Brendan Banfield assumed his wife was having an affair when his mistress called to tell him she had seen a stranger entering his Northern Virginia home, he testified Thursday during his murder trial. After all, he said, they had both indulged in extramarital relationships — and he was months into an affair with the family’s 22-year-old Brazilian au pair.
Prosecutors say the forbidden romance with the woman helping care for his daughter drove Banfield to orchestrate an elaborate plot to kill his wife and a man he lured to their bed from a fetish website so he would have someone to blame for her death. Banfield, telling his side of the story publicly for the first time Thursday, rejected their theory and testified that he interrupted a violent knife attack on his wife by shooting her attacker moments too late to save her life.
Banfield, 40, is on trial in Fairfax County, charged with aggravated murder in the February 2023 killings of Christine Banfield, 37, and Joseph Ryan, 39.
From the witness stand, Banfield described lingering at the foot of the stairs leading up to the couple’s bedroom, hearing sounds he thought were sexual and feeling dismayed.
“I was emotional at that point,” he said. “While Christine and I had had affairs, we had never seen each other with anyone. We had never been caught in the act.”
But when the noises he heard upstairs sounded more like pain than pleasure, Banfield said, he drew the gun he had been issued as an IRS agent and headed up the stairs.
“As my mind was kind of racing in that moment, the sound kind of changed,” he said. “The impact sounded forceful.”
He described kicking the bedroom door open to see his wife naked on her hands and knees, blood in her hair. A man he did not know, now identified as Ryan, knelt behind her, he said. As the man locked eyes with him, Brendan Banfield testified that his wife cried out, “Brendan, he has a knife.”
Ryan yanked Christine Banfield up onto her knees, Brendan Banfield said, revealing a flash of silver in the hand Ryan had buried in his wife’s thick, curly hair. He said his wife appeared to already be in pain, but because her hair obstructed his view of the knife and her neck he wasn’t sure whether she had been stabbed.
Brendan Banfield said he identified himself as law enforcement, commanded Ryan to drop the knife and threated to have him arrested. He said Ryan replied that Christine Banfield was his and that she “gave herself” to him.
Still, Brendan Banfield did not shoot. He said that Ryan’s head was extremely close to his wife’s and that he feared he would accidentally hit her. It wasn’t until a particularly forceful stab sent Christine Banfield falling forward onto her stomach that Brendan Banfield says he fired his gun, striking Ryan in the head.
He said he ran to his wife’s side, where she guided his hand to cover her stab wounds and apply pressure. He said she told him that she couldn’t see, she was bleeding out, she loved him, and she was sorry.
Prosecutor Jenna Sands took aim at that account during a fiery cross-examination, questioning why he claims to have been “chatting” with a woman suffering from seven stab wounds before calling 911.
He was still rendering aid to his dying wife when he heard a second gunshot, Banfield told jurors.
Au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães had followed him into the room and retrieved his personal firearm from a safe, he said, then shot Ryan after seeing him get up and approach Brendan Banfield from behind. Just as Ryan struck him in the shoulder, he said, Magalhães shot Ryan.
In letters professing his love to Magalhães while she was jailed in connection with Ryan’s death, he called her a “hero.”
“I believe Joe Ryan was very much still a threat to both me and Christine,” Banfield testified. “I view that Juliana’s actions potentially saved the rest of us.”
But earlier in the trial, Magalhães told jurors a different story. She pleaded guilty in 2024 to manslaughter and agreed to testify against her former paramour.
In her telling, Banfield was the mastermind behind a scheme he thought would allow them to get away with killing his wife. Magalhães and Banfield were in love, she told jurors, and he was desperate to leave his wife but afraid of losing custody of the couple’s then-4-year-old daughter. She said he hatched a plan to “get rid of” his wife and pin her death on a stranger they met on a sexual fetish website while posing as Christine Banfield.
In her testimony, Magalhães described arriving in the United States from Brazil as a 21-year-old and being offered $200 a week and a room in the Banfields’ home to care for their toddler. She then detailed how her relationship with Banfield turned sexual. Prosecutors showed jurors photos she posted to her Instagram with the married man’s face covered by an emoji: a selfie of them in the bath, a video of them singing in the car, a photo of his hand on her upper thigh. She joined him on work trips, she said, and they brought the Banfields’ young daughter on a vacation with them to New York.
Magalhães told jurors that she and Banfield used his wife’s laptop and phone to open an account on FetLife, a BDSM and sexual kink community site where they eventually met Ryan and persuaded him to come to the family’s home under the pretense of a rape fantasy scenario. Prosecutors said Ryan agreed to a set of rules: to not meet before the fantasy, to bring a knife and zip ties, and — most important — not to stop no matter how scared Christine Banfield seemed.
Magalhães said Banfield shot Ryan, then used the knife to stab his wife while Magalhães shot Ryan a second time to ensure he was dead.
Banfield emphatically denied any plan to harm his wife. He called the idea that he had concocted a catfishing plot “absolutely crazy.”
He told jurors that he believed his wife had been seeking rough sex online. When the couple lived in New York, he said he had discovered one of her affairs after he confronted her about mysterious bruises on her body. He said that his wife’s desire for “sexual violence” and his lack of interest caused marital problems and that they had sought counseling.
“I was not interested in ever harming her,” he said.
He testified Wednesday that his relationship with Magalhães — which he said the au pair initiated — was not serious and that he never planned to divorce his wife. He cited his former affairs as evidence his cheating did not mean he wanted to leave his wife, with whom he had been in a relationship with since they were 18-year-old college freshmen.
“I had feelings for her, but they weren’t nearly as strong as my feelings for my wife,” he said of Magalhães, denying that he loved her.
Prosecutors then presented him with letters he had written to Magalhães brainstorming names for their future children — Chloe for a girl, Robby for a boy.
Brendan Banfield said he had only grown to love the au pair after his wife’s death.
Banfield’s bombshell account Thursday followed days of dense testimony from digital forensics experts, who testified that data pulled from devices from Christine Banfield, Brendan Banfield and Magalhães cuts against the prosecution’s catfishing theory. One agreed with a police detective who had concluded that there was no clear evidence that Christine Banfield had lost control of her devices. In response, prosecutors pointed out that the data couldn’t show who was using her laptop and that Christine Banfield never messaged Ryan when Brendan Banfield and Magalhães were out of town — seemingly the most opportune time to contact an affair partner.
Prosecutors concluded court Thursday with a last-minute witness: a former IRS colleague of Brendan Banfield’s who called Wednesday night saying he had information disproving Brendan Banfield’s version of events. Banfield had begun his testimony Wednesday telling jurors that he remembered the morning of the killings because he had an important work meeting with a promotion on the line. He repeatedly stressed that he left the house early that morning because he was worried about a meeting with his superiors. But his acting superior at the time told jurors Thursday that there had been no such meeting planned.
Prosecutors also told the judge that a man had approached a Fairfax County detective during the lunch break and asked if it was too late to take the stand. They alerted the judge because two jurors had overheard, but did not attempt to call the man to testify.
The defense rested its case Thursday and once again tried to convince the judge to dismiss the charges, saying prosecutors hung their entire case on Magalhães’ testimony and failed to prove any corroborating details.
For more than a year, Magalhães maintained that she and Banfield were innocent. Defense attorney John F. Carroll has used letters and messages Magalhães sent from jail to portray her as lonely and suicidal after her arrest, disillusioned with the criminal justice system, and willing to say anything to cut a plea deal.
Magalhães “has every possible incentive to tell the story the Commonwealth wants her to tell,” Carroll said.
The judge said the jury will have to weigh whether Magalhães was telling the truth. Closing arguments are set for Friday, then juror deliberations will begin.
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