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A murder trial in a baffling case involving an au pair, her two employers, a visiting stranger and a fetish website has been pushed back to this fall as questions continue to swirl about whether it was self-defense or a premeditated plot.
Juliana Peres Magalhaes, 23, was indicted in April on charges of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Joseph Nathan Ryan, 39, at the Fairfax County home where she lived with married couple Brendan and Christine Banfield, providing child care for their 4-year-old daughter.
When police arrived at the house in the affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., just after 8 a.m. on Feb. 24, 2023, they found Ryan’s body in the Banfields’ upstairs bedroom. Ryan had allegedly been shot twice, by different guns, and died at the scene.
But Ryan wasn’t the only victim.
Not far from his body, Christine Banfield lay dying. The 37-year-old pediatric nurse had been stabbed numerous times in her upper body, investigators said, and died at the hospital.
She was nude, and Ryan, a stranger to the family, was fully clothed, authorities said.
The Banfields’ daughter was at home when the killings took place but was physically unharmed, authorities said.
Peres Magalhaes’ mother, Marina Peres Souza, told the Brazilian news outlet Folha in October that her daughter had acted in self-defense to protect herself and the family. She was shocked by her daughter’s arrest, she said, because Peres Magalhaes told her the case had been closed several months prior.
“They are saying horrible things about my daughter … but it’s not true. She wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Peres Souza said.
A July trial was pushed to November as questions remain whether any charges will be filed against Brendan Banfield, a 39-year-old IRS criminal special agent who authorities said also fired at Ryan and initially told a 911 dispatcher he was responsible for the shooting. Authorities have also hinted that he may face charges, and they’ve said that he and Peres Magalhaes were having an affair before and after the killings. At one point, they allegedly visited a gun range together.
Prosecutors and the defense are expected to argue before a jury about Brendan Banfield’s role in the killings and whether the gunshot fired by Peres Magalhaes was self-defense or murder. Also at issue is an account created with Christine Banfield’s laptop on a website catering to people with fetishes, including BDSM. Both sides agree that the account sent messages to Ryan, arranging a date at the house. But did Christine Banfield write them? Or were they a “ruse” to lure the man to the house?
The Killings
Authorities said that Peres Magalhaes told police that on the morning of the killings, she was taking the couple’s daughter to the National Zoo — with tickets purchased by Christine Banfield — when she realized she’d forgotten their packed lunches. When she returned to the house, she saw a car outside that she didn’t recognize and a man going inside with a bag. She called Christine Banfield, who didn’t answer. Next, she called Brendan Banfield, who said he was having breakfast at a McDonald’s. He returned to the house,and they went inside together.
Authorities said that Brendan Banfield and Peres Magalhaes told police that they discovered Ryan, whom they did not know, stabbing Christine Banfield. In response, Brendan Banfield told a 911 dispatcher in a call that Peres Magalhaes placed that he had shot Ryan after seeing him stab his wife multiple times, The Washington Post reported.
This was Peres Magalhaes’ third 911 call that morning, authorities said. She allegedly called twice about 13 minutes beforehand, hanging up both times.
Peres Magalhaes’s account to investigators differed slightly from Brendan Banfield’s, a Fairfax County detective testified in the April 1 hearing, according to WTOP.
The detective said she told him she saw Ryan holding a knife to Christine Banfield’s throat. But she also noted that Christine Banfield was nude.
Authorities said Brendan Banfield used his IRS service weapon to shoot Ryan, striking him near his right eyebrow.
Then he instructed Peres Magalhaes to get another gun, a Glock pistol, from a safe in the bathroom closet and shoot Ryan again, authorities said.
Ryan was on the ground when Peres Magalhaes allegedly told police she shot him in the chest. That shot was fatal, the medical examiner testified.
The Alleged Affair
Prosecutors said Brendon Banfield and Peres Magalhaes, a Brazilian national, were having an affair before the killings, The Washington Post reported.
In a hearing on April 1 to determine whether Peres Magalhaes would stand trial, prosecutors said that photos of her and Brendon on the au pair’s cellphone showed that the affair had been going on for “several months” before Christine Banfield was killed and that the pair had even taken a trip to New York City together.
“So this was not a mild thing that was going on in the home,” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Kelsey Gill argued.
When investigators returned to the home on Oct. 13, 2023, before arresting Peres Magalhaes, they found evidence that she was Brendan Banfield’s “girlfriend” and “live-in lover,” NBC4 Washington reported.
Inside the bedroom Brendan Banfield had shared with his wife — and where she and Ryan were killed — police found framed photographs of Brendan Banfield and Peres Magalhaes.
Lingerie was scattered around the bedroom, said prosecutors, who submitted as evidence photos of the bedroom that the police had taken during the search.
Prosecutors added that Brendan Banfield and Peres Magalhaes visited a gun range together two months before Ryan’s fatal shooting, WTOP reported. Brendan Banfield then returned to the range on Jan. 28, four weeks before the shooting, and bought a Glock pistol. A receipt showed it was the same weapon that Peres Magalhaes allegedly used to kill Ryan.
Days before the killings, prosecutors said, Brendan Banfield and Peres Magalhaes had both replaced their phones with new ones, NBC4 reported.
Role Of Au Pairs
Christine Banfield talked about the special relationship between au pairs and children in a September 2021 Instagram post, in which she called her daughter’s previous au pair “her best friend, her sister, her third parent, her everything.”
“A lot of people don’t understand the aupair program, but this is it right here,” she captioned a photo of the former au pair holding her daughter.
“It is opening your home and your heart up to someone with big dreams of changing their life while in America, and in the process they changed your life more than you could measure,” Christine Banfield wrote.
Peres Souza told Folha that her daughter came to the U.S. from Brazil as part of an au pair exchange program. She said she had applied to extend her visa and lived in the U.S. for two years.
The BDSM Website
Ryan, a virtual stranger, came to the house expecting on the day of the killings to have sex with Christine Banfield, authorities said.
He had been invited there in messages exchanged on a website catering to people involved in sexual fetishes, including BDSM, authorities said.
Prosecutors suggested that he had been lured there by someone using Christine Banfield’s laptop to create an account on the website.
Ryan came to the Banfields’ house after making arrangements via that account, said prosecutors, who claimed it was created as a ruse to kill Christine Banfield.
The messages Ryan received from the Christine Banfield account were not written in a way her friends and family would recognize, NBC4 Washington reported.
But Peres Magalhaes’ attorney, Ryan Campbell, argued in the December bond hearing that it was much more likely that Christine Banfield had arranged the date.
It “seems like the easiest to accept — that Joe Ryan communicated with Christine Banfield through a BDSM website,” he said, according to WTOP.
“The inference that [prosecutors were] trying to make was that it wasn’t Christine Banfield” who was on the website, he said, according to The Washington Post. “It just seems like a difficult thing for me to accept that somebody other than Christine would be going on her computer.”
Premeditated Murder?
Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis previously called the killings a “double murder” and hinted that Peres Magalhaes was not investigators’ sole suspect.
“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 twists and turns to this investigation. And the twists and turns are still ongoing,” he told NBC4 Washington at the beginning of the investigation.
“It’s my expectation that we will eventually be able to hold more than just one person accountable for this crime,” Davis said.
Brendan Banfield was called as a witness in the April hearing but repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, NBC4 reported.
His attorney did not respond to a request for comment from HuffPost.
Referring to Banfield as an “adverse witness,” Judge Michael J. Lindner observed in the hearing that prosecutors “may be playing two prospective defendants against each other,” NBC4 reported.
Peres Magalhaes’s attorney said in court that “it’s been clear from the beginning” that Brendan Banfield is the “target of the investigations,” NBC4 reported.
He has not been charged with Ryan’s killing. No one has been charged in Christine Banfield’s death.
Ryan’s mother, Deirdre Fisher, told WUSA that her son was a “kind person” with no history of violence.
“Joe never, at 39, had ever struck a woman or been violent with a woman. So, this is ridiculous. It’s so beyond ridiculous, I can’t even tell you,” she said.
“Like you don’t just all of a sudden wake up and decide you’re gonna be a killer,” Fisher added.
Christine Banfield’s online obituary “guestbook” page was flooded with tributes from fellow nurses, relatives and friends praising her dedication to her daughter, her patients and her profession.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met someone more passionate about being a nurse, or a fiercer patient advocate,” Rachel Brandstaedter wrote on March 6, 2023. “She mentored new nurses and took on every challenge and man was she something to watch in the way she could connect with families. And above all that, my god did she love [her daughter]. This loss is immense. She was such a gift to us all.”
HuffPost reached out to the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and Peres Magalhaes’ defense attorney. A spokesperson for the Fairfax County Police Department pointed HuffPost to the agency’s October 2023 press release and said it would not be sharing additional information at this time.
Peres Magalhaes is also charged with the use of a firearm while committing a felony. The trial is scheduled to begin on Nov. 12 at Fairfax County Circuit Court.
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