In-depth Coverage of the Taylor Parker Sentencing Trial

[00:00:00] Speaker ?: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [00:03:00] Speaker 1: Thank you. [00:03:30] Brittany DeFran: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Brittany DeFran. You're joining us here in the KTAL News Now Digital Streaming Center, where we're live reporting breaking news and developing stories in real time. We're covering the most important stories of the day and diving deep into issues you care about. Now, our NBC6 News team has been following this trial since day one. And thanks to our digital executive producer and courtroom reporter, we've been able to get an inside look of that courtroom, and we're very appreciative of that. So, before we get and jump into this, you know, I wanted to let you know that if you're looking to get caught up, you can follow everything on KTALnews.com. We have in-depth coverage there, articles starting from day one of this trial. And so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so to give you a little bit of background, if you are joining us for the first time today, we're talking about the Taylor Parker Capital Murder trial. A Bowie County jury convicted Parker on October 3rd of capital murder and kidnapping in the death of 21-year-old Reagan Hancock and her unborn baby, Braxton Sage. Now, the same jury actually is hearing her testimony in the penalty phase of the trial to determine whether she should get the death penalty or life in prison. And so, as I mentioned earlier, just a few minutes ago, I am joined right now by Carolyn Roy, our digital executive producer and courtroom reporter. She's been there every single day, seeing all the details. And so, you know, there is a lot of information that she's going to be able to provide for us today. So I want to say thank you. And hey, Carolyn, how are you doing today? [00:05:06] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm good. How are you? [00:05:08] Brittany DeFran: Doing very good. Thank you for joining us. So we're going to go ahead and jump into this here. Let's just start from the top of this week. So we start with hearing from Parker's first ex-husband, and he took the stand once again. And so what can you tell us here about maybe what he confirmed for the prosecution as they argued, you know, something involving handwriting? Can you tell us a little bit about that? [00:05:32] Speaker 1: The third time that Tommy Wake Casey has been called to the scene, and this time he was called to testify to recognizing his former wife's handwriting. And that was just a setup to be able to bring in the handwriting expert that they brought in after that to talk about who wrote those two confession letters, which I think we've touched on before when we've talked about the jail framing plot that prosecutors have already brought up in the trial. So this week they introduced those letters, and so his testimony was preparing the jury to hear from the handwriting expert and then to see the letters. So we learned that, you know, Tommy Wake Casey recognizes wife's handwriting. He even said on the stand that she would often sit there and practice forging her grandmother and mother's signatures and had them down, and that he was calling out the actual numbers or letters that he recognized in some of the handwriting samples that were recovered from a search of Parker's jail cell at the Bi-State Detention Center. So he was only on the stand for maybe 20 minutes, and most of it was him just looking at the documents one by one and confirming that he recognized her handwriting. And those were basically baseline samples for comparison for the experts. [00:06:46] Brittany DeFran: Yeah, no, so we definitely have talked about that a little bit in regards to the documentation that we talked about. We did in-depth coverage on that as well. We did a Facebook Live, so you can find more details on that there, and as well as on ktalnews.com. So we've touched on that a little bit, and so can we go a little bit deeper here on what else these, you know, now we know the fake confession letters, what came out about that, any gang initiation, alternative story relation to that? [00:07:20] Speaker 1: So this is where prosecutors say Taylor Parker attempted to lay out an alternative scenario in which she was actually the one that was a victim victim, and that she was the victim of a gang initiation, and it was a very, very elaborate story that she told in these letters. They were very similar in a lot of ways. They started the same. They ran through the same chain of events. The first one was 10 pages. The second one was 13 pages. These were the letters that she tried to get her fellow inmates to actually copy into their own hand and then distribute when they got out of jail. And so this was the idea that the prosecutors have presented is that she was, again, the victim of, like, a kidnapping and abduction scheme, and there's a couple different reasons for that that she gives depending on which letter you're reading or what other correspondence that has also been recovered in which she tells slightly different variations of the story. But in one case, it's because they believe they know about her inherited money, you know, from being a syrup heiress or a Morton Salt heiress or oil and gas money or her father getting a big windfall from a lawsuit judgment. So that's one scenario where this gang has heard that she has this money. They overhear it, and they start tracking her in order to break into her safe or something like that, that they lure her to her kidnapping by having someone pretend to break down on the side of the road and somehow knowing that she was going to drive by, see it, pull over, and ask if she could help. And she claims as the real killer in these confession letters, and I think she signed them Alexandria Dale, which is not a name we've heard before. I think one of the investigators on the stand said this week that he believes it's just another made-up name. So in the first letter, signed it Alexandria Dale, but after the inmate that she ends up trying to frame arrives in the jail, she's suicidal, she's not in a good place. Parker apparently, according to the prosecutors, decided she would be a good person to frame. So in the second confession letter, when the first inmate she tried to get to copy this fake confession and get it distributed to the local paper and to the sheriff's office and to her attorney, that didn't go out, or maybe she didn't know if it went out and didn't hear anything about it, so she wrote another one. So in that second one, she makes more references and embellishments to it being this Hannah Hollander fellow inmate. So, and in this whole plot, it describes in disturbing detail, really, details about the crime that only the real killer could have known. So that's what the investigator said on the stand. There are details about how Reagan was killed, about the weapons that were used, that were never found, things about Taylor herself and her life and travels that, again, only the killer could have known. So they sort of pieced this together with some of those factors, things only the killer could know, the handwriting, and the fact that the fingerprint analysis found that only Parker's fingerprints were found, at least on the 10-page letter. Interestingly enough, I don't think they went over, they talked in detail about what prints were on the 13-page letter, but it was only her prints on that first letter because she handed it to her fellow inmate, Phyllis Dawson, who she called Granny, in a sealed envelope and asked her to copy it, and Phyllis never even opened it. She said it wasn't for her. We'll talk more about Granny's testimony here in a bit, but anyway, so this was all about the details in the confession letter, helping kind of make the case that Parker was trying to plot, plotting to frame someone else, and then after this other inmate showed up in the jail, specifically she tried to frame that inmate. So that's the gist of what's in the confession letters, and like I said, pretty disturbing in graphic detail about the killing itself. She said she was knocked out. Somebody gave her an injection of some kind of drug on the side of the road. She claimed she, well, in the confession letters, she is writing it from the real killer, so to speak, it's very melodramatically written. There's terminology and slang used in there that the investigator on the stand said she was trying to sound like a street thug, and it is a bit eye-rolling, some of it. It's, like I said, melodramatic. But she basically describes that this group, this gang members, abducted her. She woke up with her face against the window, but knew she was in her boyfriend Wade's car from the smell of the clothes, so apparently they abducted her, threw her in the backseat of her own car, and then took her to Reagan's house, the scene of the actual murder, where she was supposedly still knocked out in the back of a car when Reagan was being assaulted by this group of thugs, as she wanted people to believe, and that they, she came to and they dragged her in, and she, again, melodramatically describes how heroically she tried to lift her body up, but it wasn't working because she was still drugged. Little flashes of details, which something that Taylor Parker has proven to be masterful at, I don't know if masterful is the right word, but plentiful, little details to try to make the story seem real. So she describes hearing, like, the clashing of silverware when she's dragged into the house, and they're telling her to get up, and she's, in a separate eight-page letter that she wrote to her jailhouse lover, she fills in the details sort of mirroring these confession letters of the same exact chain of events from her perspective in an attempt to corroborate this confession. So then she goes through slipping in Reagan's blood and how awful it was and asking Reagan who did this and Reagan supposedly gurgling them, meaning the gang members. It's very graphically detailed. And so quite a bit of testimony was spent going over what was in those letters. The jurors were given transcripts because it was a lot of writing on a lot of pages in this handwriting that the handwriting expert said. They couldn't confirm conclusively that it was her hand that wrote it, but that there were signs that whoever wrote it was trying to disguise the writing. So there were pauses, you know, pen lifts, things like that. And so whatever conclusion the jury might come to, that was the evidence presented to them, basically making the case that Taylor created these letters in order to try to get herself exonerated because she was also, at the same time, telling a bunch of people in the jail, whoever would listen, that there was evidence that the DA's office was destroying, keeping out of being included in the investigation because they were in her mind just after her and that she was innocent. [00:14:13] Brittany DeFran: So you definitely brought up a few things I want to follow up with you on. In regards to the prosecution trying to claim that Parker is a handwriting expert, so they were trying to argue that to the jury. Is that correct? [00:14:28] Speaker 1: That Taylor Parker is a handwriting expert? They brought a handwriting expert to the stand who examined the documents that were confiscated from her cell so that they sort of had a, I forget what you call it, but a baseline, I'm thinking baseline, a sample, a sample of what is believed to be her real handwriting to compare to the handwriting found in the confession letters. So these, you know, the testimony from that handwriting expert sort of explained, you know, how they examine what they're looking for, they examine sort of, and they also explain just how people's handwriting develops and you do develop a distinct style and that if experts look at handwriting, they can find sort of those hallmarks of distinct styles from a given known writer. So that testimony was really just to establish that even though they couldn't conclude that the confession letters, which were written like in print for one thing, at a certain slant, it was actually, you could see in the confession letters that it was, on some pages the writing was more slanted or more sloppy. One of the things the handwriting expert explained was that there's certain levels of sort of handwriting expertise. You know, some people have really good handwriting, it's very easy to read, it's consistent, it's neat. Those are a higher level. And then there are some people who, you know, the best they can do is maybe a mid or low level. So it might be sloppy, it might be inconsistent, you know, things like that. And so they did determine that Taylor's actual handwriting from her actual rights, you know, documents, showed that she was a high level. And this theory that handwriting experts use is that people can write less than their level, so if they write really neatly at that high, consistent level, they are also capable of writing at a lower, inconsistent level. Whereas people who have very bad handwriting at the lower level can't write better than that level, if that makes any sense. So they use that to basically, as evidence for the jury to consider that it's entirely possible that these letters were written by Parker and that she just tried to disguise her handwriting. [00:16:38] Brittany DeFran: Thank you for clearing that up. So, all right, so we have an understanding there of those confession letters, you know, the detail that Parker goes into there trying to, as the letters say, you know, a description of how the crime looked. And so you brought up a name there, Granny. And so I wanted to kind of follow up with you on that name. And then just a few others here as well that I believe may have played a role as well in these letters. If you can tell me who is B. Romsey and who is Shana Jagger, can you tell me a little bit about these three individuals? [00:17:17] Speaker 1: Yes. So those are all inmates who were in the bi-state jail with Taylor Parker at the time this plot was developed. They each had a role and a master plan that prosecutors say Parker developed and planned out to, again, exonerate herself by making it look like someone else might have done it. And that included finding witnesses that would say an exact description that Taylor had written a script for to provide to police. It included planting evidence. It included planting a suicide note for the inmate that Parker was allegedly trying to frame. And so each person in that plan had a role. And so the names you just listed, Phyllis Dawson, who was known as Granny, Kaylee Bromsey, and Shauna Ree Yeager, and another individual, Lana Addison, was also someone that Taylor tried to recruit into her plot. Lana was someone that Taylor had actually become romantically involved with in the jail. And so they laid it out how Parker tried first to get Shauna Ree Yeager to take a copy of the first confession letter and make handwritten copies of it to distribute to the newspaper because she used to work at the newspaper, the Texarkana Gazette, and also to the sheriff's office and to Parker's defense attorney's office. But Shauna Ree didn't do it. And so she kind of fell out of favor with Parker. Or at first, I think, because Parker, again, didn't get the response that she was hoping for, because, again, these were supposed to be sort of carried out of the jail by these inmates as they left and distributed after they got out, because you can't get these out without doing that, without sending them through the mail and therefore probably being open and read. So when Shauna didn't do that, Parker went to Phyllis Dawson, who she called Granny. I looked up her age, and she's only 64 or 65 years old, but she is Granny-like. When she took the stand, she just looked like a sweet little old lady. She was very earnest, if not unintentionally funny. So it was one of the lighter examinations so far in this trial, because she described how, for example, that when she was given the letter to copy and distribute after she got out of jail, that she didn't do anything with it. She didn't open it. She said it wasn't for her. She was praying to God about what she should do with it. And she said she never got an answer. So when she got out, she just put it on her table, or I think she said under her table. She stuffed it away somewhere safe. And apparently, Parker did offer all of these inmates some level of money to do this. She thought she might have $15,000 coming to her to do that, and also to find witnesses that would claim to have seen things they did not see. So when the Texas, when the investigator showed up at her door looking for documents from Taylor Parker initially, Granny testified that she told him that she didn't have nothing, which the way she said it made everybody laugh. But then she said that the investigator told her, if we do get a search warrant, and we will, and we find any of these documents, you could be charged with being accessory after the fact to murder, or attempted murder. Basically, he told her she could be charged. Now, she'd been in and out of jail on a number of relatively petty crimes and things like that. She sure didn't want to go back. She said she was scared. So that's when she said, they're over there. And everybody, just the whole courtroom broke out and laughed her because of the way she said it. She flipped pretty quickly. But the investigator said he still had to tell her a few times. Even after that, you weren't going to get paid, Granny. But she was such a character that even the assistant district attorney accidentally called her Granny a few times, even though that's just the nickname Parker gave her. But her role in it was to find witnesses who would say very specific things. She even gave Granny, a.k.a. Phyllis Dawson, a puzzle book right before she left the jail. And in that puzzle book, on the 165th page, Parker had given her the book, or she said, I had a package for you. Look on page 165. It's my favorite puzzle. But actually on that page was a very detailed description of the so-called witnesses, or what the, not that, but what the witnesses should say to police about seeing a girl knocked out on the side of the road, what she was wearing, that the people, that people would drive by and create, you know, sort of third-party witnesses that could corroborate those claims and things like that. But again, in this puzzle note, this puzzle book note, she said, you know, find, you know, I trust you, Granny, to find people who will really sell this story. So it was very, very blatant. So that's Granny's involvement in the master plan. And then Kaylee Bromsey was another inmate who, I think it was after maybe Sean O'Ree Yeager didn't come through in her role, she asked Kaylee, no, it was Phyllis that she kind of did the second. No, Phyllis was the first. I'm getting them flipped around. But anyway, let's go back to Kaylee. Kaylee came in and she was not in the segregated pod with Parker for long, about three weeks in January 2021, when Parker, I guess she got in a fight. And so she was put into the segregated pod with Parker. And so Parker calmed her down. She said she was a bit spastic. So Parker calmed her down, befriended her. And then when Kaylee asked for some coloring material, because, you know, in prison you can read, you can color, that's about it. Like, there's not a whole lot to do. So she asked her to borrow some, like, reading or coloring materials. And Parker said, there's something you can do for me, basically. And she asked Kaylee to plant evidence and to also plant a suicide note in Hannah Hollander's jail cell. Because she, when she, I guess when she, she shared a jail cell with her, it must have been when they were in that pod together. Because they were all in that segregated pod. So that was Kaylee's role. She, Parker, took a notebook, which is how she transported a lot of her notes and communications. And actually, because she had so many corrections officers, either completely snowed or sort of bullied into submission with threats of, you know, grievances. Which can really hang up a jailer and threaten their job and livelihoods, as we learned this week. So she actually had jailers transporting these notes in books and notebooks from her, where she's supposed to be in isolation, to other inmates, trustees, people in the general population. So she got, anyway, she got this notebook to Kaylee that had, wrapped in plastic, some of her own hairs, Parker's hairs. And she gave her instructions to, when she got out of jail, to go to a specific place. She gave her a map and everything on the side of the road, and to pick up a beanie. And she called it a toboggan, but, you know, a knit cap. And she wanted her to put Parker's hairs in that beanie and leave it on the side of the road in that very specific place. And then she wanted to have her either call police or leave it there for someone else to find it. And she also wanted Kaylee to contact a man by the name of Chase Carter, who was a former lover of Parker. Someone, as we were made to believe during testimony this week when he took the stand, someone that had been involved with Parker when she was still married to Tommy Way Casey. They had ended that romantic relationship, but they stayed friends. So, apparently, Parker thought that Chase Carter was the kind of guy who might be willing to help plant evidence. She'd previously reached out to him, actually, about a month before the murders and asked him if he knew anyone who could help her take care of a problem with a family member that she didn't really want to get into the details of, but was offering $1,500. Nothing ever came of that, he testified, and he never knew exactly what she wanted him to get someone to do. So, that was Kaylee's role, basically. She described how Parker actually practiced and practiced the suicide note to get it just right. She was told to find it under Hannah Hollander's table in her cell to say that she sleeps on the floor, and so she looked up and saw it. If there's anything that Parker does consistently, it's to come up with details and detailed plans. [00:25:52] Brittany DeFran: Yeah, definitely a lot of new details and evidence presented to the jury this week. Also, testimony. A lot more people, it seems, that we heard from this week as well. Even one more person took the stand that I wanted to bring up, and you mentioned them briefly. Parker's jailhouse lover, a former jailhouse lover. Can you tell us a little bit about what the jury learned through that testimony? [00:26:20] Speaker 1: Yes. So, this was a woman who, I think she was a trustee working in the laundry, sanitation services at the Bi-State. She testified that she got to know Taylor when she was bringing her her laundry. She didn't know exactly what Taylor was in there for or anything, and they just became friends. They showed us a note that looked like it was a note, maybe, that Taylor initially sent to her, flirting with her, telling her to smile, and telling her her name. I think she introduced herself, basically. So, they developed this friendship that turned into more, turned into a romance, at least a jailhouse romance. But it did continue after Lana left the prison, the jail. And so, interestingly, on the stand, and understandably, she was not thrilled about being there, because this has just been very difficult for their whole family. She has children. They've been humiliated. She's been humiliated. She broke out in hives on the stand. You could see them, and you could see that she was itching. I think she even said something about it, and just that she was nervous. She was nervous about the whole thing, and upset with Taylor. And that became clear when, for the first time in the trial, somebody giving testimony, somebody on the witness stand, actually directly addressed Taylor herself. She accosted her pretty angrily when she was testifying about how she was starting to question Parker's version of events. You know, after she came to learn what Parker was in there for, and Parker was telling her all these tales about how she was innocent and framed, and how it was Hannah Hollander. Lana said that she started to, whether Parker's story was true or not, she wanted to find out what exactly happened, and so she was asking questions, basically. And in the process of explaining what some of the questions were that she had for Parker, she actually turned to Parker directly and yelled at her that she lied to her. You know, how could you do this? That you did what you did to my family. I'm trying to remember the exact quote, but it's on our website in that story. It was pretty dramatic. It looked like at one point she was going to jump out of that stand. She didn't, and she continued with her testimony. There was no reaction from Parker either, really, that I could tell. Her back is to the gallery. But she didn't move. And then throughout the rest of her testimony, she, if looks, could kill. I mean, she had a few times she glared at Taylor truly daggers. But she testified in detail, though, about what Parker wanted her to do, which was to, I think, deliver the letters. After maybe the first two failed, or one of them failed. She also wanted to, she wanted to sort of discredit Shauna Reager because she had failed to come through for Parker. And she was maybe afraid that that other letter would get out and it would mess up her plan because she had sent, now she was trying to send out another letter. So that was part of her role. And she also, her main role in a literal master plan written out that was found in Lana's cell after she contacted authorities because she didn't want any part of it when she realized it was too sketchy to be involved. Lana's role, and even in letters that Parker had written to Lana, like love letters, was, you're my lead witness. You're going to help corroborate what, you know, I'm going to give you some of these details. She had a cheat sheet, bullet point list of sort of details from this, you know, bogus alternative scheme. And Lana was going to give some backing to that, I guess, with authorities when it came time. None of that ever happened. The plot failed because Shauna Reag came forward and later Lana did and there was an investigation launch. That's how the investigator ended up over at Granny's house looking for documents. So it didn't end up working, but it is just more evidence that the prosecution feels is pretty relevant in this sentencing phase of the trial. Just to show that the scheming continues, it seems there is no evidence of any remorse and still no taking responsibility for what happened. [00:30:40] Brittany DeFran: Yeah, no, I think for me, just from hearing from a few things you shared, the most shocking thing was Lana addressing Parker directly. So that must have been, you know, just seeing that for the first time, for that courtroom to see that for the first time must have been, you know, interesting to see or, you know, for the jury as well. I'm not sure if that's what they're paying attention to, but just everyone else in the courtroom. [00:31:06] Speaker 1: There have been times where there have been people on the stand that I've wondered, you know, if Taylor's looking them in the eye. You know, I've seen a few of them look at her or look in her general direction. I've seen others avoid eye contact. You know, witnesses have to pass that, the desk, the defense table as they walk in. But one that did not have to walk in that way and was allowed to walk in from the judge's quarter side of the courtroom was Homer Hancock, so that he didn't have to walk past her anywhere near her. And it may have been as much for her protection as anything else. So, yeah, and it has been interesting to, you know, you try to tell if there's any body language that tells you anything. And up to that point, there just hadn't been any direct eye contact, at least from the people in her life. I did see one investigator look her right in the eye, and it was noticeable. That investigator clearly has seen a lot and apparently is not very impressed with what she's done. [00:32:14] Brittany DeFran: All right, we're going to go ahead and move forward a little bit, you know, still on the topic of letters, because there was also another letter that was written, and the prosecutors say Parker wrote not only a confession letter, but found a letter written to the FBI, and this letter was found in Parker's cell. So what did the jury learn about these letters here? [00:32:38] Speaker 1: So, well, the FBI letter was never sent, but it was several pages, and they did show it in court this week, and it was a letter offering her services to the Federal Bureau of Investigations to help solve cases. And in exchange for that, she was hoping that she could get some help with her case. She did not mince words about that. She said that she was charged with a crime, of course, that she said she didn't do, that the prosecutors wanted the death penalty. She said she'd come to peace with whichever she got, life or death, but that she had one she preferred more than the other. She didn't say which one, but I think we all know. And she then went into detail about why her services were so valuable, or would be so valuable to them. And this was the part of the letter that was very striking in a sense, that it seemed like she really was leaning into her now experience, as she put it, with criminals having been in the jail, apparently. She said she wanted to work for the FBI on the inside. But she wanted to, you know, tell them that she is, told them she is manipulative, that she can use her sexual charms to influence both men and women, that she understands the psyche of a criminal and their motivations. She even kind of told them what their job was and talked about how, you know, when you're putting a case together, it's a puzzle and you're trying to fit it together and you come up with a theory. But sometimes what you think happened is not what happened or why it happened or how it happened. And so if you read this letter in the context of what Taylor Parker's accused of doing and how she's behaved ever since, because the question of the motivation for what she did, you know, prosecutors say she did it to keep Wade Griffin from leaving her. But, you know, there's an undercurrent of it. It might go deeper than that. It was a lie initially to keep her, to keep him from leaving. But she also was clearly motivated by wanting to show everyone who was accusing her of lying, because she was, that they were wrong. So just interesting sort of psychological, contextual things about that letter. And there's some excerpts from that letter in the story from that day on our website. I think that was, it might have been Tuesday, the FBI letter, if not Wednesday, but it's on our website. Just really, again, kind of disturbing. It's almost like she's telling on herself that she has a criminal mind because she's telling them she knows how criminals think. And it's not just from hanging out with them, basically. [00:35:10] Brittany DeFran: Yeah, and so, as Carolyn mentioned, we have that information on our website. You can go check out those stories. We have in-depth coverage. I see a few of you guys giving us some comments here in our Facebook. You can go ahead, if you have a question, you can go ahead and put that in there. We're here to answer all your questions here. And so we're going to just continue talking a little bit about this. And so, something that I was curious that I wanted to ask you, Carolyn, just in regards to how those letters were found, the letters to the FBI, how were they found? How did the prosecution get their hands on that? Can you tell me a little bit about that? [00:35:50] Speaker 1: So, the FBI letter was found among the documents that were confiscated from her cell when they shook it down, I think, as part of the investigation into the framing scheme. So, yeah. Like a file, which I learned, didn't make sense, but I learned that inmates will often write legal on a folder or a file in their cell because it has to be, that's privileged information, but often there'll be things in there that have absolutely nothing to do with their cases. So, some of those documents and other documents found in our cell. It was one of them. [00:36:23] Speaker ?: All right. [00:36:23] Brittany DeFran: Thank you for that. And so, I'm going to move forward and talk a little bit more here, or question about some more things, some more evidence that was presented to the jury to kind of paint a picture of Parker. So, it looks like they kind of talked a little bit about Parker being fascinated by the image of herself on the news and watching herself through our coverage on KTAL. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, how this was presented to the jury and a little bit about that information that was shared? [00:37:01] Speaker 1: Yeah, there was actually, all week long, there were little nuggets and notes along the way about her fascination with, maybe with fame and fame-seeking, also with her coverage of her own case, more claims of a Netflix deal being in the works and a documentary about the trial that would, you know, include the results of the trial, which for, she told several inmates that she thought was going to end very well for her, she was going to get off. But, yeah, so yesterday they actually showed video of Parker watching KTAL News at 10 on the day in the first part of the trial when body cam video was played in court for the jurors of the traffic stop that showed Parker, you know, with the baby in her lap and everything, with an unresponsive baby, traumatic video, really. You've got a woman who's claimed that she's on the side of the road, just gave birth on the side of the road, and it's Taylor Parker who's accused of capital murder on trial for it, but she was excited to watch the coverage, and I think she might have thought that that video would be played in the newscast. Of course, none of that video has been released yet to the public because the trial is not over, but she did ask to be able to be out of her pod and in the day room that night, which would be time well beyond the one hour a day she's supposed to be getting in isolation, and she got it. And so we saw the video of that. They played about an hour of it, and they just fast-forwarded through it just to point out things about it. Like the other, it's four, I think, cells in a pod, and then it's sort of, they surround a shared common area or day room. There's a table. There's the email kiosk or text kiosk that inmates can use at certain times of the day, as I understand it. There's a shower, but the cells have doors with little windows on them, and you can see the cellmates in there, the podmates in there, looking through the window, watching her out of her cell when she shouldn't be, watching TV, holding the remote. You see the corrections officer come in at least three times to deliver dinner and, I think, to pick up the trays. And Parker's just sitting there chit-chatting with someone off-camera for quite a bit, a couple of animated conversations. There's no audio, but you can see that she's just having a good old time. And then when the news comes on, she actually stands up and watches the TV very intently. You can see when the coverage from that day ends, she goes back into her cell. And prosecutors use this as just one of the many examples of how Parker would get away with things that were against jail policy that she shouldn't have been getting away with, including being out of her cell far more often and longer than inmates in that pod, in that segregated area should be. So, because it was 10 o'clock at night, and she'd already had her rec time for that day. It wasn't the first time. It probably wasn't the last. It seems like it's still going on, even up to and including right now during the trial. There are other examples of fame-seeking. I could list them if you wanted me to, but I'd rather give you a few highlights. [00:40:09] Brittany DeFran: No, thank you for that. And I think it definitely points out to some things coming back around, in a sense, as the jury has previously heard that Parker has been able to manipulate her way around the jail cell and being able to get her way in things. So that sounds like just definitely another way that that has happened. And so that was a video that you guys watched. So that's another interesting one, too, in regards to who got that video and how that was. I guess, obviously, that was collected through the investigation, but interesting to know who got that video. Do you know that by any chance? Cam video from the state trooper who pulled her over. [00:40:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been played before, but this was a portion of it that hadn't been played for the jury. I mean, there are hours of footage from that and from her and her interrogation. So, yeah, it was just a portion of it that shows her. Actually, I can tell you what they were trying to do with that was, excuse me, I got it in the trial. They saw the entire, not the entire, but enough video to establish what went down from the time the trooper pulled Parker over that morning after the murder to when she went to the hospital in the ambulance. So it was that portion of the trial, it was the second week or so of the trial, I think it was September 12th, that jurors saw that video. So that's when, that night, Parker wanted to be out of her cell when she actually didn't have permission to be. But the COO said on the stand that she let her because they were very busy, she didn't want to deal with it, and she just let her. So they would let things slide. Other times they would, had really, like there's some corrections officers who were, you know, afraid she'd file a grievance or come up with some way to kind of get them in trouble. But there were actually corrections officers who seemed very friendly with her. There's one that even became such good friends with her that she's no longer a corrections officer there, but they still exchange letters and she still puts money in her inmate account. So she had friends in the corrections staff in the jail, and that probably explains some of the contraband that actually has been finding her cell too. I think I went off track there. I think we actually saw more video from that traffic stop. And in that video that the prosecutor showed, they were just showing that Parker seemed to be far more interested in going to the hospital in Idabel than actually doing the CPR on the baby in her lap. So the video showed how she was on the phone with LifeNet, who was trying to give her instructions on how to do CPR to try to revive the baby until someone could get there. But she kept getting distracted and yelling at the trooper that she wanted to go to Idabel and not go to Christa St. Michael in Texarkana. Of course, as the prosecutors pointed out, that was because Taylor knew at that point that all the hospitals in a 60-mile radius had been notified, so she couldn't go to any of those hospitals. Not that it still worked out for her, but she was adamant, upset, frantic, yelling and demanding. And they just wanted to show how she was spending far more time looking up at the trooper and not, you know, breathing into the baby's nose or doing compressions. That's what that was this week from the same body cam. [00:43:22] Brittany DeFran: And then so you guys got to, or the jury had a chance to see that body cam footage and also some images as well. And in this moment, I want to warn our viewers that we have here joining us and listening in on this live coverage stream here. You know, this is going to get a little hard to hear, so I do just want to warn you guys of the details. If it is too hard to hear, you know, just want to forewarn you guys. But we're going to talk a little bit about some of the images that were shared of baby Braxlin Sage. You know, those were shared to the jury. And could you just tell us a little bit about, you know, what that, you know, the details that that image shared? I know that it is hard to see and describe, so thank you, Carolyn, for doing this for us. [00:44:14] Speaker 1: The reason that they had to show those pictures, and it's become clear that they don't, they're not showing the jury these disturbing photographs from the autopsy or of the bodies or the crime scene for anything but to show exactly what Taylor Parker did and probably, you know, also to show why she deserves a death penalty at this point in the trial because that's what the purpose of the sentencing phase is. So none of the evidence or autopsy information about the cause of baby Braxlin's death was presented in the first part of the trial, the guilt and innocence phase. The prosecution felt they had enough on the capital murder and kidnapping charge to get her, to get the guilty verdict that they wanted and did get. So in this phase, they're using that evidence and testimony, again, to show the jury the cravenness of the crime, the brutality. And if a dead baby doesn't do it, it's, you know, it's hard to imagine what would. So they had to talk about what did cause the baby's death because it goes to that argument. So the medical examiner, well, before they actually brought the medical examiner to the stand, they actually brought Christopher Mason, the OB-GYN, who was actually Taylor Parker's OB-GYN to the stand. He'd been certified as an expert witness in that field previously in the trial. So they called him back just to talk first about the developmental stages of the fetus, when a baby starts to feel the sense of touch, when they start to feel pain, when they can hear voices, at what stages, when they're viable. At what point is a baby fetus viable, in other words, able to survive outside the womb, even if they're born early. So they established that, you know, that baby Braxton was 35 weeks along. She was viable in every way. And that at that point, she was certainly capable of hearing voices. Babies recognize their mother's voices and have an affinity for them. And they said, you know, even earlier than that in pregnancy. So they kind of established all that. They also established a baby's dependence on the mother while they're in the womb for oxygen and nutrients through the placenta and the umbilical cord. That was critical for the jury to understand when they went into the autopsy because it plays into the cause and manner of death that the medical examiner determined for baby Braxton. And that was essentially that baby Braxton was died as a result of being forcibly violently ripped from her mother's womb while her mother was being killed because babies depend on the blood flow from their mother for oxygen. If the mother has been severely beaten and suffered more than a hundred knife wounds alone, let alone the blunt force injuries, she's lost a lot of blood. And cesarean sections, even when they're in a controlled environment, are very bloody procedures. So too easily could someone bleed out if someone doesn't know what they're doing. It does not appear from the evidence and testimony presented so far that Parker had any intention of trying not to kill Reagan. But the point is she lost a lot of blood. So when a mother is hypotensive, doesn't have the blood pressure to pump blood around, the baby can easily go into distress quickly. And also there was actually a bruise on the baby's head that the medical examiner believed may have been caused or could have been caused at least by Reagan being kicked or punched in the belly before, you know, during the beating and before the baby was cut out. So he did determine that the manner of death was a homicide and the cause was that violent removal. And there was some testimony about how the uterus was actually cut on the back side, which in a normal cesarean, the doctors were cutting on the front side down low. Occasionally there's another variation, I guess, of the procedure where they do cut a little bit higher on the uterus, but it's all on the front. And at 35 weeks, that uterus is large because it's full of a 6- to 7- to 8-pound baby or more. So there's, as the doctor described it, as the medical examiner described it, the uterus is pushing up into the diaphragm. If anybody's ever had a baby, you know exactly what that feels like. There's not a lot of room in there. So he was describing how it would have been pretty brutal on top of brutal and horrific to have removed the uterus in that way, to have cut open into the uterus in that way, excruciating for Reagan, who is believed to have still been alive at that point. And we'll get to that in a minute. But also, you know, probably not a very pleasant experience for the baby. That was the autopsy because of the baby's death. But there was a little bit more in that autopsy because it involved a good look at the placenta as well. And I can get into that if we have time. [00:49:13] Brittany DeFran: Yeah, yeah. We do have a few minutes here. So, I mean, is there anything else that you think that is important to share with our viewers now in regards to that, like what came out in that autopsy that you still want to mention? [00:49:28] Speaker 1: I would say the other sort of main point takeaway from that testimony was that the placenta, which was recovered from the scene of the traffic stop when Taylor Parker was pulled over in decab on the morning of the murder. She initially had the placenta and the umbilical cord were still connected to each other and they were stuffed down her yoga pants. After Parker was taken to EMS, they actually bagged up that placenta. They kept it with her at the hospital. And I think later, you know, returned it to the baby when they realized that this wasn't her baby. And it was also included. It stayed with the baby for the autopsy process. And so the placenta is, I am not a doctor. So, just basically, it's an organ that is created in the process of the, you know, gestation and growth of the baby right inside the woman's body. It provides the nutrients. It's the umbilical cord that's attached to it. And so, and it comes out after a baby is born. An examination of this placenta showed that it had been torn out. It had jagged edges. It wasn't removed gently at all. So, basically, what the conclusion was, was this was no, I think in some of the, um, like the eight-page letter to her jailhouse lover, where Parker is sort of filling in the details from her perspective as the victim in this whole alternative scheme of gang initiation version, is that, you know, she did not want to do this, that Reagan took her broken hand and drew the scalpel across her own belly and all of this, and that the, that the baby's, that the sack just popped out on its own and that a leg just popped out. This was, in part, probably, besides to just make sure the jury understands how brutal and, and hardcore this had to have been. Um, and for Parker to continue with it, even at that point, um, was to just contrast it with her version of the story. You know, that, you know, that it just popped out. It did not just pop out. It was ripped out. And the reason they know that, and that Reagan was still alive, was because they also found something else in the placenta, which were fragments of one of her press-on fingernails. Um, and some pieces of grass, they said, organic material that appeared to be grass, and some strands of hair, in her placenta, which the prosecutor asked, um, the medical examiner, you know, whether that would be consistent with Reagan still being alive, or with the mother still being alive, if you find one of her own lead press-on fingernails, or whichever brand, purple with glitter on it, broken, um, actually embedded in the placenta. And the juror saw the pictures of that, so that they could understand that Reagan was grabbing and still trying to save her baby and protect her baby, um, even in her dying breath. So it was very difficult to, to watch, and it's even difficult to talk about, and probably, I'm sure, to hear. But this all goes to why the state believes that Taylor Parker deserves nothing less than the death penalty. [00:52:27] Brittany DeFran: And that's exactly what the jury is trying to determine, whether Taylor Parker will get the death penalty or life in prison. And so, um, as Carolyn has mentioned, that's why, uh, the prosecution is going into deep detail and providing, you know, uh, those graphic pictures and images and, and, um, allowing medical examiners to, um, you know, provide this critical information and in detail, although it may be hard to hear, um, you know, it is critical in, uh, you know, the decision that they, the jury will have to make. Um, and so, uh, yeah, I know Carolyn has something to add. Yeah. [00:53:00] Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, before they did the autopsy, testimony and, and show those photos, um, which also, by the way, show bruises on the umbilical cord, which, um, you know, indicates that maybe it was pulled or, or squeezed. Um, again, not a very gentle, um, removal there, but before they showed all of that, they, they actually brought, um, an Ida Bell detective to the stand who was called to the hospital. He was on his lunch break on the day of the murder. He gets a call from the patrol commander and says, we need to go to the hospital sometimes. We're not sure what's going on here. There's a woman who had a baby on the side of the road, et cetera, et cetera. They didn't know quite yet, but he had it up there. Um, and because there were already four officers interrogating, um, Parker in the ER downstairs, he went ahead and went up to the maternity ward to check on the baby. And he testified about what he saw and heard when he got up there. And I'm telling you that was actually one of the more difficult emotionally, um, testimonies to hear was this grown man, um, who was probably has seen a lot in his career, um, describing going, uh, being led into the locked ward by a nurse who was crying, who showed him to the room. And then when he arrived, he saw a baby laid out on a table with wires coming out of her and barely a heartbeat registering on the monitor and how, um, it didn't make sense to him. Um, he was, he was confused. He asked the nurse, what's going on here? Why isn't anybody doing anything to transport her to the children's hospital, like in Oklahoma city? And the nurse told him that the doctors had determined that she wouldn't make the flight, that she wasn't viable, that she wouldn't survive. Um, and he couldn't take it. He had to, he had to leave. And while he was describing that, he broke down on the stand and he had to stop for a second. Um, I'm telling you after that moment in the courtroom, there were, you know, the judge always warns when there's going to be difficult testimony or, or, you know, video or pictures, things like that. And he did warn before this, but, um, and some people did leave the courtroom, but I know there were family members in there, some members of Homer's family too. So it would have been like Reagan's family, uh, Reagan's in-laws, um, the grandparents of that baby, or at least the grandmother. Um, there were people there that were not related to the family that were crying. Um, the jury seemed focused. Um, I mean, inappropriately, um, sort of stone-faced. Um, so, I know the autopsy was graphic and horrible, but the sadness of seeing a baby who looked like she should have been healthy, the testimony was that she would have been born healthy under normal circumstances, that brought the sadness home, that it wasn't just, um, Reagan whose life was taken. It was this little baby. So it's very sad. And I think if anything stays with me from the trial, that might be it. [00:55:47] Brittany DeFran: As we mentioned, yeah, definitely really hard, um, to hear and see. So thank you again, Carolyn, for being our eyes and ears in that courtroom. And so we want to go ahead and tell you guys if you would like to get caught up on all the details and all the information, how everything is unfolding in that courtroom, you can head on over to ktalnews.com. You can see right here, we have in-depth coverage. We also have a quick links on our main homepage. You can actually click it and it says Taylor Parker trial. You can click that and it will take you to this page you see right here where, uh, it gives you a day-by-day coverage of what's taking place in that courtroom. And so just as we, uh, close here, Carolyn, I want to ask you just if there's... I apologize. If there is anything else that you would like to add before we end today's live stream. [00:56:38] Speaker 1: I think that, I would just say, you know, there was a lot to talk about this week. There was a lot of testimony. We almost barely scratched the surface. We got to some of the most important takeaways. But just to note, so far in this penalty phase of the trial, it's gone on three weeks now. There have been about almost 60 witnesses. We heard from 24 of them this week. So again, a lot of testimony. But a couple of things that we didn't get to today that is on our website to learn about that I thought were really worth mentioning and noting. Number one, Hannah Hollander, that inmate that was suicidal, that was described as a troubled woman with a meth addiction that Taylor Parker allegedly tried to frame. She has not been seen and cannot be found by law enforcement since her release from jail in May of 2022 of this year. Another interesting side note, and not so much a side note, is that a tranquilizer was found in a syringe in Parker's purse in the car on the day of the traffic stop. She told police it was a steroid for her animals. Turned out the lab said it was a tranquilizer for horses and cows designed to knock people out. And some of the testimony, by the way, on the stand involved basically the, you know, the prosecutors asking whether there was any indication. In fact, Parker's defense attorney himself noted there was no tranquilizer found in anybody in Reagan or Braxland. She didn't use it. So the prosecutor asked the medical examiner wouldn't have been at least humane to have done that, which drew an objection from the defense. And another one is the deviant books. There's all the books that were described by the investigator on the stand who actually had to sit down and read one of them, of these very, very dark selection of books that Taylor Parker has been interested in and particularly leading up to the trial. Very dark themes, things we probably don't want to discuss here. They didn't even want to discuss in court. Information about that testimony is on our website. And also, I think the, oh, big one, big one, the unaccounted time. And there is a map in the story on our website for that. I think it was Tuesday's story. But basically they laid out, the prosecutors laid out with some testimony and evidence and some GPS location tracking data to show where Parker actually went after the murders. And it wasn't directly toward Ida Bell. with that unresponsive baby in her lap that she actually took a little side trip. So there's a story on our website that explains exactly how much time that took and where police believe she went based on that location data and where apparently Reagan Hancock's cell phone went. And it's interesting to note that the timeline that they put together shows the last signal received by a tower from Taylor, from Reagan's cell phone, that is, is at 9.26 a.m., one minute after Taylor Parker was at that location by the river up north, googling directions to Ida Bell. So police believe that's where she ditched all the evidence that's still missing from the scene. So details about all that, it's a lot, but it's interesting. It's interesting, but the picture becomes ever more clear. [00:59:36] Brittany DeFran: Definitely. Yeah, no, thank you so much for those last tidbits there. We appreciate it. And again, as Carolyn mentioned, you can catch up with more in-depth detail in regards to what's unfolding in the courtroom on KTALnews.com. You know, there is only so much that we can touch on here. This is like a highlight version of what's going on. But again, we'll be here next Friday with more in-depth coverage. So thank you for joining us. If you have any questions, go ahead and leave them in the comments section. If we weren't able to get to them today, we can go ahead and look over them after, and we'll be sure to get to all of your questions. Again, thank you all for joining us, and I hope you guys have a great and safe weekend. [01:00:20] Speaker ?: Thank you. Thank you.