In the first 911 call from the Northern Virginia home where two people were slain in 2023, the only sound is a guttural moan, then silence. About 15 minutes later, another 911 call comes from the home, and this time the Banfield family’s Brazilian au pair can be heard begging for help, breathing hard and too flustered to give an address. Then Brendan Banfield’s voice cuts in.
This is where the cover-up began, prosecutors argued Tuesday at the outset of Banfield’s murder trial. They say he and Juliana Peres Magalhães hatched a plot to kill his wife, Christine Banfield, and a man they planned to frame as a violent intruder.
“There’s somebody here,” Brendan Banfield can be heard saying on the call. “I shot him. He stabbed her. She’s bleeding out. There’s several marks on her neck. What do I do?”
Banfield, charged with aggravated murder in the killings of Christine Banfield and Joseph Ryan, cried in court Tuesday while listening to the 911 call Magalhães made from the Banfields’ Northern Virginia home that February.
He would later tell investigators that Magalhães had called him to tell him she’d seen a strange man entering the house, and he rushed back to the home to find Ryan with a knife to his wife’s throat, so he shot him.
But Fairfax County prosecutor Jenna Sands urged jurors Tuesday not to believe that version of events.
In opening statements, Sands argued that Banfield and Magalhães, the then-22-year-old au pair, were deeply in love, but Banfield worried that if he left his wife he would lose custody of their young daughter. Instead, Sands said, the couple impersonated Christine Banfield on a fetish website, where they met Ryan and lured him to the family’s Herndon-area home under the pretense of a rape fantasy scenario. Sands said Ryan agreed to a set of rules: don’t meet before the fantasy, bring a knife and zip ties, and — most importantly — don’t stop no matter how scared Christine Banfield seems.
Sands said Magalhães messed up the plot by making the 911 call too early and only called back later after both she and Banfield had shot Ryan and Banfield had stabbed his wife repeatedly in the neck.
Both Magalhães and Banfield were arrested and initially charged with murder. But Magalhães pleaded guilty in 2024 to a manslaughter charge and agreed to cooperate. She is expected to testify against Banfield.
Defense attorney John Carroll on Tuesday told jurors to be skeptical of Magalhães’s version of events, saying she had maintained her innocence for a year but eventually changed her story to match prosecutors’ theory in exchange for a sweetheart deal. Carroll pointed to correspondence from Magalhães to Banfield while she was in jail, saying she wrote to him “They want you” and “They want me to say things that aren’t true.”
“The whole reason she was arrested was to flip her against my client,” Carroll said during his opening remarks. “There’s a vulnerable person who is open to prey for what they need. … And I would respectfully suggest that Juliana Peres Magalhães is the linchpin in all of this.”
Banfield also faces child abuse and child endangerment charges related to his daughter, who was 4 years old and in the basement of the Northern Virginia home when the killings occurred. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts. The trial is expected to last four weeks.
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