Brendan Banfield, the Virginia man accused of plotting with the family’s au pair to impersonate his wife on a sexual fetish website to frame a stranger as her killer, was found guilty Monday of aggravated murder in the 2023 killings of Christine Banfield and Joseph Ryan.
A jury in Fairfax County deliberated for nearly nine hours before finding Brendan Banfield, 40, guilty of both murders as well as two lesser charges. He faces life in prison at sentencing.
The conviction marks the end of a four-week trial during which prosecutors painted Brendan Banfield as a man so deeply in love with the family’s young Brazilian au pair that he orchestrated an elaborate plot to stab his wife, then shoot the man he’d lured to the Northern Virginia home under the pretense of a rough sex fantasy. Brendan Banfield told jurors he interrupted a violent knife attack on his wife but shot her attacker too late to save her.
Both Brendan Banfield and au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães took the stand in the televised trial that made international headlines. They gave vastly different accounts of the events that left two people dead in the primary bedroom of the Banfield home.
Magalhães was initially charged with Ryan’s murder but pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in a deal that set the stage for her testimony. She said Brendan Banfield did not want to divorce his wife because he feared losing custody of the couple’s then-4-year-old daughter. Instead, Magalhães said, he devised a plan to “get rid of” Christine Banfield by “catfishing” a man online, asking him to come to the home with a knife to engage in a rape fantasy. He shot the man and stabbed his wife with the knife that the man brought, Magalhães said.
Brendan Banfield called the impersonation theory “absolutely crazy.”
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