Maternal Instinct: What Taylor Parker's Boyfriend Tried to Cash at His Bank

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is HiddenKillers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
We're going to continue our conversation here on Maternal Instinct. A lot of people watching Maternal Instinct have some reaction to Wade Griffin and the same reaction to Wade Griffin. How did he not know? His, her ex-husband tried to warn him. Mom tried. Friends tried. Walked into a bank with an $8 million fake check and didn't question it. The documentary raised it and the audience is rather split. Is Wade purely a victim of Taylor Parker? Or does he carry some of what happened to Reagan Simmons Hancock? Does he carry some responsibility there? There's a lot of people looking at this with a lot of mixed opinions. I've watched this thing three times now. I went back and watched it again last night specifically for his parts because I just wanted to see how he was emoting, how he was handling it. Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author with us. So is Rob Hendrick, retired FBI special agent.
I'm still kind of confounded on Wade a little bit. He seems like a nice enough guy.
And I don't know any other way to put it, but he seems like a simple man.
That's what he was raised around and nothing wrong with that. But I don't necessarily have the reps or the skills to have dissected and peeled the onion back to really see the capabilities of what Taylor was even though she was right next to him. What was your take on Wade Shavaun?

**Shavaun Scott** (1:48)
Simple, perfect word. That's the one I wrote down to.
I had the sense, I may be wrong, but I had the sense he didn't have a lot of experience with women. So this was a new thing for him. She was pretty, she was cooking his meal, she was helping out at the farm. Critical thinking was just not weighing in for him. Also, $8 million is incredibly motivating.
She got him vehicles, farm equipment, and was going to spend what? Three or four million on this fantasy property he had always had. So I think we can say his reasoning was motivated by all this benefit that he was told he was going to get from her. It did indicate in the documentary that they had been having lots of fights and lots of conflict, and that would be fascinating to talk to him about what were the fights about and what was going on. But yeah, I couldn't understand. You've never seen her naked. I mean, during this pregnancy all this time, and you didn't think that something was off here. Yeah.

**Tony Brueski** (3:00)
I mean, it's amazing.
I mean, it sounds crazy to most people in healthy relationships, but then you start talking to some folks and you'll find so many marriages and relationships where it's like, you've never done that and you've been together how many years? And it's like, yeah, and people will find ways to tell themselves, this is normal, this is healthy, this is just how it is and we're unique. And it seems that he found a way to do that and be okay with it. Robin, what was your take on him?

**Robin Drake** (3:29)
Yeah. She had so many life reps around manipulating people and part of her manipulation is discovering their triggers, their needs, wants, dreams, aspirations, priorities in life. And she knew exactly how to fulfill every single one of those for him and him. So she create this ideology of what he was seeking and she became the key to getting all that because she knew what she just wanted him in her life. And I can imagine that she knew that she could get away with manipulating because she had already escalated it to that point that if she just said, I can't do this because my own insecurities with my body, because that's what she said, that she could keep it hidden. And I'm also curious about this too, because he's repeatedly said he never said he loved her. So he was in love with the idea of what he'd get from her and not necessarily her. And so I think when she was pushing him away physically, to see the fake baby bump that she didn't have, it probably played a little bit easier with him since he wasn't as, according to him, as physically attracted to her.
But I think that goes then too, because they mentioned those fights. So Shavaun, do you think there was a physical escalation going on at some point? Because otherwise she'd go from to 100 to killing someone so brutally. I mean, so what kind of things do you think were going on with her with any rage and violence that brought to the point where she could do what she did? Because that was extremely horrendous what she did.