Hidden True Crime - What Netflix Left Out of ‘Maternal Instinct’ | Taylor Parker Unmasked by Criminal Psychologist

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Taylor Parker spent months convincing everyone around her that she was pregnant. The lie would end in one of the most shocking and disturbing crimes in recent history. In this episode, forensic psychologist Dr. John Matthias reacts to Netflix's 'Maternal Instinct', breaking down Taylor Parker's psychology, reported diagnoses, compulsive deception, and the motivations that may have led to the murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock and the theft of her unborn child. Lauren and Dr. John discuss what Netflix got right, what was left out, and the psychological red flags that appeared long before the crime. How does someone become so invested in a false reality that they're willing to destroy multiple lives to maintain it? Sponsors: OneSkin-Get 15% off OneSkin with the code HIDDEN at https://www.oneskin.co/HIDDEN IQBar- Get 20% off all IQBAR products, including the Ultimate Sampler Pack, plus free shipping—text HIDDEN to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. About Hidden True Crime What started as a simple conversation at their dinner table became a captivating podcast. Join the dynamic duo of Dr. John Matthias, a criminal psychologist, and Lauren Matthias, an investigative journalist, as they delve into the psychological facets of unthinkable crimes every week. Their unique perspectives and in-depth analysis offer a fresh take on true crime storytelling. Thank you for your support through sponsorships, subscribing, listening, and becoming a Patreon member at⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/HiddenTrueCrime⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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She also says that, quote, she has to piece together parts of other people's real lives to make her feel a little bit more real. And that speaks exactly to this idea of the false self. That's the false self. The false self is an empty self. It's a construct that doesn't exist. She doesn't have the self.

Hello, Hidden Jens. Hello. We are back at our table, our dinner table, also known as our podcast table. now it's um fair indistinguishable at this point yes yes and we are going to cover a wild Netflix documentary that just came out it is called maternal instinct it is heartbreaking it follows the story of Taylor Parker 27 year old Taylor Parker she is actually on death

row now she has been convicted because what she did was in 2020 she faked a pregnancy at 27 years old with her fiance Wade definitely didn't want to lose Wade and once she's nearing 10 months pregnant I guess she realizes gee there's something I need to do here she goes as far as getting a prosthetic you know belly all of this stuff and she then kills Reagan Hancock and Reagan Hancock's unborn baby brachslin by attempting a C-section in the home killing, 21 years old, leaving her Reagan's other child motherless, absolutely heartbreaking, her little girl. And this was traumatizing to watch, very traumatizing, but we have questions. This is one of those documentaries that is difficult to watch,

but we knew it was coming out. We knew we wanted to talk about it. I know that you've been actually preparing for this even before the documentary came out because this is a case that we want to talk about today. And you have your notes. You are ready. Yep. And yeah, you do have a lot of notes. And let me say too. So I knew about this case because when we first started this podcast many moons ago, it was shortly after we started that I remember this case came out. It was so bizarre. And so unusual. Fetal abduction is one of the rarest types of homicide, by the way. They are really unusual, especially fetal abductions of this nature.

And so where there's actually a procedure performed on the mother. Googling C-sections, how to do a C-section. Just one of her many Google search results. So I remember this case fairly well because there was a moment when I had talked to you about possibly covering it and I thought we were immersed in another case and it just it was overwhelming but I remember the case and I remember some of the details so there are elements of this case that were not discussed in the documentary that we'll be talking about and I think that that will give us a fuller picture of what happened but it is truly

it's truly a sad case I mean I was I was very emotional I was surprisingly emotional during parts of this documentary. Yeah. Yeah. Just the way it happened and. Reagan's family, the way they painted that for me was, yeah, really sad. Reagan's family and Kenley, the three-year-old, she was a three-year-old at the time of the murders. Hiding in the bedroom.

Hiding in the bedroom, but apparently she certainly heard what was going on, But there was some speculation that she actually came out at one point. And so just that situation is so heartbreaking. And I just can't even imagine that type of moment for any child. I mean, thankfully, she's alive, but still. And Reagan's sister and parents all saying that she was the best mother and that she was just born to be a mother and so excited to have her second little girl. There were sisters.

There was definitely some very emotional moments during this documentary and just in following this case in general. So it's a case that I wanted to talk about for a while. And we just haven't had the opportunity. And so when this documentary dropped, I thought it would be a natural opportunity to think about it. And we both watched it yesterday separately so that we didn't. So I haven't talked to you about it. Yeah. We're doing that again.

We actually surprised some people by some. of our conversation in the last documentary that we discussed by the way. Okay. And some people thought, did you guys rehearse this, that I was maybe being a bit of a pushing you, but no, that's actually how our conversation sometimes go. We, we, when we cover cases on our show like this from documentaries, our, our preference is to watch them separately or watch them at separate times so that we don't know what we're going to say that there's more fun today. Because sometimes we like to watch them together.

Although he pauses way too much. These notes, I'm like, sometimes I'm like, you know, I just want to sit with, you know, and watch. Yeah, there's no. There's no. But you're like pausing and taking notes. So, so I don't mind that either. There's no watching true crime documents for entertainment for me. It's, it's unfortunately because of what I do, I think it's always going to be worked to some degree.

Or at least, at least it's one of my psychologist friends used to joke all the time with me and say, do you ever take a moment not to think about true crime? Do you eat, breathe, and sleep true crime? Because that's the only thing that seems to be on your mind. I'm like, well, not really. It's pretty all-consuming. And we do have a life and a child. So the answer is that, yeah, that's not the only thing that occupies my mind.

But I do have a passion for, true crime and for figuring out motivations behind crimes like this. So with that, should we dive in? Do you feel like you've given us enough background? I think I've given enough background. That was another request we had to make sure that we give that background before we start talking. Because I think we always come on and aren't sure how much to say right away, because we know

that there are going to be spoiler alerts. But I think at this point, people understand that we are going to be be covering if you see the title to this, a Netflix documentary. So clearly there will be spoilers, but we hope you'll stay with us. So people have asked me about this, this crime, by the way, over the years, and people are just baffled by this crime. I think, by the way, the correct terminology for this type of crime, it's in the research is, it's referred to as fetal abduction by maternal eviseration. So that's a mouthful, but that's, That's how researchers refer to this type of crime.

There's different types of fetal abduction. This one happens to be by, you know, as you said, C-section by pulling the child out. That's maternal evisceration. So I think one thing to begin with is just to say that fetal abduction by maternal evisceration is very, very rare. They're extremely rare. And so the research on this type of crime is, it's. It's really hard to reach any conclusions because there's just not a lot of data. If you want to do research, the more data you have the more solid your conclusions are going

to be and there's just not that much data. So between 1987 and 2011, there's only been 15 completed cases. So 15 completed non-family cases. When you say completed, you mean... Cases where the baby was removed and there was a data. there was a homicide. Okay. And where the, where the offender, the perpetrator, was not a family member.

So they wouldn't, if it was a family member, that presents a little bit of a different situation. So in these cases, typically they're strangers. So over a period of over 20 years, you have 15 of these. So you have less than one per year. And if you think about the millions of people in this country, right, that's a very, very small number. So we don't see a lot of these crimes. There should be zero. There should be zero.

Agreed. Right. But one a year. Wow. There should less than one. Less than one. Fewer than one. Fewer than one.

So I think I want to start with that because whatever, what I'm going to talk about is going to be speculative. I will base some of this on research, research that we have. But we have such, there's so few cases here that, you know, to generalize or direct conclusions, about what's going on here would be very difficult. So what I'm going to have to do is I'm going to have to look more broadly at, say, personality disorders and violence or personality disorders and certain elements of, say, childhood that lead to personality disorders, that sort of thing.

So I'm going to look more broadly at the bigger picture. And I'm not going to, these elements may or may not apply to Taylor Parker. So I'm not going to say anything definitively about Taylor Parker because I really can't because, again, the data set is so small. I will talk about some of those findings, and I think that'll help us figure this out to some degree. But I want to start with, there's really a couple of interesting things going on here, I think. I want to start with during the, because this was in Texas, when there's a conviction, they have a death penalty phase to the trial.

And during that phase of the trial, the prosecutor led in his opening statements by referring to Taylor Parker as the following things. So he said, she's a liar, a con artist, an actress, and a fraud. And he would prove that she was all of those things, and therefore the crime was premeditated. It wasn't impulsive, that she had planned this out. those are the elements that the prosecutor really saw as being crucial to understanding this crime and understanding her, that everything about her is false. Everything about her is deception. And so everything. Everything. Everything. I think to me that was the most shocking thing. I'll just say this because I did understand the case I was getting into and I understood what happened,

but I did not understand all those little details and everything. When we say everything is deception, everything, everything, almost everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie. Or texts or, yeah. And so I think when I think about somebody who is lying about everything to the core, the first thing I think about is this idea of there's a British cycle analyst. I've talked about him a lot. He's someone I really respect, D.W. Winnicott. And he's a pioneer in our field. He's written some brilliant articles.

But one of the articles he wrote was in 1960. He wrote a paper called Ego Distortion in terms of True and False Self. The interesting thing about this article is that Winnicott was really one of the first psychoanalyst to talk about after Freud, to talk about this idea of the true and the false self. And while psychologists now, I think, we see the self as much more complex than this binary choice between whether you're true or false self. It's much more complex than that. There's not an all true self or an all false self. But the basic distinction, I think, is important.

It still holds up. And the basic distinction is that you can create a false self with a child by essentially placing the caregivers. demands on the child and not allowing that child to be who they could be. In other words, we've talked about this. There's something called mirroring. And the idea of mirroring is that the parent, part of the parent's job, if you want to raise a healthy child, is to mirror or reflect back to that child, emotions, thoughts, ideas, opinions, right? It's to have an interaction with that child that's not solely based upon your own needs and your own desires. your own perceptions of the world.

In other words, the parent's job isn't necessarily to an indoctrinate that child. Right. And it's not to dismiss that child. One thing that I have learned is that taking care of yourself isn't just about feeling good. Today, it is about making choices

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And after you purchase, they will ask where you heard about them, and please support our show and tell them that we sent you. For example, if a child says, Dad, I'm feeling really sad. The way I might mirror something back to that child is, I hear what you're saying that you feel really sad. Tell me what's going on. It's like chat GPT.

It's like chat TV. Yeah, chat TPT is probably more empathic than a lot of people. But these days. Very validating. Forget anything. Okay. But so yeah, I mean, chat TPT actually does therapy with a lot of people these days, by the way. Yeah, maybe though, because they didn't learn mirroring.

So keep going. Right. I don't know that chat TPT is going to be the best of marrying. But this idea of mirroring comes into play because in this interaction between parent and child, the question is, does the parent remain open enough to the child's wishes, emotions, feelings, behaviors, right? Their view of the world.

Is the parent acknowledging all of that in a way that the child can then become more spontaneous and become aware of their emotions, right? That's how you develop what I would call it true self. Is you're letting that child not only have, not only you're open to that child's complete experiences of the world, but you're acknowledging them, and you're letting the child figure that out for themselves. Yeah, okay.

If you're not mirroring back to that child, those elements of the child's upbringing, then, and you're mirroring back, say, for example, let's say I'm trying to indoctrinate that child. So let's say... When you say indoctrinate, you mean... I'm trying to force my opinions, beliefs, my... Let's use the example.

of sadness. The child comes up to me and says, Dad, I'm feeling very sad. And let's say I'm a father that's not comfortable with sadness and myself. Yeah. So maybe in that circumstance, my response to the child is, man up, I don't want to hear anything about sadness.

You need to be tough. Yeah. That would be an example of a situation where a parent might start creating a false self in that child. because the child wants to talk about their sadness. They want to experience it.

And we know that sadness is a big part of the human experience. It's real, man. So if I'm responding to that child and saying, I don't want to hear about your sadness, be tough, man up, get over it, then what I'm doing is I'm starting to negate a very important part of that child's experience. And not only am I not allowing that child to experience sadness, but now I'm setting the stage for that child not to greet. So let's say that,

let's say in that family, the family dog passes away within a few days of me saying that to the child. That child is not going to come to me and say, Dad, I'm feeling sad. Yeah. The dog will pass away, and even though the dog's beloved in this family,

I've set the stage for a situation where that child will not be comfortable expressing sadness anymore. And the child will think, I need to be a man and be tough for, dad and not express my sadness, even though the child's feeling sad. So there is a story. I'll just say this really quickly. When our son went to a dentist appointment when he was about four, he said, he said,

I'm scared. And the dentist said, don't be scared. Very sweet. Very sweet thing for a dentist to say, don't be scared. But our son looked right at him and said, it's okay to be scared. So clearly he did. I remember that was a really proud parenting moment. And it really threw the dentist off.

Oh, okay. He's like, who are your parents? But he's like, are your parents actually marrying stuff back to you? That's unthinkable. It was really funny. So we get this idea of the true and the false self from Winnie Kot. And it's if you want to understand, this is how I always like to start a lot of our shows. If you want to understand Taylor Parker, you need to understand this concept.

of the true and the false self, specifically the false self. Because there's a progression. So it starts with mirroring. It starts with this process of, right, you're trying to raise a child. You're trying to raise hopefully a healthy child that has the capacity maybe to experience emotions, to experience behaviors, right, that are going to be acceptable or a part of that child's upbringing. And their sense of self. And so this story, this Taylor Parker story, is about a false self that largely becomes dependent upon performance.

So you have this progression. So you have a child with what's called them authentic needs, which sadness would be an authentic need. So you have a child that's having these experiences of the world. And then the parent, part of the parent's job is to interact with the child. healthy way to acknowledge those needs. But if you don't acknowledge those needs, so sometimes the word therapists will use, clinicians will use is attunement. Are you attuned to the child? It's not just mirroring, it's also being in touch. You're finding some degree of emotional attuned with the child. And if you are, then the child feels validated. The child feels accepted.

And if you're not, so think about this, right? If you're not attuned to that child's needs, then you're negating that experience. And what happens over time if you do that enough is you start creating a sense of shame in the child. Yeah. And that's where shame comes into, this is where shame starts becoming associated with the false self. Because if you negate that child's experience long enough, and maybe not even long, it could just be one time. If I'm very punitive, if my child comes to me and says, Dad, I'm feeling sad.

And I say, shut up. I don't want to hear about it. Man up and be tough. It's probably going to only take one time for me to do that, for that child to shut down completely. So the next time that child feels sadness, not only would that child not come to me. But the child, if the child, let's go back to the example of losing the dog.

Let's say the dog passes away. the child feels sad because naturally that that's a natural response to losing a beloved dog in the family so now when the child experiences that sadness the natural response is going to be something like shame something like i'm feeling sad dad doesn't like that something must be wrong with me okay i need to be a man so this is where shame comes into the equation i'm oversimplifying this because this is a process that's going to happen over time, and it's probably not going to happen. It could, if there's a traumatic experience,

it could happen from one instance. But for the most part, this is an experience that's going to occur over time. So you have this, so if we're thinking about this process, you have this process of the child has a need, an authentic need,

there's a misattument to the child, needs, there's shame that starts developing, the child feels defective. And so what happens is the child will naturally start developing adapting. The child will start developing defenses to that. The child will have to defend against those feelings because the child's experiences are being negated and dismissed. Okay. And so are you saying this is what happened to Taylor Parker? This is the process, I think that, yes, that would apply to Taylor Parker, right?

So the problem with Taylor Parker is I don't, we don't know a lot about her childhood. That was an interesting actually part of the documentary because they brought in people to share about her childhood, including her friends, but it really, we only got kind of like her teenage years. And then the mother shows up as I'm sure they asked her mother, but she clearly declined. Her mother kind of appears, she doesn't appear in the documentary, but she becomes a figure. when somebody finally talks to the mother and says Taylor isn't who she says she is, but we don't know really anything about her. I'm sure they asked her to interview, but no one in Taylor Parker's family was in this documentary.

Yeah, right. We just, there's a real. It left a lot of mystery, but also it answered a little bit too, right? When you don't have any family or any history to speak of, it kind of says something. It says a lot, but it does leave, it does mean that our childhood is a bit of an enigma. We can work backwards. I'm going to be talking about some things from her childhood that are going to give us some clues. But a lot of times the cases we cover, we have a lot more clues.

We'll have instances of trauma from childhood. We'll have instances of abuse. We don't have that here necessarily. Well, they talked about low self-esteem. They did talk about her weight and that she had surgery, weight loss surgery. weight loss surgery and lost a lot of weight and sort of enjoyed the attention once she was able to feel, I think, prettier and present herself. So I imagine, I think I imagine and speculate that there was some low self-esteem.

It makes me wonder if people were kind to her growing up. We'll be talking about that in a minute. I think that's part of this equation. I'm jumping ahead. You're jumping ahead. I do that. It's okay. Well, I jump around.

I just, yeah. Okay. Keep going. So we have this process. So I'm at the point now where, right, you, you have this misattunement or this misalignment in terms of how the parent is reacting to the child's needs for authenticity. And by the way, when I talk about that, I mean, elements of the child's life that might be uncomfortable, not just so, not just sadness, but things like shame, fears of abandonment.

feelings of emptiness, these deeper existential things that all children feel, but often feel difficult to express. Feeling ordinary, feeling helpless, feeling dependent, feeling envious, feeling jealousy. These are all, these are all part of this equation. Feeling anger, feeling rage, fears of being unlovable. These are all normal parts of the human condition that in a perfect world, children, are allowed to express and the parent is capable of acknowledging. But when the parent doesn't, then you have this situation where the child oftentimes feels defective

or they feel shame, they feel fear perhaps at experiencing any of those elements I talked about, vulnerability would be another big one. If a child feels vulnerable, is the parent able to acknowledge that? So when a parent can acknowledge that, you get a child has to adapt to be able to cope with those emotions. So that's, you get, right, that's where defense mechanisms come to play. And what happens is the child, because the child's not able to start really experiencing what a true self would be like or an authentic self would be like, the child starts experimenting with very, ways to feel normal and to because these experiences are negated, the child has to cope.

The child's trying to find ways to exist in the world, even though this big part of their experience is negated. So there's a lot of ways they could do that. But one of the ways that children test the boundaries of feeling negated is by lying. And so you'll see children test the boundaries of what's possible oftentimes. by engaging in deception and lies, and they'll see how far they can go with it. This is where pathological line just sort of starts to take root, is what you're saying. Right. This is where, this is where line enters the equation in terms of line really,

the psychology behind line becomes, line becomes, okay, the simplest way to put this is to say that line becomes the way to regulate a fragile self. Lying. Okay, lying becomes the way. Wait, hold on. So, lying becomes. Lime becomes a defensive maneuver in order to protect a fragile self, a false self that is not able to acknowledge these experiences of vulnerability and the things I just talked about. Lying becomes a way to protect your fragile self, the fragile self. Essentially. It becomes a, it becomes a defense against the fragility of the self. vulnerability, shame. All of the above. All of the above.

A way to protect against a fragile self. It becomes a way to transform. Basically, it becomes a way to transform certain unbearable emotions or experiences into a reality that's more survivable, that they're able to cope with better. So if we go back to my simple example about the dog passing away and the child feels sad, and then the child knows they can't express that. They're experiencing grief.

They can't express it. It's not being acknowledged. The child feels defective or the child experiences some shame around that. The child may have to, in order to cope with that situation, the child may start creating fabricating and creating stories to make them feel better. Such as, well, the dog, for example, well, I didn't really. really love the dog anyway because the dog bit me all the time. And let's just say, let's just say that's false.

The dog, let's say the dog was wonderful. And the child loved the dog. Right. The child, the child is creating this alternative reality. Interesting. Lying about it, creating this alternative reality in order to regulate their emotions and their shame and their fragility. Interesting.

And so what happens is the child and this. I'm having a lot of aha moments. here. This goes back to what the prosecutor said about a child, about Taylor Carcker being a liar, a con artist, an actress, and a fraud. Let's isolate the actress part. So what happens when you have these steps and the child starts lying is it becomes a child in some way starts acting because they know their real experience should be sadness. Yeah. But now they're creating this this other narrative that negates sadness and it presents this fiction they're creating about the dog being cruel so that they can cope with their sadness.

It's false. But what's important about it is it becomes performative. And I think one of the key takeaways from looking at this particular situation is that one thing we know, one thing I can say definitively about Taylor Parker is that almost everything she's doing is a performance. Yeah. Everything. She's performing illness. She's performing medical conditions. She's performing wealth. How about, oh yeah, the performing of the wealth. How about? She's performing pregnancy. She's performing victimhood. Let me keep going. Well, I just want to performing her maternity pictures where she writes some photographers is what I

really want is laying with my belly up in the air on a horse. I'm like, how about just like, if you're like faking a pregnancy, like it's just bold enough to be like, hey, I want for, you know, maybe some maternity pictures. Like even that's mind-blowing. I mean, faking your pregnancy is mind-blowing. Faking your pregnancy so far that you're like, let's go get maternity pictures is mind-blowing, going so far as to doing that and saying like, I just want, talk about performative. I want my belly in the air on a horse and this is, I mean, that's when you're like, okay. Okay, okay, you know, wow. This episode is brought to you by IQ Bar, our exclusive snack, hydration, and coffee sponsor.

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these stories about the dog that are false, just so they feel better. The dog bit me. The dog bit me. I don't like the dog. The child's performing. The child's creating this elaborate fantasy and this fiction in order to feel better about the dog. So if a friend says, let's say a friend says to that child, hey, I, feel so bad your dog died.

The child will say, oh, don't feel bad. The dog used to bite me all the time. I hate that dog. So that's a really simple version of what's going on with Taylor Parker. To cover fragility of self, shame, vulnerability. So you get emotions. You get these lies. Right.

You get these lies and these fictions and these fantasies that are all performative. And here's what happens. I'm listening. The more you do this, and this is where I'm going to invoke the name of our podcast. This is where I'm going to say hidden. I get to say, I never, I never get to say hidden. It's our name for a reason. It's our name for a reason.

This is where the true self, in terms of Winnicott's definition, the true self that needs to feel vulnerable and sad and all those normal experiences I talked about, this is where the true self becomes hidden. The child starts hiding the true self and the true self either becomes lost or buried, negated, or erased. And in the case of Taylor Parker, I don't think there's a true self anywhere in sight. Anywhere.

There's no true self. Zero true self. There's no true self. I think that's what's most fascinating because isn't there like some true self in some people? I'm like, just like a little bit, like in there. You're like absolutely nothing.

Everything is a lie. You mean like everything. Everything is a performance. Everything's a lie. And so the true self becomes buried. I'm going to use the term hidden because that's my favorite word. So yeah. The true self is hidden.

It's hiding. It's in some cases, I think with her, it becomes erased. And if the true self becomes negated and erased, then that, person becomes utterly dependent upon this fiction, this false self. And that's what you have here. And not only do you have that, but there's another step here that's equally important. And that is because the person knows that they're operating from this false self, they're terrified of being exposed.

They're terrified of their lives becoming exposed because that would mean that the very basis of their identity, which they don't know anyway. But whatever their self is would become even more fragmented. It would become even more fragmented than it is. I don't know if that's possible with Taylor Parker, by the way. But you have... I'm thinking about a lot of crimes and a lot of criminals

and Taylor Parker, but this is fascinating. And so you have this absolute fear of feeling shame. You have this absolute fear of being exposed as a fraud. being exposed as a con artist, being exposed as a liar. One thing she says near the end of this documentary, and again, spoiler alerts here, we're going to talk about this documentary. So if you haven't seen it, go watch it.

We are talking about this documentary. But Wade. Fiancé Wade, Taylor Parker's fiancé Wade. The supposed father of the prosthetic belly. Yeah. He he confronts her. This is going to be an important part of this story later. He confronts her a couple of days or a day before the crime,

day before the murder. And she says something, she basically says something to him like, I'm not going to be called a liar, right? Like she knows. Projection. She knows she's a liar. Well, no, that's a big debate, by the way. Does she know she's a liar?

I mean, we'll get into that. She has no sense of self. I don't know if she knows what she is. Does she know she's a liar? I don't know. It's actually a question for me. Does, you know, Lori Valo know she's a liar? It's the same dynamic.

I think that there's distinctions there in the sense that Lori Valo was diagnosed as having delusional disorder, whereas Taylor Parker, at least according to the forensic people in the case, did not diagnose her with delusional disorder. So that's a big distinction. But the point is that all of this gets set in motion and then all of it becomes a vicious cycle. All of it, you go through the cycle over and over again because the fear of being exposed then leads to more shame, which leads to more feeling defective, which leads to more defensive maneuvers, which leads to more lies, which, you know, it becomes an unending situation. cycle. It's really hard to break. And they can't stop it. The only way you can stop it,

yeah, there is a way to stop it. You know how you stop it? You tell the truth. They can't do that, though. I know, but if you don't have a sense of self. I know. So this is where, so this is the point where I want to interject my main literary metaphor. Okay, here we go. The way to stop it is to become Pinocchio. This is, this is, this is, this, is, and when I say Pinocchio, I'm not talking about the Disney version. Taylor, well, you know, Taylor Parker was her stomach that kept growing on her nose. Her fake stomach. Exactly, but it's the same, it's the same dynamic.

It's the same idea. And it's got bigger and bigger and bigger. Carlo Colati in 1881, he writes the story of Pinocchio. And by the way, the original story of Pinocchio is way more interesting and darker than the Disney version. So I'm referring to the 1881 version. The story of Pinocchio is in essence. We're not going to talk about Pinocchio on too much depth there. But the story of Pinocchio is essentially a story about growing up.

So Pinocchio is a wooden doll created by his father, Geppetto. If you can say, I don't know if you don't, he becomes a boy eventually. So he's wood. So I guess you can't, I guess you don't really have a father. if you're wood. No, he's his father. Yeah, the puppet maker becomes his father. Puppet maker is his father.

He wanted a little boy. And the way Pinocchio transforms is essentially by growing up and taking responsibility for his actions. And so he's kind of this. His nose gets longer and longer and longer. That's so the nose, the nose becomes a physical manifestation of his line.

It grows longer. A whale appears somewhere. Yes. Isn't there like a whale? Yeah, but that's... Okay, we're skipping the whale? That's all I remember. There's also a sea monster.

There's like toys that come to life. It's a great story. I was actually going to reread it for this episode. Yeah, and we don't have time with that. I didn't have time, yeah. So, but trust me that the metaphor of Pinocchio is applicable. The nose grows with each lie. But one of the, so the nose becomes a,

a metaphor for the self that's becoming more deformed. In other words, one of the things about Pinocchio is that lying harms the self. Yeah. Lying, because you're digging this false, because you're amplifying this false self, in a way, you're really deforming yourself. You're really distorting any version of the true self that might be left. You're starting to negate it. and you're really,

you're really starting to bury that and deny it. And the further you get away from that, the harder it's going to be to get it back. So with Pinocchio, right, the more Pinocchio tries to control his environment, and the more he tries to control appearances, the more visibly out of control he becomes. The worse it gets.

The worse it gets. And so you have a similar dynamic. It's also a snowball effect. You have a similar dynamic with Taylor Parker in the sense that she's creating these lies about her wealth, about her physical, her medical issues. She has MS. She has brain cancer.

Like it just goes on and on. I don't even know if we have time. So many lies. The money, the finances. But going as far, this was one moment that was just surprising to me. This is, I think, a question with how much does she know how much is a lie? she creates this fiction about her wealth and goes out and buys her mother-in-law a car,

gives her mother-in-law the car. And then three weeks later, it's repossessed because no one's paid a dime on it. And that's it. Nobody talks about it. But my point is, like, there was almost a part of me that wondered, that was a great example. Did she know that that was going to happen?

Did she know that three weeks later, the car would be repossessed? Or did she somehow think that, Like, what, or, you know, was you taking pictures of it with a bow for social media knowing it would be repossessed? I think that's an interesting part of this story is, is if you have a pathological liar and you know they're lying all the time, then why do you keep buying their lies? Well, I mean, there's a goability. Well, yeah, that was part of it. You know, Wade wanted to think the best of her.

People were starting to figure it out. Everyone wanted to think the best. Wade, Wade, right. Wade, we'll get to some things Wade said later. I don't want to kind of, I don't want to say what he's, I don't want to spoil too much with Wade because there's some things he said that are going to be absolutely critical

to this analysis, but Wade wants to believe her. He does. Wade wants to think that, I think a lot of... Well, because there's two choices in front of you. You either have a pregnant fiancé or it is the absolute worst case scenario and you are living with a sociopath or what you feel like is, right?

I think that's oftentimes how crime sort of happened too is I feel like it's always hindsight when you have somebody and you think it just can't be that bad, right? The other option is so horrific to think about. You have, there's a social contract, We all have an implicit social contract, which basically says that human beings should be trustworthy, that human beings operate in good faith, that human beings tell the truth. If we didn't have that social contract, society would collapse instantly.

If everybody was lying to everyone about everything, I mean, that's the reason we have the law. That's the reason we have a legal system is because contracts get broken and they have to be enforced in some judicial way. because human beings aren't always trustworthy. But for the most part, most of society operates with the assumption that people, even if they're lying, the assumption is that people, to some degree, are trustworthy.

Otherwise, you can't do business with people. I know. And when you're looking at someone face to face and not only that, but when you're living with them and they're carrying your child and you fell in love with them and they're your fiancé,

yeah, I don't think you're going to go to, she's faking this entire, thing. You'd rather stretch to like, no, her mother, you know, is wicked and took her money away and, you know. Well, that's, so that's a, this is actually a really important part of the story, which is that Wade becomes one of the central vehicles for her, her line apparatus. The, the way it becomes both the emotional catalyst and the audience for her performance. So in other words, to put it simply, she's using him. She's manipulating him.

And she's manipulating his sense of operating in good faith and believing her and his dependency. I think Wade really, I mean, he doesn't totally trust her, but he really wants this to work to some degree. Yeah. Absolutely. And so she's really taking advantage of that. She's really manipulative.

I mean, that's what all liars do. They play on people's gullibility. They play on people's vulnerability. They play on people's trustworthiness. And so clearly she's doing this. Their humanness. Let's even call it what it is. Just their belief in being human.

Exactly. So the weight part, I think, is really important. Because there's another part of that, too, When I say that Wade's the emotional catalyst, what I mean by that too is that some of Taylor's friends talk a lot about the fact that she's constantly worried about the fact that he's going to leave. She's afraid that he's having affairs. She's just petrified of abandonment. Afraid of abandonment.

Afraid of abandonment. Right. It's something we've talked a lot about when it comes to criminals. Yeah. A fear of abandonment. Also, rejection? Absolutely. That's a part of this equation for sure.

But let's, in terms of way... I shouldn't say just a fear of criminals. We talk about crime and criminals, thus I said that. But it's a fear of people who also don't commit crimes to. I just mean in the criminals we talk about. And so you see it's, she's constantly worried about the fact that he's cheating, that he's going to leave, that perhaps he doesn't love her. These are things that are always on her mind.

And that naturally leads into the pregnancy. So she's trying to get Wade to stay. She initially tries to get him to stay through money, through wealth. That's where the whole McCann Point estate that's worth $4.7 million, almost $5 million. She dangles this carrot. Like, hey, Wade, I know you've wanted. this your whole life. And not only, by the way, speaking about performances,

how about the, she knows this guy, she meets Wade in October and she, now she tells him within like weeks that she's going to buy this property because she's an oil heirs, eras from her grandparents. So they, they in December of 2020, she gets the whole family together. And they have, in the documentary,

they film her. performing performing for no reason, by the way. And let's be honest, nobody could give it during that moment. It was like the most... Well, I think they're all kind of stunned. Nobody cared.

I think the families, they're all... I think they're all stunned by the fact that like, here's Wade about to get, supposedly in their minds, about to get a $5 million dollar property. Well, everyone's, but nobody's showing that on their faces. They're all stunned. What do you mean? Stunned by?

her performance are stunned by the whole situation it's also bizarre like i mean she's like we're gonna i think there's a part of them like chestnuts or what was it like they were going to farm pecans yeah it's pecan point i think is the name of oh pecan point and yeah but she was yes they they filmed it and her announcement she's reading it and everyone's just sitting there like this right but it's still it still goes back to that performance she can't just she can't just buy the property. She can't just buy the property. Which she never did because she didn't have money. Right. She didn't have the money. But she can't buy the property and just, you know, like a normal person would buy the property and they'd move in and like family would know. Yeah. She wouldn't have this big production. Actually, you never let anybody know for the most part. You'd probably be like, let's just kind of quietly do this and not make a big deal out of it. Yeah. She's like, hold my beer. I'm going to, I'm going to let them all know that I'm buying this even though I'm not. Right. So they have this big production within two months of meeting about. this property that she's buying that she can't buy because she doesn't have the money because

it's all a lie it's all a fantasy but you're right it's also keeping wade there it's also keeping way there right absolutely keeping him there i i have heard this you know this story with people that lie before this independent wealth thing you know right i'm wealthy and people yeah fascinating yeah and so so yeah so you have you have this first attempt with the wealth. And again, this is where Wade becomes this vehicle through which she engaged, all of her machinations become enacted through Wade.

So Wade, by the way, I mean, Wade seems like a really nice guy. And a hard worker, very hard worker, nice guy. You know, Wade is just sort of like caught in the middle of this hurricane, right? Yeah, he doesn't even know what happened. He doesn't even know. He starts dating this woman all of a sudden.

sudden he's, it's his fiance and she's going to have his baby. And I think he's like, how did this happen? Wade says at the beginning of the documentary, Wade says that he, so they met at a rodeo in August of 2019. And then I think like by September, she's dangling this property. And then he said, he just says innocently, he's like, I thought she was pretty. And I thought we could just go to dinner and talk, right? He basically says something like that.

And then it becomes, all of them then it becomes like pecan point. And then a couple months after that, when it becomes clear she's not going to buy this property, now she becomes pregnant. And you're right. That is about a fear of rejection and abandonment and him leaving, right? He won't leave me if I'm about to buy this $5 million property. And when she realizes she can't carry that, lie on forever, she becomes pregnant. Right.

She becomes pregnant. That's her next step. Her next step, her next ploy, her next chest move. Right. So. And she can maybe dangle that one for a little bit longer. nine months or 10 months. Right.

She can keep that one going for, yeah, exactly, because eventually the banks are going to figure out pretty quickly that, you know, most people don't have $5 million. She can only create so many, you know, and not only, cell numbers and fake personas. I mean, she was faking voices in AI. Oh my gosh.

You know. She had fake social media accounts. She had fake emails. She had fake, she used a voice number, a voice transformation app. I mean, it was just. just unbelievable. It also shows you how far these people that do want to lie and create a fake persona can go. Yeah, absolutely. And it is scary, you know, what's real and what's not these days. Absolutely. And so I think this might be an interesting place to kind of interject with people have asked me,

specifically, Grayson has asked me many times, do you think she has a personality disorder? And. Yes. Specifically, I kept in this morning and said, you can't diagnose when I'm casting my vote. Can't wait to hear what you might think. Oh, and what was your vote? I said sociopath. I don't know.

That was just me and my chaty BT where I got personality disorders and traits. I think, no, I definitely need to, I mean, I mean, there's like at least one personality disorder, not more. I mean, I'm going to speculate. I haven't asked him yet. I'm going to speculate. Yeah, you're probably right. But like I think, well, yeah, like definitely like a ton of antisocial quality is like, as you said, I don't even know if there is a self.

So I would say antisocial. But then on top of that, like maybe borderline. Well, guess what? Guess what? I don't have to answer the question because during the mitigation part of this, during the death penalty part of the trial, they brought it up. They brought in experts and I'm going to defer. I don't have to diagnose because I have people do it for me.

Forensic psychologist, Dr. Michael. Arambula, Arambula, A-R-A-M-B-U-L-A. He testified. He testified in Tanner-Horner's. Oh, he testified in Tanner-Horner's. Also? Like, he must be their go-to guy. So I'm going to read you what he said.

Shout out to Dr. Arambula. Arambula. Shout out to Dr. Rambula. Here's what he said on the stand. Quote, I was looking for some kind of mental deterioration that would come for that, meaning the murder. But instead I saw that she stuck to her plan. and there was no remorse afterwards.

In this case, there is nothing regarding any mental illness and nothing regarding intoxication, and Ms. Parker falls in the category of fetal abductors, which are rare, but fall into a class of women who do not have mental illness. The murders are planned, they're premeditated, they have plans for after, unquote. And then he went on to say

that he believed she did have or does have, She does have borderline personality disorder. I just thought her personality. Okay, keep going. She has borderline. He believed that she had borderline personality disorder and or other personality disorders in Cluster B. So Arambula says, number one, it's premeditated, no mental illness,

which, by the way, I think it depends on what he means by mental illness. You know, there's different because I'm not diagnosing here, but it would be hard for me to believe that she hasn't had some struggles over the years with maybe major depression. Yeah, depression, anxiety. Or anxiety, right? I agree. If you're afraid that somebody is going to leave you, that's anxiety, right?

If you're afraid of abandonment and if you have no sense of self, that would certainly lead to depression. Right. If you have low self-esteem, if you're, if you have a very fragile self. Yeah, I think of that too. So I don't know what he means by no, I think no mental illness. But mental illness, he's probably talking. schizophrenia. Yeah, he's probably talking about psychosis, schizophrenia.

But he does suggest, he does say that he thinks she has borderline personality disorder. And then the defense brought in a psychiatrist to forensic psychiatrist. His name is Dr. Griffin, G-R-I-P-O-N. He saw Taylor. He interviewed Taylor twice for a total of five hours when she was in jail. He described her as, quote, a pathological liar. and he said that she had a mix of psychological, psychiatric disorders, including narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and antisocial and histrionic.

In other words, he basically says she has everything in Cluster B. She's got the whole cluster. That is. That's all of Cluster B. That is everything. Narcissism, Histrionic, borderline, antisocial. Wow. He also said that one of her main motivations for being a pathological liar, so I've explained it a little differently.

Just like a walking cluster B. She is. She's like, DSM. Yeah, she should have her picture in there. She should have her picture in there for having the whole constellation of cluster B traits, qualities. Wow. Hello, my name is cluster B. The reason she's the pathological liar is because he says, quote,

when her external world is not pleasant, her internal world is pleasant. Now, when her external world is not pleasant, her internal world is pleasant, fascinating. Which is... In other words, she just seeks chaos. Like, chaos makes her feel great. Well, I think it's, I think it's more...

I think it's more a version of what I'm, what I've been talking about with lying. That it's, it's, she's creating these fictions to protect yourself against shame. and fragility, and it gives her control. Yeah, she definitely wants to create chaos. Yeah. That one thing about lying, one thing that lying does is it challenges other people's reality.

It challenges other people's perceptions of the world. And when you do that, you create chaos. When you say, this is my version of the world and you're wrong, and you know that version is not correct, it throws you into disarray. It upsets your normal perceptions of the world, and that's chaos. So yes, pathological liars do create chaos. They do, and they do it, by the way, to control.

To control and make themselves feel, yeah, to even just feel in control, right? If there's a dispute, if there's a power struggle over different versions of reality, and they want their version to win. And that's called gaslighting, by the way. If they're gaslighting you and arguing that their perception is correct, and you feel crazy, you feel, you feel... And you're questioning reality. You're questioning reality.

You feel a little bit disoriented from it. Then you're off balance. You're off kilter. And in some ways, you've given them some control. Yeah. They're controlling other people because they're trying to. you throw you off balance. They're trying to throw you into this chaotic state so that you don't know how to respond.

And so in that sense, it is a pure power struggle. Question. Is there a world with people who are, sorry, in this case, I've been following for years. Is there a world in which pathological liars, like, they get to a point where they don't even realize their lie? They're just doing it. Like, and they legit believe it. Well, yeah, Laura, I think, yeah, to protect themselves from shame.

Lori Valo. So we're going to get into this issue when we talk about the body cam footage in the hospital. Because that's absolutely fascinating. Because you're right. You see that moment of like she knows. Does she? Okay. That was a great hook.

That was a great hook. Yeah, right? So the hospital, the hospital body cam is just, there's nothing like. it's just unbelievable so but we're that's where we're going to answer that question which by the way so that will take us to the next segment which is which is the pregnancy we have to talk about the pregnancy the western photographer maternal maternity photography you're getting way ahead with that one well it's part of it's part of the pregnancy the pregnancy so the pregnancy will bring us into it'll start moving us into the realm

of the psychology of fetal abductors. The pregnancy is her, you have to say the pregnancy is her master performance, right? That's her master lie. The problem with the pregnancy is, well, actually, let's back up a little bit because I think this is really fascinating about Taylor Parker is how much,

how many of her lies are based on something, her body. Her body becomes kind of the place of a lot of her lying and it becomes sort of evident. It becomes the place where her lies come to life. And so if you think about her medical illnesses, in some ways she takes these fictions and she makes them more realistic by saying that their body. Yeah.

So she says she has MS. So she has cancer. It's true. Nobody can find any of these things. but it's hard to really dispute if you're arguing that this is happening in my body and even if it's subjective in some sense she's making them more realistic and it's what's fascinating to me about that narrative is there are issues here going back to her childhood we haven't really talked about

some of her childhood stuff yet too much but her body becomes the site of a lot of her shame yeah So isn't it interesting that if you, so she has this, this weight issue when she's 14, her parents divorced when she's 12, her mother, Shana, Shana talks about the divorce. She doesn't say much about it, but there's some implication, this is really interesting, there's some implication that the divorce must have been messy because, according to Shana, and I don't know if this is accurate, but Taylor starts using these, these are Shana, words about the grandmother starts feeding Taylor food for comfort. That's the term she

use. So she becomes a comfort eater. She picks up a ton of weight. I don't know how much, but by the time she's 14, she weighs 250 pounds, according to Shauna. So what's interesting about that is here you have Taylor, a couple of things. Number one, we can make an assumption that the divorce must have been somewhat traumatic because she's she's emotionally, she's eating emotionally for comfort to calm herself, right? To deal with that trauma, number one.

Number two, we can make the assumption, I think, that's important here, is that she struggles with some emotional regulation. If she's comfort eating, number one, and she's self-medicating through food, number two, I think we can assume that she's, that if we go back to this idea of mirroring and attunement with parents, that she's lacked that to some degree.

That if in the creation of a false self that becomes Taylor Parker, I think it's probable or it's possible that this becomes a metaphor. Her body and her weight game becomes a metaphor for her inability, for her emotional dysregulation, for her inability to really regulate her emotions, because she never had that opportunity to apparently in her family. Yeah. And again, I'm making a lot of inference here. This is speculation, but the pregnancy becomes,

her body then becomes the sight and the source of shame when she's very young. Oh, interesting, right. And it's possible. Okay. It's possible we don't know. It's possible she may have, I don't know if Shauna's version's true, but it's possible that she may have had weight issues. prior to 14.

Who knows? Right? But if she didn't, either way, her body becomes the manifestation of her shame. And then later on, you get this, she's using this prosthetic.

Uh-huh. Belly. Which is a way of putting on weight. It's putting it on in a way that's not real. Huh. But she's revisiting that shame. Interesting.

From her childhood. And so the pregnancy becomes not only proof of this fantasy of this fantasy of having Wade's baby. Having Wade's baby. Right, having Wade's baby. But it also solves a lot of problems for hair in the sense that it solves a lot of problems because a baby, in theory, a baby offers unconditional love. So it gives her, in her fantasy world, this is a way for her to get unconditional love again.

It's a way for her. Because her children are growing up, you know. It's a way for her to become a solution to possible abandonment. Yes. If Wade leaves her, she still has the baby. Yes. It becomes a solution to her infertility. That's another tremendous source of shame.

She has a hysterectomy. She can't have a child. it solves that problem. It also solves, here's another thing that's really important. She gave up custody of her kids. Yeah. She can't get pregnant. In other words, I think there's a deep source of shame here for her around this idea of motherhood and being a mother.

She's not, her kids aren't even in this documentary. They're a little bit. Well, they're there for the gender reveal. Right. Which is so wild. They walk out with her for the gender reveal her older children. So the pregnancy becomes a source of reparation. It becomes for her in her fantasy world.

It becomes a solution to a lot of these problems she's experiencing with shame. So if there's shame around her being a mother, it solves that too. It also solves the problem of her relationship, whatever relationship issues she's having. it creates, so let's say that it seems like Wade might be distancing himself from her to some degree. It solves that because it forces him closer to her no matter what. Yeah. It forces him to stay with her to some degree. And so interestingly enough, I think for me, if you go back to these earlier issues around weight, you start seeing.

So she loses this weight, presumably reducing her. sources of shame to some degree, but not really. They don't disappear. They're not erased. She still has, if she did have trauma from the weight gain, that's still there. If she had shame from the weight, it's still there. But this pregnancy, ultimately this pregnancy becomes this catch-all for all this shame and all these issues swirling around her shame. Also, think about, Let's think about other issues of shame that she has. She's lost custody of her kids. She's had multiple divorces.

She's had a history of relationship failures. Infertility. Hersterectomy. Job instability. She can't keep a job in adulthood. She's been fired from all these jobs. Financial issues. Financial issues, right?

Lack of money. It's not going to solve that problem. But it's by creating this, by faking this pregnancy, and having this imagined baby, I think it really, it really becomes compensatory. It really becomes a solution to so many of these issues she's having, to all this shame she's experiencing.

And so I think that, I think it, so if we're trying to understand Taylor Parker and we're talking about this idea of the false self, this is her attempt to reverse. that. This is her attempt. Even though she's doing, even though it's all fiction, right, the irony here, there's a paradox here. She's created this elaborate web of lies and all these fictions that she can never reverse. But she thinks that by having this baby and by being pregnant, that somehow

she's going to reverse, she's going to solve all of it. And that, by the way, it's rather than coming to terms with all of her lies. Right. Exactly. It's important. The most, important point here to understand about this is this explains why she's all in on the pregnancy. This explains how she could go from this false. People keep saying, well, people know she's lying. People know she had a hysterectomy. They're like, well, when is she going to have a miscarriage, right? She's not going to have a miscarriage because she's so invested.

That's what sad is a lot of people knew and nobody thought that she would go this far. But at what point, again, do you see the red flags enough to realize how far someone will go. Right, but I think you have to understand the source of her shame in her body from the past and how this pregnancy and this baby and the success of this pregnancy. The success of this pregnancy and these issues around infertility and motherhood. She can't have a miscarriage. Because she can't have a miscarriage. That's a failure.

That's a failure. That's more of fertility issues. And she can't be exposed. Under no circumstances can be she be exposed because that would increase her shame. That would make things a million times worse for her. That would mean that all her defenses and all her adaptive strategies and all her line would be exposed. She would be exposed and her shame would increase exponentially. Yeah. In fact, I would argue that it would increase to the point where I, where, you know, it would, it might increase to the point where, well, it did increase to the point where she harmed someone else. But it's possible it could have increased to the point where she could have engaged in self-harmed. Because that's how desperate she was. Right.

So unfortunately, it, she acted out. That's scary. She acted out externally rather than internally. She could have had this miscarriage and somehow justified all this. but because of her investment in this, and because psychologically and emotionally, it meant so much to her, she carried it out. She felt like she had no choice.

The desperation is what makes her so dangerous. Exactly. And not only the desperation. And made her so dangerous. Not only the desperation, but the moment. The moment. The moment when she, there's the moment at the end where she weighed, Wade's mother.

Connie. Wade's mother, Connie, calls him and says, look, we've got all this evidence. This is days before the crime. Something's not right here. Something's not right. We've got all this evidence. Everybody's telling me that this is not a real pregnancy.

You've got to do something. And Wade finally goes to her. This is the moment that pushes everything over the edge. Wade goes to Taylor and he says, I know you're not pregnant. I know this is nonsense. Which by the way, as an aside, like if this was you, I'd be like, can I touch the baby? Can you show me the baby? I think he probably tried that.

And it wasn't worked. Right. Apparently, apparently she must have kept him quite a distance. Right. And it'd be like, no, you can't, you know, if I was speaking, my pregnancy. So Wade approaches her and she says to him, this is chilling. She says to him, she says a few things to him. She says she's tired. That's the term he used. She's tired of his family calling her a liar. So this gets to that issue of if she's a liar,

then she's going to be exposed. And being exposed again is terrifying to someone. It's death. It's death. It's annihilation to someone that doesn't have a real self. She's tired of being called a liar by him and his family. And here's the real. Here's the chilling.

Here's what is exactly what Wade says. Here's what she tells him, quote, I'm going to bring a kid home, unquote. That's the point where Taylor Parker is committed. She's all in. She's going to find a live child that she's going to engage in maternal evisceration. That's the moment she makes that decision. That's the moment.

she reaches out to Reagan, that's the moment when this plan is set in motion and it's irreversible at that point. So a day or two later, I forget the exact timeline here. The crime occurs and we obviously know the result of that. So heartbreaking. And Reagan was just somebody, she just happened to meet because Taylor took photographs for a quick moment for weddings. That was one of the businesses or jobs. She decided to start. And Reagan hired her earlier, and they met.

And then they were social media friends. And she learned she was having a baby girl. And it was just like talk about the wrong place at the wrong time, you know. Oh, my gosh. I know, exactly. And Reagan was like the sweetest person. Her family was wonderful. I know.

Those are the moments that were the most touching to me is just the way this impacted the victim's family and how much they loved her. Reagan couldn't have been more innocent. She was so. I know, so innocent. And her little girl. So that brings us to an interesting question

about this entire situation. And that is that as Reagan's wedding photographer, so one of the things they said in the documentary is that after the wedding, And they actually invited Taylor to participate to the reception and to participate. And after the reception ended, she went out with them and spent time with them. In other words, they seemed to think she needed a friend, needed friends. They sensed that she was lonely.

They sense all the things you would sense about someone who could be borderline personality disorder. But the point is that they suggest that there's this connection. to Reagan and her family that goes above and beyond just being a stranger who's taking photographs of the family. And that I think that's where this becomes really interesting, is that you would think at some level that Taylor Parker would have some empathy or compassion for this woman, Reagan, that she's befriended. She knows the family. The whole family befriended her. Exactly.

The whole family wrapped their arms around her and decided to care for her simply because she photographed the sweating and they could tell that she kind of wanted to be a part of it. Exactly. And so once you cross this threshold, so once Wade, once she tells Wade, I'm going to bring a kid home, that's the moment of no return. She did look for infant adoption. There was, there were some Google search results for infant adoption, but clearly that's not going to happen.

But she doesn't have time. Right. She doesn't have time. That's what I'm saying. It's not going to happen. She doesn't have time because her due date is continually to grow people. The longer she doesn't give birth, right, the longer she doesn't give birth, the more the lie is exposed and the more anxious she's getting. She's feeling more desperation. So this is another fascinating transformation, and this is often associated with fetal

abduction, which is that the victim is dehumanized because the victim at some point, the perpetrator has to see the victim. They see the victim as a means to an end. The end is to get the child. The means is to use the victim. They see the victim only as an obstacle. They see the victim as an object. So even though this is really interesting,

even though Taylor Parker knew her family, knew her, she spent time with her the night before. I know. In fact, when they said who they thought it might be, Reagan's husband said, no, there's no way she was just here the night before. Exactly. There's no way. And so it poses an interesting question because when she's doing the wedding photographs,

there's no means to an end at that point. She's not pregnant. But if we go back to what the forensic evaluators said about her not having any remorse. It does suggest an absolute lack of empathy. That whatever she was doing with them was all performative. None of that was a real connection. To feel loved and for her own attention, her own need, her love and attention. Her own need to feel less lonely, right, her need to feel more connected, to feel any connection to people. Well, her once friend, her former friend that decided to stop being friends with her, said that that she was so

excited about her pregnancy, but that she almost wanted to be a part of it. And Reagan's family sort of said the same thing about her at the wedding, that she almost wanted to act like a bridesmaid. She wanted to be a part of it. Well, her friend, her friend McKenzie actually said that when she became pregnant, she became like alarmingly attached to her. Correct. Almost like it was, right, almost like it was her pregnancy.

Like she was like, in fact, that's an interesting quote that I want to read now by McKenzie. I got so many notes. You do. McKenzie says, here's what McKenzie says, this is a brilliant analysis of Taylor Parker. McKenzie says, quote, it was like she wanted it to be hers. She also says that, quote, she has to piece together parts of other people's real lives to make her feel a little bit more real. That's exactly what I'm talking about. That's what McKenzie, she quote, to make her feel more real.

She has to piece together parts of other people's lives to make her feel a little more real. And that speaks exactly to this idea of the false self. The false self is an empty self. It's a construct that doesn't exist. She doesn't have the self. And by the way, on that issue, if you don't have any substantial sense of self, if all you have is this empty self and this false self that's devoid of any substance, then you're going to have no self-awareness.

You're going to have no capacity to reflect. The term I use all the time is metacognition. You won't, metacognition means thinking about thinking. It's self-reflection. It's the ability to step back and analyze your actions. She lacks that. If she had that capacity, she may have been able to stop herself. But because of this idea of taking bits and pieces of other people's lives

and kind of grafting them on to herself, it shows, as you point out, it shows that she lacks this capacity for self-reflection. She has no self-awareness, and that compounds this whole situation. That is a profound quote by McKenzie. It was one of the better quotes. So this leads us to treating Reagan like an objectifying her and not having any empathy or more. because she's completely dehumanized her.

She's already done that, by the way. So one thing... She's done that to everyone in our life. She's done that to everyone, yeah, true. I don't know if there's anyone that isn't serving a need for her, you know. Right. And so the violence becomes a solution for her. Yeah.

The violence becomes a way for her. All those issues I just talked about with shame and her fragile self and feeling, like she's an inadequate mother, all of those issues. Now, this now becomes an attempt to solve that. And it doesn't, nothing's going to get in her way. Yeah. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this.

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Taylor Parker's history, to the murder. And there's a lot I haven't covered, by the way. I mean, I haven't even really scratched the surface of all her lies. Yeah. Well, we've mentioned them. Her lies are just astonishing. And they're astonishing.

Makes Pinocchio seemed quite sure. Yeah. They're astonishing and they're unending. Pinocchio's got nothing on Taylor Parker. Yeah. So Pinocchio, getting back to Pinotio, I'm glad you mentioned Pinocchio. So one of the things about Pinocchio. So the way Pinocchio grows up, and by the way, that you could argue this too, that Taylor Parker is very much a child, Taylor Parker is incapable of growing up.

She is very childlike. She's very childish. Everything about her speaks. And narcissism, by the way, has a lot of roots in childhood stuff. So narcissists typically present as being infantile and childlike. And I think you have some elements of that here too. I'm not saying, I'm not diagnosing her as a narcissist, by the way, the psychiatrist did that. Correct. But Pinocchio becomes more human and he grows up when he's able to face the truth, when he's able to speak to truth, when he's able to act responsibly.

And when he's able to ultimately, when he's able to have his inner life, when his inner life comes to life, then he comes to life. When his inner life begins to match his words and so that his nose doesn't grow anymore, when he starts telling the truth, his nose starts reversing.

That's when Pinocchio grows up and becomes human. Those are the very things. When he starts like sort of accepting his, inner self. Correct. He, he put, Pinocchio's transformation ultimately is not only growing up, but it's moving from a false self to a true self. Correct. And that's what Taylor Parker cannot do. You know, I created an image which we can put up of, of Pinocchio and Taylor Parker interacting. It's from the original, it's not from Disney. It's from the original 1881 story to rendering based on that, by the way, which is much more realistic.

But in this image, I have Pinocchio with his nose, poking Taylor Parker's false pregnancy, her stomach, as if to say to her, even I know your line. Right. That's why I created this image because I had some fun with it. But I'm showing the relationship between, there's a lot of similarities to Pinocchio. But even Pinocchio can see she's lying.

Even Pinocchio is like, okay, okay, Taylor. Pinocchio's like, I'm poking your prosthetic belly because I can see it's not real. Yeah, like, right. That's what I'm saying. Like even Pinocchio is like, okay. Even Pinocchio can see this. Like one of the things. So one of the problems with Lyme, by the way, just to revisit this quickly, but when you create this elaborate fantasy world, it really distorts everything.

It not only distorts your perception of the world, but because it does that, it also distorts yourself. You can't develop an authentic self if you're distorting everything and everyone. Correct. In fact, you get further away from your authentic self. Exactly. If you are doing this. Exactly. And it's really hard to get back to normal once you start going down that path and once you start getting into the cycle of lying and line and line all the time about everything.

So that's going to bring me to some other interesting components. So I think those are my main points on Taylor Parker. I don't know. I've tried to get us from point A to be as much as I can. I know there's a lot I left out. There's a lot of my notes that we're just not going to have time to cover. But there's a few things I do want to cover before we finish. And that would be some of the family dynamics.

One of the fascinating components of the story and of the documentary, the documentary gets into a little bit, but not tremendously. But when during the trial, the death penalty trial, a lot of these players were on the stand and they were talking about her. And there's fascinating component of this case where she creates these villains and these animals. She creates these false personas that are emailing and that are emailing and that are on social media. And one of them, by the way, is called Mandy Body.

So notice, by the way, the term body shows up. That's interesting. Yeah, that is good catch, good catch. The importance of the body. The names are all fascinating. Yeah, the names are really interesting. The name chose. So they're all pseudonyms.

They're all her, by the way. So we've learned that all the texts, all the male and female, all different phone numbers, different voices. She used voice manipulators, male and female. So she has created all the characters, all the voices, all the names. Mandy body, interesting. Mandy, body. Right.

Again, again, emphasizing the importance of the physicality of her shame. Wow. The physical. Again, by making this so physical, she believes it's more likely that people will believe it, that it's less likely people are going to dispute something that's physical, that you can see. Yeah.

But the, so she creates this whole, she creates this whole world of, she creates this whole world of these villains and enemies. And like, she's, her mother is trying to kill her. Her mother's tied to the Mexican mother. mafia who's trying to kill her. Like, it's just crazy some of the narrative she spends. It is crazy.

I'm going to read, I'm going to read some of the, these are some of the emails from Mandy Body. So also, all of this, most of this is projection, by the way. So when I talk about projection, I mean, parts of Taylor Parker are coming out on these characters. Parts of her that she's disowning herself. She's putting out there on other people. That's interesting.

So this is, these are some of the things she's saying. So think of it like this way. Because this is projection, these things she's saying in emails to other people, she's writing to Wade for many of these. She's writing to Angela, who's a mother figure to her. These are really things she feels about herself. So projection is when you take parts of yourself, disown parts of yourself that you don't want to acknowledge

and you put them out there on other people. These are some of the things. These are direct quotes from some of her emails and text that she's sending to Wade and other people, quote, you don't want her fat ass, unquote. Quote, you don't love her, unquote. Quote, he hates you. Quote, you disgust him. This is how she feels about herself.

This is how these are all self-hatred. Yeah. And when people start questioning what's going on here and they suspect it's her, she blames her mother for all of it. Never mind that she's spinning narratives about how her mother is trying to assassinate her. Right. But this gets us back to this idea of drama and chaos. If you keep people on edge and if you keep people off balance and off kilter,

then in some ways you control the narrative. So she's creating all these personas and these villains and she's doing all this. not only to take control of the narrative, but to try to explain, there's all these contradictions that are happening in her narratives. She's doing this to try to explain those contradictions.

She's also using all of this family drama. So Wade says this. He says, quote, she portrayed her mother as a monster, unquote. It was, quote, it was never ending the family drama. So what is the drama doing? The drama is also a huge distraction.

The drama becomes a distraction so people can't focus on the reality, which is she's lying about everything. People are less likely to focus on it because they're distracted because they're thrown into the chaos. And she's also adding to the dysfunction. By doing all this, she's making that family system even more dysfunctional. She's adding to the drama. she's enhancing the dysfunction

from something that's manageable to something that's not manageable which makes it harder for people to grasp. She's also, by creating all these family villains and all this family drama, she's externalizing blame. So she's right,

she's blaming other people. I just read some of the texts. She's projecting blame onto other people and she's doing that in order to maintain her narrative. Yeah. In order to solidify her narrative. So by blaming other people, it's always, you know, you see this all the time with pathological liars.

It's always someone else's fault. She's never going to take responsibility for it. And that's what's scary to the point where you become so desperate, you do this horrific thing. Never. When they say never, they mean never will take responsibility. I should also mention, by the way, that so just briefly, but. it's not uncommon for people, and I'm not talking about Taylor here, but just people in general, people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder

to struggle with this idea of the false self. Okay. People with borderline personality disorder tend to have more childhood adversity. They tend to experience more trauma. That makes sense. The definition of borderline personality disorder is based on instability. which is very sad. It is sad.

I agree. It is sad. I've worked with a number of borderline personality disorders and patients. That want to improve. Yeah. They want to manage their lives. They want to,

and it's very hard to see them struggle to such a degree because they really want to change, but it becomes very difficult to change. But the very, I don't know, my notes are, the very, the borderline personality disorder is. I wish you guys, like the notes are taking up the whole table. It is a spread. It's characterized, this would be in the DSM,

but it's characterized by pervasive instability and moods, self-image, behavior, and interpersonal relationship. So in other words, almost all areas of someone's life. And so this chaos and all this drama and this false self kind of behind all of that, a lot of times you'll see that. in borderline personality disorder. And it's not like they don't want borderline personality disorder. People don't want to change that.

They do. They just don't know how. It's so habitual. They don't know how to. Right. Right. So. Well, sounds like they just can't get over.

It's also just, again, the, just loving themselves enough to just. Yeah. Yeah. If they love themselves, then they wouldn't necessarily have as much of a false self. Right. Another area that they did not touch on in this documentary, but I think is fascinating, is some of her post-crime, what I'll call her post-crime behavior. Yeah.

She just continues to act out. She acted out in jail. She acted out in prison. I mean, I can't even scratch it. I can't even begin to scratch the surface of this. But she befriended people in prison that she, that she, that she, tried to argue were the ones who actually committed the crime. So she was getting them to write letters saying that they did the crime.

I mean, you can't even believe the stuff she was doing. But she was continuing this pattern of line and acting out. And like, it didn't stop. And that, by the way, that tells you, when you're incarcerated and you're on death row and you can't change your behavior. And you're bringing people, you're triangulating people into your drama and you're throwing them under the bus

and you're blaming them for your crimes and you're getting them to say things that are false for you by forging letters. And I could go on and not. She's having relationships, trying to have relationships with other prisoners. And I mean other prisoners and other prisons. She's having people communicate with other people outside of prison.

she's putting, she's using, she's putting money on her books in a way that's not authorized by, it's not authorized by the prison. I mean, it just goes on and on. Here's what, there's a quote, which I think is, is a great quote. If I can find it because my notes are. You'll find it. I believe in you. Here's a, here's a, I found it.

I don't know how I've got so many notes. Your notes are so impressive. Here's a email she wrote to another inmate that was in another facility. I believe it was a male inmate. She said, quote, a male inmate that she was in love with. I mean, I think she was in love with a lot of other male inmates that were not anywhere near her prison. But, quote, I love to read, but my true joy is writing. I love every part of putting together a story, unquote.

That's called a tell. Let me read that again, because if you want to understand Taylor Parker, this is a good, this is a good sentence to understand. I love every part of putting together a story. Not only does she love it, she thrives on it. Putting together. It's also not telling a story because there's one thing to tell a true story. She's putting together the story. You know, that means she's creating the story.

That's actually a really interesting words there. Right. It's not telling a story. Right. And it's not telling a true story. The implications are putting together. It's putting together a false story that she's going to then weaponize. Right.

In a way that benefits her. I mean, but so that's, that was a quote from her in an email. She said she also wrote a letter to the FBI. I'm not going to read this, but she wrote a letter to the FBI saying that she wanted to work for them as a profile. because she felt like she, so she was trying to, she was trying to, she was trying to, she was trying to, so there was one of the, apparently one of her, one of the inmates with her was very gullible. And she was trying to convince this inmate that the inmate actually was there during the murder and committed the crime.

And she was going to have the inmate confessed to committing this crime. And. She thought this would work. So she thought she would get out because of that. And so once she got out, her hope was that she could go work for the FBI as a profiler. I mean, yeah, that I mean, talk about delusional. One of the things she said in that letter is that she also talk about, she did have apparently moments of honesty.

She said she called herself manipulative in that letter. and she was quote, she's quote, the one who runs the jail and no one crosses her. Okay. So interesting. She did have moments of very rare moments. Well, you know, in the hospital, that's interesting. She knows she's manipulative, but in the hospital, you haven't talked about the hospital yet, the hospital body cam, you said that was so fascinating.

The important point here is that her post-crime behavior is the same. Yeah. All she's doing is she's finding a new audience for her craziness. she's doing is finding an new audience for her fictions for her lies, right? She's still the same pathological liar. It also shows she's got a personality disorder. And again, I don't... Persimperment personality disorders.

Disorders, right? She apparently, apparently according to the forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Gribbon, she apparently has all of them. So the line, the storytelling, all of this continues after she's incarcerated. And it shows clearly. too that she's so defense that the performance never ends she's so defensive right she's so fragile that she will do anything even after being put on death row she'll do anything she'll do anything these these lies in this narrative she'll do anything anything what else i got questions

i keep brighten them down so i do have some final thoughts we'll get to it a little bit but let's before I do that, let's open the floor to your questions. We have to talk about the hospital. Yeah, I want to talk about the hospital body cam, but I think one question I have is, I understand she's a pathological liar. I understand she has no sense of self. I understand, or a fault self. I understand that she's a walking cluster B. Yeah. I understand all that. Okay. But how does she think she was going to get away with this? Like, she is pretending to give birth, you know, has the umbilical cord of this dying baby that essentially she murders, you know, by taking this baby out of her mother and has the baby and the embellical cord, you know,

still attached, pretending it's coming out of her pants, says she gives birth. Like, she's got to know that police are going to find a murdered mother. right like how does she think she's gonna get away with this like I understand the line and she loves putting stories together but at what point

does just logic come in and say there's no logic so here's so this will get this will take us to the hospital body cam footage which is just for I mean

yeah it does lead us there It does lead us there because that's when I started thinking about this. So the hospital body camp, but she's in there because she's claiming she just gave birth on the side of the road to this baby that's, you know, now deceased. And they're looking at her going, we know you didn't just give birth. Whose baby is this? And she's still like. She's like, it's my baby. They're not going to figure this out.

They're not going to find a murdered mother, you know, in her kitchen and her home. Yeah. Yeah. It's an absolutely fascinating moment because it's the, it's the, it's the. This is the first moment in her life where you have the collision of a brutal reality, a murder that she committed with her pathological line. What happens when you get that collision? So we saw this with Lori Debeau to some degree too.

Here's the difference between, I don't want to talk about Debeau. I want to talk about what I think, what I believe, So nobody's diagnosing her is delusional. The forensic psychologist basically says, no, this was planned. She knew exactly what she was doing. There's no mental health issues. So there's not delusions. There's not schizophrenia.

According to him, maybe that's changed. I don't know. I think this is the fundamental distinction. I watched that several times. I look closely to her body language. I was fascinated by the fact that she's in such unbelievable denial. I'm just going to be up front with you. I've been talking to the DA down in Booty County

and they've been working on a case down there. And we know that you had a hysterectomy sometime back and that you've claimed to be pregnant for a while, but that you really weren't. So we're trying to figure out where this baby came from. But you didn't get birth this morning. What do you mean?

So I just said you didn't get birth this morning. We want to know where this baby came from. That's why I'm here. So what happened? I just told y'all what happened. Okay. What's the doctor gonna find when he comes in and checks you? Is he gonna find you to escape birth?

They can tell. When he looks, he can tell him about a second, if you get birth or not. Okay. So is he gonna find that you get birth this morning? Yes. Okay. It'll be here. It'll be here. But the information I've got is you've had a hysterectomy in the past and

you have hissterectomy can't be pregnant. And you came into a hospital with a newborn. We want to know what this newborn came from. Oh. Okay. So you're still saying it came from you? Yes. Okay. Because we can do DNA on it. You can be able to tell pretty quick. They have the placenta and they can see if the placenta sent.

Okay. You gave birth to this child? Yes. We're just making sure. Who drove the animals drove here? Yes. From beach?

Yes. If there's anything you need to talk us about, you can. I don't know what everybody wants me to talk about. So this is what I think. I think she, at some level, knows she committed the murder. I think she at some level knows that she murdered that baby, that fetus.

But the answer lies in what has she done her entire life? And gotten away with it. No one's held her accountable. Right. Everybody's bought her lies. Yeah. And so here is what she thinks. She thinks she's committed this murder, but she can manipulate everyone into believing that she did not.

Because that's what she's done. That's what she's done her whole life. That's what her mother did with her. That's what she thinks. She thinks she can bend brutal reality to fit her fantasy and that people will believe it. Because that is what she's always done. Because that's what she's done because there's never been any limits on her. Wow.

That's kind of scary. I mean, it's scary because I think about people. But that's how you get to murder. I know. It's frightening. Desperation mixed with cluster B mixed with not holding people. accountable, you know, and getting away with something for so long. It's frightening.

My take, so on that point, my, you know, I was thinking about, so one of the things you know I like to do is draw some literary parallels or maybe some movie parallels. This is, this is, so Pinocchio, I think Pinocchio is my main explanatory vehicle. However, what this is, ready for it? I'm ready for it. Are you sitting down? Yeah, you're sitting down. Okay, here we go.

Yes, I'm definitely sitting down. I've been sitting down for a long time. So I am more than ready for this. You have a drink. You even have coffee or something. I don't know what that is. Yeah. All right.

This is Pinocchio meets fatal attraction, meets when the hand rocks the cradle. That's what this is. That's freaking freaky. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's exactly what this is. Except the fatal attraction part isn't from an affair, obviously. it's not a man. The fatal attraction part is Reagan. If you replace Reagan with the Michael Douglas character, do you remember fatal attraction with Glenn Close? Yes. Glenn Close had borderline

personality disorder, right? So you've got the bunnies. Pinocchio the liar meets the Glenn Close character with borderline personality disorder meets the hand that rocks, the cradle, with the nanny who wants to take over the home and the child. That's what this is. Yeah. I just, can I sell that to Hollywood? Well, no, it's freaky. It's actually frightening. It's absolutely frightening. Yeah, it is frightening. It's frightening in the sense that this is when it looks like when you have someone that's so divorced from reality and so desperate. And someone who's a pathological liar who has no sense of self. Who's desperate?

And they're desperate to maintain a relationship. They're desperate for people to believe the law. lie. This is frightening. This is what you get. And I think this is why, by the way, this is why. And the dehumanization of. The dehumanization of Reagan. Reagan becomes an obstacle.

Reagan and her unborn baby. Correct. Wow. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Which actually, so it actually leads to a really, I think it leads to an, the question you're kind of asking beneath all of this is,

what happens when a person's, when a person's fictional narrative begins to collapse? Yeah, what does happen? That's where I think it becomes scary. What happens when brutal reality intersects with someone's fictional narrative that they've been using to maintain their, to protect their identity of their whole lives? Their whole life and that they've never been held accountable. What happens? Well, one thing that happens, obviously, is one thing that can happen is,

violence. Another thing that can happen is some type of nervous breakdown or some type of emotional breakdown, some type of fragmentation that can lead to violence or that can lead to hospitalization that can really to self-harm. There's a lot of things that can happen. The thing that's less likely to happen but could happen is some type of Pinocchio transformation. It would be good. Some type of come-to-Jesus moment where for Pinocchio, by the way, has come to Jesus moment is he recognizes that Giuseppe loves him. He recognizes that his creator, his father, wasn't trying to harm him by sending him to school. He wasn't trying to harm him by disciplining him. He was simply trying to help him. Chippetto. Chippetto. I'm sorry,

what did I say? Giuseppe. Yeah, I'm sorry, Chepetto. Pinocchio has that moment where he has that moment when he's able to accept love. Yeah. And that is going to bring me some of my final thoughts, which one of my favorite, one of my favorite sayings that I say over and over again, I probably tired of it, but I always say,

behind every criminal lies a failed love story. No, I'm not sick of it. It's true. Behind every criminal lies a failed love story. And what does that mean? This is by definition of failed love story. It's a very failed. On many, many levels.

Right. Since birth. Beginning to end. And I think the reason this is such a failed love story is because Taylor Parker is incapable of finding, keeping, and feeling, most importantly, feeling love. she doesn't know what it means she doesn't know how to do it

she doesn't know how to facilitate it she doesn't know how to keep it and the reason she can't do that is because she has no basis to love someone that it's all false she operates from a position of lies and from a position of false falsity from a position of artificiality

yeah and so I you know in that sense I do have some empathy for her because she she wants more than anything to feel love. I know. And she can't experience that. Everything she's doing is to try to prop herself up or to try to find people that will love her. The problem is she can't accept that love. And also, she's very confused, by the way, about, like, she has this idea of motherhood as possession.

Like, she thinks that if she just have a baby, even though it's not, even if it's not hers, even if she's pretending that it's hers, she thinks somehow she has a baby, the mere possession of that baby is going to somehow solve all her problems and it's going to give her love. What she doesn't understand about mothering, obviously, is that mothering is about care or, let's say, being a parent. It's about care. It's about responsibility. It's about protection. It's about nurturing, nurturance. And most importantly, it's about unconditional love towards that child. She can't grasp any of that.

She sees love as possession. I know. And so I think on this idea of this being a foul love story, I'm going to get back to Pinocchio. Because Pinocchio is the opposite. Pinocchio is a successful love story in the sense that at the end of the day, the thing that transforms Pinocchio from a wooden boy

into a real human being, this is his ability to give and receive love. Taylor Parker cannot give and receive love. And here is the quote that I promised you like an hour and a half ago that I'm now going to read. This is going to be my last thought tonight. We're going to end with this.

This is my day new ma. Here's a quote from Wade. At the very end of this documentary, Wade Griffin. Oh, yeah. Here's what he says. He says, quote, the whole point behind it all, meaning the murder, the lies, everything, the whole point behind it all. Behind it all.

The whole point behind it all. I guess she was hoping one day I would finally tell her I loved her, but I never did. Yeah. I guess you was hoping one day I would finally tell her I loved her, but I never did. If you want to understand this situation, that's all you need to know. That's it. He tells you. I mean, on the one hand, it's kind of sad that Wade can't express, if he does love her,

which apparently he never did, but if he did love her, he can't express it to her. Right. But on the other hand, I think what he's part of what he's saying or mostly what he's saying is that he doesn't love her. her because she's so crazy. He doesn't love her because he doesn't trust her. He doesn't love her because he knows so much of this is lying and so much of this is deception. He can't love her because she doesn't, she's not able to give and receive love. And this is how he expresses it. Here's a question, though. I mean, I completely agree, figuratively speaking, but literally speaking.

Yeah. I don't know if that would, like, if he literally said to her, hey, I love you. I don't know if that would have. Like if she's, you know, six months pregnant, he says, you know, I love you. I will leave you. Would that have, I mean this sincerely, because if it could be that simple, we could solve, we could stop a lot of crimes before they happen, you know? Just everybody say you love them.

Well, don't worry, Wade won't do it. But I want to know. I don't know if it would. I think, here, I think, okay, I think if Wade could genuinely and emotionally connect to her with true love, maybe, maybe it would be a step in the right direction. Do I think that would change the equation? Probably not. Yeah.

Because she's so far gone. And because a personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of habitual actions and behaviors, it's really hard to change that. I don't think Taylor Parker is someone who's going to accept love. Right. Whereas Pinocchio will. Exactly. Well said.

So in other words, Wade's quote is also about her acceptance of it. Correct. The whole point behind it all, I guess, is she was hoping one day, I would finally tell her I loved her, but I never did. The other side to that is that she would have had to, accept his love and she couldn't. There's no, Pinocchio can't feel love from Chappado unless he can accept it. And it's, by the way, it's really hard to accept love if you have a lot of self-hatred.

You know, Taylor Parker clearly has tremendous amount of self-hatred. Those examples, those texts I read earlier about, about that I said were projection. You don't love her. He hates you. he hates you. That's how she feels about herself. About herself. It's really hard to accept love if you have all this self-hatred.

Right. You can't accept somebody else's love if you don't love yourself. That's a cliche, but yeah. It's a failed love story. You know what? Behind every cliche. Is it true? Is it true?

On that issue, by the way, on the little Pinocchio, on the little Pinocchio rendering I did, At the top, you'll notice there's a sign that says veritas. You know what that is? Yes, I do. Okay. There you go. Do you know what that is?

Yes. Truth. Yes. The truth will set you free. But not everyone deserves your truth. But yes, it will. The truth will set you free. All right.

Thank you. You're welcome. Did this help explain to you? Taylor Parker. It helped explain. Taylor Parker, it helped explain to me a lot of people. Honestly, it helped explain a lot that's going on. Yeah. So thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. And it's scary, you know, like I said, when desperation meets a false self and someone desperate to keep the narrative or their narrative or their story they've put together, what happens next. and the dehumanization.

So it's a lot to think about. It's actually pretty heavy. There's a lot of lying going on in the world. Yeah. It's late right now, and I will probably be thinking about a lot and not sleeping right away. Okay. But thank you so much, babe.

It does. Appreciate it. Yep. So, and thank you for, for figuring it out and giving us hope. Pinocchio gives us hope. I love Pinocchio.

I am now going, by the way, I'm now going to go reread. Kolati's original story. I read this story years ago, but I want to go reread it because it is a really beautiful tale, and it's a timeless tale. I'd like to read that too. I'd like to reread it. I want to tease a Patreon episode, by the way, coming up

that I've been working on for weeks now, but it's it's going to be my first ever self-help episode i know i know cori richens i know it's exactly that's what inspired it i know it's unthinkable that i might do something positive i know it's unthinkable you're such a glass half i'm totally i'm total pessimist you're going to be like how could such a pessimist do something that's actually motivating or self-help based I don't know. I'm working on it. Well, I would like to tease a Patreon episode we've already done.

And I would like, I would like to thank everyone for CrimeCon. CrimeCon. We haven't talked about CrimeCon. That was such a fun time to meet so many of you. And we shared a little bit about our experience at CrimeCon on Patreon. Patreon.com slash hidden to crime. And I want to think, or we want to think, I'm sure, all of our don't want to speak for you, but I think we're both thinking all of our Patreon supporters.

No, we are truly grateful for all of you. And it was a wonderful time at CrimeCon in Las Vegas. I mentioned, you know, it's interesting. You talk about trauma and grief and crime, and yet you come away from CrimeCon a little bit more hopeful and because you spend time with such thoughtful people and have dialogues with people that bring that hope for me. And so if we're going to talk about positive things,

meeting so many of you at CrimeCon was sincerely a positive thing for me. And we talk a little bit more about that on our last Patreon episode that is there. And for a lot of behind the scenes episodes, not a lot, like a lot, like we have, I think over 100 now, behind the scenes episodes where John and I actually just turn on my phone voice recorder and just start talking iPhone. Sometimes it's when we're on a date driving around, trying to figure out what to do

when we have a babysitter. And other times it's just sort of late at night and I flip on the voice recorder and we talk and share thoughts. And so we have a recent one that we did. So you find that. Patreon.com slash into crime. And yourself, help one will be coming soon. We're planning and recording in the next week, this week.

We'll see. Yes, okay. Don't. I don't do dates. Okay, yeah. I'm working on it. It's getting there. Yeah.

So thank you, everyone for being here. And thank you for those, the supporters here on our podcast, at YouTube, on Spotify. It was so fun to have Spotify. We share our videos there now. And at Patreon, again, patreon. com slash, I don't you cry. So until that. next time. We'll see you. Thanks guys. Good night. Good night.