At the start of her second day on the witness stand where she had blamed her former boss and affair partner for a double-murder plot she says they carried out together, a prosecutor asked Juliana Peres Magalhães why she agreed to testify.
Magalhães, the 25-year-old Brazilian au pair who says her months-long relationship with Brendan Banfield led him to kill his wife and a man he planned to frame as a violent intruder, said Wednesday that keeping the secret was too heavy. She was here, she said, because “it was the right thing to do” and she “couldn’t keep it to myself, these feelings of shame, guilt, sadness.”
Banfield’s defense attorneys would soon suggest another answer to the question that has carried the central tension driving the first week of Banfield’s murder trial in Fairfax County, a bizarre true-crime case that has drawn international attention.
John F. Carroll used letters and messages Magalhães sent from jail to Banfield, his mother and her family in Brazil to sketch a picture of a young woman — lonely and suicidal in her cell, disillusioned with the criminal justice system, and courted by true crime authors and documentary producers — who was driven to cooperate with authorities out of self-interest.
Magalhães, the admitted co-conspirator turned star witness, had already spent the previous day detailing for jurors how she and Banfield meticulously plotted to use a fetish website and a rape fantasy to kill Christine Banfield and Joseph Ryan, 39. Brendan Banfield told authorities he thought Ryan was an intruder who was attacking his wife.
Magalhães and Banfield were both charged in the case. But after spending a year in jail, Magalhães cut a deal with prosecutors in exchange for testifying against the man she pledged in a letter after her arrest she would “never do anything to hurt.”
For her testimony, Magalhães agreed to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter. The arrangement stipulates she is to be released and deported home to Brazil after the trial. That’s why, Banfield’s defense said, she changed her story to the one prosecutors wanted to hear.
In a letter to Banfield’s mother in November 2023, the month after she was arrested, Magalhães wrote that she’d “rather die than live like this.”
As time went on, she wrote that she couldn’t sleep, struggled with “disturbing” thoughts, and called the jail her “personal hell.”
“I don’t want to keep living, keep going,” she wrote. “I just want this to be over one way or another, good way or bad way.”
Banfield’s mother paid for Magalhães’s attorney and funded the account that allowed Magalhães to communicate with her family from jail. Magalhães wrote to her again in late 2023: “Since the beginning they’ve told us they could make all my charges something very simple called a misdemeanor,” she wrote of what her lawyer had promised if she cooperated. “They know I’m not doing that.”
“I have no idea what they are making up,” she wrote. “Whatever they are saying, whatever they want to believe, I will take the blame for both of us.”
In the first months, she also wrote loving letters to Banfield, telling him she couldn’t “bear living here without you.”
But as time went on, doubt began creeping into her messages to friends and family. Homesickness also pressed on Magalhães.
“Brendan and I are different in many ways: money, career culture,” she wrote in one message. “We are only the same about sex lol.”
In a message about her family, she wrote, “I’d never forgive myself if I couldn’t see them again after all this.”
At the same time, she was losing faith in her attorney. In dozens of messages to her mother and brother in Brazil, she complained that her attorney would repeatedly fail to show up to meetings or arrive with his laptop uncharged.
She was especially critical of her lawyer after a motion to continue her trial, originally scheduled for July 2024, delayed it until November. “I feel neglected,” she wrote to a friend after her trial was delayed. “I really wanted to risk everything to do it in July.”
“I should have changed lawyers long ago but now it’s too late,” she said in a message to her mother on Sept. 5, 2024. “I’m scared because my life is in his hands.”
A month later, a medical emergency landed Magalhães in the hospital for gallbladder surgery. She spent 10 days in the hospital.
Two days after her release, Magalhães met with prosecutors and told them Banfield had concocted the plan: lure a strange man from the internet into his home for a rape fantasy scenario, kill him and Christine Banfield, then frame the man as a killer he shot moments too late to save his wife. Magalhães testified Tuesday that Banfield repeatedly stabbed his wife in the neck after shooting Ryan.
Prosecutors said Magalhães was a 23-year-old woman in a relationship with a federal law enforcement agent 15 years her senior, who was not only her employer who provided her with money and housing, but also one of the only people she knew on the continent. Even after Magalhães was arrested, prosecutors said, she was dependent on the Banfields for everything from legal representation to communication with her family, and she was reluctant to turn against her support system.
Carroll, the defense attorney, also questioned Magalhães on her contacts with authors and documentary producers who were interested in telling her story.
The defense introduced messages that showed Magalhães speaking with a true-crime author and producers who said they wanted to make a Netflix documentary about the case. These included offers to pay Magalhães for her story.
In one message discussing these negotiations with her mother, Magalhães wrote: “We deserve something” — a line Carroll fixed on Wednesday.
“What do you deserve something for?” he asked.
“For what I’ve been through,” Magalhães said.
“You were charged with murder because you shot someone,” Carroll said. “Am I wrong?”
“You are not,” Magalhães said.
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