A stranger with a knife had pinned Christine Banfield down in the bedroom of her suburban Virginia home when her husband and their au pair burst through the door. “Brendan, he has a knife!” Christine Banfield yelled to her husband, au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães testified Tuesday, telling her story publicly for the first time from the witness stand in a Fairfax County courtroom.
She said she saw Brendan Banfield, a federal agent, draw his service weapon and shoot the man. Christine Banfield asked Magalhães to call for help, and she dialed 911.
But Brendan Banfield signaled for her to hang up the phone, Magalhães said, then seized the man’s knife and began repeatedly stabbing his wife in the neck.
Magalhães told jurors that she and Banfield had plotted to kill his wife and the man they’d lured from a fetish website to frame as a violent intruder. Both Magalhães and Banfield were arrested and initially charged with murder. But Magalhães pleaded guilty in 2024 to involuntary manslaughter and agreed to cooperate. Brendan Banfield is charged with aggravated murder. His trial began this week.
Magalhães testified for two hours Tuesday about the February 2023 killings of Christine Banfield, 37, and Joseph Ryan, 39. She will resume answering questions Wednesday morning.
She described arriving in the United States from Brazil as a 21-year-old offered $200 a week and a room in the Banfields’ home to care for their toddler, then how her relationship with Brendan 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 to the 2002 hit song “A Thousand Miles,” 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. It was on that trip in October 2022 that Brendan Banfield first mentioned his plan to “get rid of” his wife, Magalhães said.
At first she thought he was joking, she said. But then he took her to the shooting range and told her that he wasn’t going to hire a hit man because that would be too easy for investigators to discover. He replaced the family’s windows with soundproof glass. She posted a photo of herself at the shooting range the same month as the New York trip, captioned in Portuguese that translates to, “The handsome guy takes really good pictures HAHAHA.”
She said she watched as Brendan Banfield used his wife’s laptop to create a new email address in her name and open an account on FetLife, a BDSM and sexual kink community site. The couple impersonated Christine Banfield on the website, Magalhães said, waiting until Christine got home from her nursing shifts to take her laptop from her backpack and exchange messages with people.
Brendan Banfield made sure they used the website only when Christine Banfield was also at home, Magalhães said, anticipating that investigators might later track her movements through her phone.
They eventually met Ryan, who went by the username tacosupreme7000, and lured him to the family’s home under the pretense of a rape fantasy scenario. Prosecutors 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.
Brendan Banfield cried in court Tuesday while listening to the 911 call Magalhães made from the Banfields’ home that February.
In the first 911 call from the Northern Virginia home, the only sound is a guttural moan, then silence. About 15 minutes later, another 911 call comes from the home, and this time Magalhães 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 the trial.
“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?”
He would later tell investigators that Magalhães had called to tell him that she’d seen a strange man entering the house, and he rushed back to find Ryan with a knife to his wife’s throat, so he shot him.
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 the prosecution’s theory in exchange for a sweetheart deal. The plea deal that Magalhães took calls for her to be released and deported to Brazil after the trial as long as she cooperates.
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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