Jurors spent three hours Friday weighing two versions of a story: Did a Virginia man heroically shoot his wife’s attacker, as he claimed? Or, as prosecutors and his mistress tell it, did he orchestrate the whole scene in an elaborate attempt to get away with murder?
Brendan Banfield is accused of plotting with the family’s au pair to impersonate his wife on a BDSM website, luring to their home a stranger they intended to frame for his wife’s death, then killing them both.
Lawyers for both sides took one final attempt to sway the jury Friday in Fairfax County before jurors shuffled out of the courtroom to decide whether Banfield, 40, is guilty of aggravated murder in the February 2023 killings of Christine Banfield, 37, and Joseph Ryan, 39. Jurors will resume deliberations Monday morning.
During the three-week trial, prosecutors painted Brendan Banfield as a murderous mastermind so desperately in love with a young Brazilian au pair that he was driven to kill his wife, while the defense claimed Brendan Banfield had interrupted a brutal knife attack moments too late to save his wife’s life.
Testimony from Banfield and au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães bookended the televised trial that made international headlines. The former lovers 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 manslaughter in a deal that set the stage for her to appear on the witness stand.
Their competing accounts were largely the focus of closing arguments from each side. Prosecutor Jenna Sands emphasized that Banfield repeatedly said he remembered the morning of the killings well because he had an important work meeting with a promotion on the line. But his acting supervisor at the time called prosecutors after hearing the testimony with new information: there had been no such meeting planned.
“The defendant took the stand and he lied,” Sands said. “If he’s lying about the things that don’t matter, how can you believe a single word he’s said?”
Defense attorney John Carroll pointed to letters and messages Magalhães sent from jail indicating investigators began attempting to convince her to turn against her paramour nearly immediately after she was arrested. In the first letters, she staunchly maintained her and Brendan Banfield’s innocence. But as time went on, messages show she grew suicidal, homesick and disillusioned with the criminal justice system.
“Those personal letters, I believe, is the closest thing to the truth that you will hear from Juliana Peres Magalhães,” Carroll told jurors. “The Commonwealth and police broke her.”
The first time prosecutors approached Magalhães to discuss a plea deal they offered to reduce her murder charge to a misdemeanor if she agreed to testify against Banfield. She rejected the offer, Carroll said.
But months later, she accepted a deal that required her to plead guilty to a much more serious charge of manslaughter, leaving her a felon. As she lost faith in her attorney’s ability to prove her innocence, Carroll said, she became willing to say anything. He also reminded jurors of the hundreds of emails Magalhães has exchanged with producers associated with Netflix, Hulu and other media companies suggesting she planned to cash in on her story. And the plea deal could allow her to go back to Brazil after the trial.
“Her entire story has been bought and paid for,” Carroll said. “First with her freedom. Then, with a little bit more on the end.”
Magalhães told the jury 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 of the home with a knife to engage in a rape fantasy. He shot the man and stabbed his wife with the knife the man brought, Magalhães said. Then she shot Ryan a second time.
Brendan Banfield called the accusation “absolutely crazy.” In hours of salacious testimony this week, he told jurors that when he heard noises coming from the bedroom he shared with his wife, he assumed she was having an affair to satisfy a fetish for sexual violence that he refused to entertain. Then he said the sounds coming from the bedroom switched from pleasurable to painful, so he kicked open the door to find a man with a knife to his wife’s throat. In his telling, he had never before met Ryan and was blindsided by the fact his wife had been sending messages on the sexual fetish website FetLife.
The defense spent much of the trial calling digital forensics experts who concluded there was no evidence that Christine Banfield lost control of her devices even though Magalhães said the couple would frequently take her laptop to send messages to men on the website. Magalhães testified that was because Brendan Banfield, an IRS criminal investigator, had anticipated that investigators might later track Christine Banfield’s movements through her phone and made sure they used the website only when she was home.
In closing arguments, Carroll reminded jurors that Magalhães had repeatedly testified she didn’t remember details about important days in the murder plot, including the day the FetLife account was created and the night before the slayings. She testified she did not recall who took Christine Banfield’s laptop out of her backpack, the name of the email address they created or what part of the house she and Brendan Banfield were in while they sent messages.
Sands pointed out oddities in the FetLife messages to jurors: Why would Christine Banfield ask a man to cut her with a knife when she had a blood clotting disorder? Why would she shut her phone off and put it in a kitchen cabinet if she expected a stranger to arrive soon? Why did she refuse any suitors who wanted to meet her before having sex, or said they felt more comfortable going to a hotel? And why were no messages sent from the FetLife account when Brendan Banfield and Magalhães were out of town together and Christine Banfield was home alone — seemingly the most opportune time to contact an affair partner?
“There’s many more whys,” Sands said. “But the answer to all of those whys is the same: because it wasn’t Christine, it was Brendan Banfield.”
Carroll said the catfishing allegations were a theory “pushed by non-investigative command staff” onto detectives who were punished if they presented contradictory evidence. He pointed to the testimony of Brendan Miller, a former Fairfax County police digital forensic examiner, who was transferred off the investigation and told by a deputy police chief that he would “never work a case in major crimes again” after he wrote a report concluding there was no evidence someone else had taken Christine Banfield’s phone or computer.
“Detective Miller spoke the truth,” Carroll said. “They discredited him, they discarded him and they didn’t listen to him.”
In her rebuttal — the final remarks jurors hear before deliberating — Sands said Carroll’s digital forensics evidence could “never be that smoking gun” because the experts cannot definitively say who was sitting behind Christine Banfield’s laptop scheduling the encounter that would eventually end her life.
“I think that Mr. Carroll is trying to focus on the HR woes of the Fairfax County Police Department to distract from the fact that the evidence actually supported that theory,” Sands said.
She left the jurors with a question: “Whose story is more credible?
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