The Virginia man accused of conspiring with his family’s Brazilian au pair to murder his wife and the man they would frame for her death will try to convince a jury beginning this week that he’s innocent, more than a year after the au pair agreed to cooperate with authorities investigating her former boss turned paramour.
Brendan Banfield, 40, is charged with aggravated murder in the 2023 stabbing of his wife, Christine Banfield, and the shooting of Joseph Ryan.
According to court records, Ryan arrived at the Banfields’ Fairfax County home armed with a knife for a “rape fantasy” rendezvous he had planned with a user he met on a fetish sex website. In Banfield’s telling, au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães alerted him a stranger had entered their home and they arrived in the primary bedroom just in time to see the intruder stabbing his wife, so both he and Magalhães shot at the man. But prosecutors say Banfield orchestrated the whole thing, posing as his wife on the fetish site to lure Ryan to the house, then shooting Ryan and stabbing his wife to death with Ryan’s knife.
Both Magalhães and Banfield were arrested and initially handed murder charges but, in 2024, Magalhães pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge and agreed to cooperate. 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.
A jury was selected Monday in Fairfax County Circuit Court to weigh the diverging accounts of what happened the morning of Feb. 24, 2023, that left Christine Banfield, 37, bleeding from stab wounds to her neck and Ryan, 39, fatally shot.
Attorneys will deliver their opening statements Tuesday in a trial expected to last four weeks. Both sides have laid out much of their arguments in the nearly three years since police were called to the Banfield home.
Prosecutors allege deadly catfishing scheme
Prosecutors say Banfield was pretending to be his wife on a fetish-related website when he invited Ryan to their Herndon-area house for a mock home invasion and rape fantasy so Banfield could kill them both and claim he was interrupting an intruder attack.
Almost from the beginning, police were unconvinced by Magalhães’s initial account of the attack in which she claimed she and Banfield walked in on Ryan holding a knife to Christine Banfield’s throat and both shot at the man they believed to be an intruder. Investigators first questioned the confusing sequence of 911 calls that morning, prosecutors said. Their suspicion grew after authorities searched the au pair’s cellphone and found that she and Banfield had begun a romantic relationship several months before the killings — a fact she had not mentioned in interviews with detectives.
When Magalhães was arrested in October 2023, eight months after the slayings, she had moved into the main bedroom, authorities said. A framed picture of her and Banfield was on the nightstand, police evidence photos show, and her clothes hung in the closet once used by Christine Banfield.
Banfield was arrested nearly a year later, in September 2024. Magalhães pleaded guilty roughly a month after his arrest, giving a statement to officials confirming parts of their theory.
In court records, prosecutors have alleged Banfield left his home’s front door unlocked that morning, parked a short distance away, then waited for Magalhães to alert him when Ryan arrived. Magalhães has told police she called Banfield, who took his young daughter to the basement, then went upstairs and shot Ryan and fatally stabbed his wife. She told investigators that she helped orchestrate the killings by posing as Christine Banfield in some phone calls to Ryan. She also said she retrieved a gun and fatally shot Ryan after he survived the first shot, prosecutors said.
Paramedics found the bodies repositioned, prosecutors have said, with Ryan’s arms seemingly smeared with Christine Banfield’s blood and crossed in a position he could not have achieved after being killed. As paramedics worked to save Christine Banfield, prosecutors said, her husband didn’t ask about her.
Prosecutors wanted to use the Banfields’ daughter’s conversation with a forensic interviewer about what she believed was happening the morning her mother was killed, but a judge ruled it cannot be included in the trial.
Defense claims police commanders silenced detectives
John Carroll, Banfield’s defense attorney, has contested prosecutors’ theory that Banfield impersonated his wife in messages to Ryan, arguing that Fairfax police commanders pressured investigators and reassigned two homicide detectives who questioned the theory.
Brendan Miller, a former digital forensic examiner with the Fairfax County Police Department, wrote in a summary of the case that “there is no indication that Christine lost control of her devices” in the six weeks before the slayings. The records show Christine Banfield’s laptop and phone were used to contact Ryan and that one of Brendan Banfield’s phones had no such contact, though his work phone could not be opened. An evidence analysis team at the University of Alabama peer-reviewed and affirmed Miller’s digital forensic findings, according to court records.
Miller was transferred out of the department’s digital forensics unit in late 2024, though a former Fairfax County commander testified the reassignment was not punitive.
Detectives testified in July that they felt pressured by commanders during the investigation, with one deputy police chief saying he disagreed with Miller’s finding and acknowledged saying Miller “will never work a case in major crimes again.”
Carroll has sought the personnel records of lead homicide detective Kyle Bryant and Miller, whom he suspects were forced out of their units because they disagreed with command staff’s catfishing theory. He has also pointed to an internal affairs complaint filed last year by nine homicide detectives, including Bryant, alleging a hostile work environment from commanders.
In a July hearing, Carroll called Bryant to the stand. “Were you ever asked to adopt a theory that you didn’t agree was supported by the investigation?” Carroll asked.
“Yes,” Bryant said, though he said he was never told to testify falsely. He said there were further disagreements after Banfield was arrested in September. He was moved from the homicide unit to the sex crimes unit and then to the digital forensics section.
“This investigation is a theory in search of facts,” Carroll said during the July hearing.
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