Griffin did not question Parker’s pivot to searching for alternatives to having the baby at a local hospital. She called McCurtain County Memorial Medical Center in Idabel and learned they would not turn anybody down, even if they were not a patient there. It was supposedly outside of Shona’s reach.

“After tomorrow, everything is gonna be fine.,” Parker texted herself on Oct. 8 as her aunt, Katie Joe.  

“I just wanna shove it in all their faces,” Parker replied.  

Earlier in the trial, prosecutors noted how some of the conversations Parker fabricated for Wade’s benefit ended up reading a lot like a diary.

The morning of the murders

Wade Griffin says the plan as he knew it was that he and Parker were going to go together to the Side X Side Ranch in Wynnewood, Oklahoma on the morning of Oct. 9. Parker had arranged a hog sale there and they were going head out early to make the four-hour drive. After that, Griffin says, they were going to “swoop down in Idabel” and induce the baby. 

The day before the supposedly scheduled induction, the couple went to dinner at Osaka’s and stopped at O’Reilly’s to pick up a plug so he could make sure all the lights on his trailer were working properly for the trip. Parker told him she was going to visit Reagan at her house, and he worked on his truck.    

The next morning, he got up around 3:30-3:45 a.m. He says they planned to leave around 4 a.m. She was up already. She told him she had been cramping all night. And could not make the trip. He wanted to stay home with her, worried she could get into trouble on the way to the hospital if she had to go without him, but she insisted. There was too much money at stake with $6,100 on the line, and they were in debt.  

She told him she would go get registered, and they would meet at the hospital around lunchtime.   

Griffin says they also got burner phones so her mother would not know what they were doing.    

When he pulled up at the ranch at 7:35 a.m., he learned they were not expecting him.   

“I said, “Am I in the right place?’ and he said, ‘I don’t even know why you’re here.’ I said ‘Well, I’ve got these text messages,’” Griffin recalls telling Scott Robinson, who told him, “I didn’t order no hogs. That’s not my phone number.’”  

Griffin says he figured he had been set up. Not by Parker, but by her mother, Shona. Who else in the world would do this? He figured her mom was still trying to manipulate their lives. And what better way, Griffin thought, than to set him up with this bogus deal, knowing it is illegal to cross state lines with livestock and then get him busted for it.

“I was like, ‘Yeah this makes sense.’” 

Griffin thought he was going to jail.  

He spoke to Parker at some point while he was still at the ranch trying to salvage the deal, but he says she never indicated to him that anything had gone wrong, and certainly not of the criminal magnitude he would later learn about.  

He says he still had no idea what he was walking into when he arrived at the hospital in Idabel early that afternoon. The nurse at the desk did not speak to him when he asked for Parker’s room number but instead just pointed down the hallway.

“I was like, ‘Okay I’ll just find her room.”  

That was when he saw three officers walking toward him.  

“They told me to turn around and put my hands on the wall, and I said, ‘What’s going on?”  

They told him not to ask questions, handcuffed him, and took him to the police station. At that point, he still thought it was about the illegal hog transport.

“That dadgum Shona done called the law,” Griffin recalled thinking.

Instead, he learned his girlfriend was not pregnant and that she might have been involved with the murder of Reagan Hancock.

But even as he made his statement to the officers, he says he still did not know that all the harassment and threats he believed he and Parker had been dealing with for months from her mother were fake.

“I still believed all of it.”  

He says he had no idea Parker was not pregnant and no clue that she had gone over to Reagan Hancock’s home that morning and killed her. He also testified that he did not know her to carry a scalpel in her purse like the one found buried in Hancock’s neck during her autopsy.

What about the red flags?

“You did not want to do this,” Crisp had noted as Griffin began his testimony, acknowledging the discomfort he felt having to explain how he could have ignored all the warning signs. The soft-spoken 27-year-old remained stoic through more than five hours on the stand. But in the end, his pain was unmistakable.

“You’re not perfect, but you did not have anything to do with this, did you?” Crisp asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“How has this affected your life?”

“Pretty much ruined my whole reputation. Slandered my name, my brothers, my mom. I lost my job over it. Still trying to figure out stuff today. Worst thing I’ve ever had to live through, for sure.”

Parker’s defense attorney Jeff Harrelson spent more than 40 minutes listing red flags Griffin either recognized or at least should have seen, one by one. Griffin acknowledged all of them. He also admitted he was not in love with Parker at any point.

“But you did like the idea of tractors, trucks, side-by-sides, and this land over there in Oklahoma. It was a “dream come true.” Taylor wasn’t dream come true, that life and lifestyle was your dream come true,” Harrelson said. “You had a lot of your decisions influenced again and again about the hope of money.” 

On redirect, Crisp came back to follow up by noting that Harrison “went over what a good con artist Taylor Parker is.”

“So if you identified a red flag, she’d just double down on it. She’s great, she’s really good at it.”

“She was the best I’ve ever seen,” Griffin said.

“Probably no shock to you that they’re trying to make you look like an idiot, but she manipulated you. You understand that, right? ”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell Momma bye”   

The jury also heard Monday morning from a woman who was incarcerated at the Bi-State Jail with Parker in December 2020, two months after Parker’s arrests. Shonnaree Yeager was in for probation violation and working as a trustee at the jail. She sent a letter to the DA’s office in March, telling them Parker told her some details about what happened on the morning of the murder.

Yeager testified that Parker told her about how she initially tried to use a knife that was in Hancock’s home on the morning of the murders to cut the baby out but found that it was not working the way she wanted it to. Yeager testified that Parker told her she went out to her car to get the scalpel blade she kept in a medical kit in her purse to finish the job. 

Parker allegedly told Yeager that she placed the baby up against Reagan’s cheek and told the baby, “Tell Momma bye.”

Yeager told the jury Parker said her she headed to the hospital with the baby so she could get a record of her birth. She also told Yeager she pulled over when the baby stopped breathing and did not mention that she stopped because she had gotten pulled over. She said she tucked the cord into her pants and that EMS crews assumed the baby was hers. 

While Yeager testified that she did not receive anything in return for the information she provided about the case to the prosecutor’s office, Harrelson noted that she sent the letter to the DA’s office while she was hoping to have her probation reinstated. Yeager acknowledged that she was hoping to get out with time served on her charges in Bowie County, as well as charges in Cass and Miller County, but she did not hear back from the DA’s office until after she served her time.  

After testimony wrapped up Friday, Parker’s defense team immediately moved for a directed verdict, essentially asking the judge to throw out the capital murder charge against her. They argued that a fetus that has not been born is not alive under Texas law and therefore cannot be kidnapped.

Judge John Tidwell denied that request and the defense rested its case without bringing a single witness. Tayor Parker confirmed she had been informed of her right to testify and declined to take the stand. Her mother, who featured prominently as one of Parker’s faked personas, is on the witness list for the State but did not take the stand during the guilt or innocence phase of the trial.

The trial is set to resume with opening arguments on Monday.