Maternal Instinct is the latest true crime doc to make everyone you know say, “What the fuck did I just watch?” with a look of horror on their faces. While it’s true that the crimes Taylor Parker was convicted of are horrific beyond imagination, there are some elements of this case we’ve seen over and over – which paints an interesting picture of what we expect from victims.
Oddly, the perpetrator, Taylor Parker, is the one described as “lighting up a room,” but her victim, Reagan Simmons-Hancock, is still painted in an incredibly positive light. She was a wonderful mother, a fantastic friend. The only one who stood up for Taylor, even when everyone else turned their backs. Most importantly, she loved being a mother.
In short, she was perfect.
I once had the opportunity to interview a writer for one of the true crime all-the-time cable channels. He described an instance where he was asked to remove a large portion of the victim’s story, despite it being integral to the series’ purpose, because it would make viewers less sympathetic. The story could not be about a sex worker with a drug problem. It could be about a very young woman with no friends or family to look out for her, but we weren’t allowed to know how she got to that point, or what she was doing. Or why. To put it simply – all victims have to be perfect.
The imperfect ones don’t get airtime.
Taylor’s other victim1, her boyfriend (sometimes called “husband”), Wade Griffin, is presented in a more complex light. Parker’s approach to her relationship with Griffin has all the earmarks of a romance scam, with one notable exception — her goal was not to swindle Griffin out of money, but to swindle him into a marriage. Another way their story doesn’t follow the plot of a typical romance scam is that Griffin is pretty open about the fact that he was enchanted by the bank account she claimed to have, and says he “never” loved her. He tells a story of being overwhelmed by the speed the relationship moved and ambivalent about his feelings for her. His friends and family don’t tell a different one. They seemed more taken by Parker’s show than Griffin was.
In fact, the only times Griffin shows any emotion about the relationship at all are when he is clearly pissed about the fake job she sent him on and when he finds out she killed Reagan Simmons-Hancock and the baby did not survive. No one tells us what a good friend Griffin was, how much he loved kids and animals, or even thinks twice about the fact that he was seemingly only able to be scammed by Parker because he thought he was going to scam her. Griffin gets to be imperfect and still get sympathy for the impact Parker’s actions had on his reputation and relationships.
In 2009, without irony, an NBC affiliate published an article blaming a woman’s “party-girl lifestyle” for her murder. As we all know, no woman has ever attended more than one party and lived.
In 2014, a 19-year-old girl was found in an abandoned mine shaft in Joshua Tree National Park after being murdered by her affair partner (who was also married). The local chatter was all about the “poor decisions” she made that led to her death. Very little was said of the fact that her murderer was also married, and that his motive was to cover up her pregnancy. Her “poor decisions” seemed to outweigh all of his, which included: having an affair, not using a condom, and murdering a pregnant woman.
In 2018, the focus on murder victim Christina Abbott’s status as a “secret” escort was so intense that her family released a statement that included the phrasing, “She is not here to defend herself in this case.” The case in question was the trial of her murderer.
Men are not immune to character assassination following their brutal murders. Well, as long as they’re not white. You probably don’t need Dirge to remind you that the debate around George Floyd’s murder was focused on things he did or didn’t do well before the police approached him in 2021. Even this article, which is ostensibly about honoring him, has a section on his past criminal record.
If you had social media in 2012, there’s no doubt you saw completely unhinged theories about what kind of person Trayvon Martin was before he was killed at 17. The defense used his school records and social media profiles to prove self-defense in a case that didn’t happen at school and didn’t involve social media.
The discourse around Michael Brown’s murder in 2014 included the obviously intentional misreading of the peace sign as a “gang sign” in photos of the 18-year-old. The vilification of murdered young Black men and boys is so common, the term “thuggification” was coined to describe it. And these are just a few examples.
Wade Griffin was not a victim of nor an accomplice to murder, though one might argue in a sea of infinite “what-ifs” that her motive could have been extinguished, at least temporarily, if he had not stuck by her side on the promise of a big payout from her family money.2 But he was a victim of a crime we usually see perpetrated against women. The discourse around these women often picks apart their motivations for being in the relationship, the warnings they ignored, the effects their blind loyalty had on their families, and any number of other flaws they may have. Griffin gets to be imperfect without much judgment.
The documentary and the discourse around it seem to agree — Wade Griffin was a victim, period. Not a victim but or a victim because. Just a victim. It feels almost odd to see him presented that way, because true crime often focuses on crimes perpetrated against women, and women have to be perfect to be considered victims at all. In the case of men of color, it is less that they have to be perfect and more that the world refuses to consider the possibility that they are even capable of being victims rather than perpetrators in waiting.
If we’re going to continue watching true crime and getting involved in the discourse around crimes in the news, perhaps it’s time to start treating every victim with the same kind of neutrality Maternal Instinct gave Wade Griffin. The “bad guys” in crimes against other humans are the criminals. The victims have nothing to prove.
