John Jefferson
Inset left to right: Brendan Banfield and Juliana Peres Magalhaes (Fairfax County Police Department). Background: The house where Christine Banfield and Joseph Ryan were killed (WTTG).
A northern Virginia man has been indicted for killing his wife and another man who he is believed to have snookered into acting out a part in a complicated murder conspiracy involving his family’s au pair and a fake profile on a sexual fetish website, law enforcement says.
Brendan Banfield, 39, stands accused of four counts of aggravated murder and one count of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony over the February 2023 double murder, according to a press release issued Monday by the Fairfax County Police Department in conjunction with the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.
On the day in question, Christine Ann Banfield, 37, was killed in her own home, along with Joseph Nathan Ryan, 39, who was not a resident of the home. Details of the alleged plot to take their lives are lurid. Several mysteries have swirled since their brutal deaths at the two-story house on Stable Brook Way in Herndon — a medium-sized town and part of the broader Washington, D.C., metro area.
Now, law enforcement claims to have unraveled the story.
“On Feb. 24, 2023, I stood in the middle of a cul-de-sac street in Fairfax County and described the deaths of two persons inside of a residential home,” Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said in comments reported by D.C.-based CBS affiliate WUSA. “Now, 570 days later, we know the deaths of Joseph Ryan and Christine Banfield are both in fact murders.”
The first person arrested in connection with those alleged murders was Juliana Peres Magalhaes, 24, the onetime live-in nanny whose charge was the Banfield’s preschool-age daughter.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Magalhaes was the first person to call 911 that day. She first dialed dispatchers at 7:49 a.m. in what amounted to an “open line hangup,” Davis previously said. Some 13 minutes later, Magalhaes called again and spoke — saying that her friend was hurt. Then Banfield got on the line to say he had shot Ryan — claiming the other man had entered their home and stabbed his wife.
“We still have a lot of work to do to identify who exactly — we have to prove it — who exactly shot and killed our male decedent, Joseph Ryan, and who exactly stabbed Christine Banfield to death,” Davis said at the time. “We know what our 911 caller, the husband, told us, but we have a lot of work to do to substantiate that claim or to otherwise identify the person responsible for that crime and both crimes.”
By the time Magalhaes was arrested and charged in October 2023, however, certain suspicions painted part of the picture. Chiefly, why and how Ryan — described by police as not “necessarily a stranger” — was in the idyllic, tree-dotted Banfield house in the first place, with his car parked on the driveway right outside of the home’s two-car garage.
“There was no forced entry whatsoever,” Davis said on the day of the slayings. “This was not a home invasion. Here’s what I can say right now with certainty: He did not force entry into the home. I do not know exactly what the nature of his presence in the home is all about just yet, but we’re working hard to determine that.”
To hear the defendants tell it: Magalhaes left the home with the Banfield’s daughter in tow around 7:30 a.m. that morning — just after Christine Banfield purchased their tickets for the zoo. Then, the au pair told police, she doubled back because she forgot to grab their pre-packed lunches and saw a car she did not recognize in the driveway. A phone call to Christine Banfield went unanswered, Magalhaes said, so she called Brendan Banfield. He happened to be at a nearby McDonald’s and quickly rushed home.
The trio — husband/father, daughter, and au pair — entered the house. Upstairs, the defendants claimed, Ryan was in a bedroom with a naked Christine Banfield, who had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck. First, Ryan was shot with a gun already in Brendan Banfield’s possession. Then, the husband directed the au pair to retrieve another gun from a safe in a bathroom closet, and he provided the code.
Whereas Brendan Banfield initially said he was the one who shot and killed Ryan, Magalhaes would later admit she used the second gun to shoot the already-shot man in the chest. Another story allegedly diverged: the au pair first said she and Brendan Banfield were not in a romantic relationship; her attorney later confirmed that they were.
Their story was self-defense, but investigators were suspicious.
In April of this year, details of the alleged plot were revealed when Magalhaes was indicted for Ryan’s death on one count each of second-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Investigators suspect Ryan was lured to the house to play patsy by someone posing as Christine Banfield on a fetish website, D.C.-based NBC affiliate WRC-TV reported. All this, in service of getting the wife out of the way so the husband and his Brazilian national girlfriend could live their lives together, law enforcement alleges.
Prosecutors say they found messages on the fetish website between both victims — even arranging a meeting on the fatal day in question. But, law enforcement alleges, the way the fake Christine Banfield profile communicated with Ryan did not match the way she otherwise spoke, citing descriptions provided by friends and family.
“I suspected from the very beginning — and I went to the scene of that double murder — that there was going to be a lot of twist and turns to this investigation. The twists and turns are still ongoing,” Davis told WRC-TV. “It’s my expectation that we will eventually be able to hold more than just one person accountable for this crime.”
Part of the state’s presentation to the judge in Magalhaes’ case was instrumental to the since-filed charges against Brendan Banfield: newly-framed photos of the two alleged conspirators together. In one such photo, set up in Banfield’s bedroom after the killings, the husband and the au pair are seen sharing an embrace, the nanny’s head resting on the IRS special agent’s shoulder — both smiling.
Juliana Peres Magalhaes and Brendan Banfield in a photo together next to his bed (NBC Washington via Fairfax County Police), Christine Banfield (via her Facebook)
The new slate of charges will put the complex alleged double murder plot in the hands of jurors. Charging him with four counts of aggravated murders in the deaths of two people, prosecutors want the eventual jury of Brendan Banfield’s peers to have a lot of options.
“The reason we did that is, it’s very lawyerly and technically, but essentially it boils down to in the aggravated murder statute there are a number of different options to prove that,” Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano told WUSA — when explaining the four different counts of murder filed this week. “When we took a look at what we intend to present at trial, we believe our presentation of evidence can possibly hit both of those different subsection elements. We wanted to cover all our bases and make sure the jury had every option that they could want when looking at the evidence.”
Law&Crime reached out to the Fairfax County Police Department, as well as the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, for additional details on this story but no responses were immediately forthcoming at the time of publication.
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