Juliana Peres Magalhaes and Brendan Banfield in a photograph on the nightstand of Banfield’s main bedroom on October 13, 2023. Photo / Fairfax County Circuit Court Clerk's office
When Juliana Peres Magalhaes dreamed of America, she envisioned a spacious home and a more comfortable life than the one she led in the countryside of Sao Paulo, according to family and friends.
She found all of that – and more – in a well-to-do suburb of the United States’ capital, caring for the young daughter of Christine and Brendan Banfield as an au pair.
The work, through a cultural exchange programme, delivered on the promises that drew the 21-year-old from Brazil to a nearly million-dollar house in Virginia.
She made friends. She made money. She became part of a family.
Then came a gruesome and complicated double homicide, which authorities allege Magalhaes helped orchestrate.
Magalhaes now sits in jail, awaiting a jury trial in November in a case that has become an internet sensation, prompting an episode on Crime Stories With Nancy Grace, a social media following on TikTok, and fervid coverage in Brazilian media outlets.
The way prosecutors tell it, Magalhaes appears to have been part of an elaborate ruse that lured a man interested in sexual fetishes to the Banfields’ Fairfax County home and ended in both his and Christine Banfield’s deaths.
According to prosecutors, Magalhaes admitted to shooting the man, Joseph Ryan, who she described to police as an intruder, in the main bedroom of the family home on the morning of February 24, 2023 – a crime for which she has been charged with second-degree murder.
Ryan is a Springfield, Virginia, resident who lived with his grandmother and a small dog.
No one has been charged in the death of Christine Banfield, 37, who was also found mortally wounded in the bedroom.
Magalhaes told investigators that she and Brendan Banfield, an Internal Revenue Service criminal investigative agent, shot Ryan after they discovered him attacking Christine with a knife.
Almost from the beginning, police questioned Magalhaes’ account. In their view, there had been a confusing sequence of emergency calls that day from Magalhaes and Brendan Banfield that did not support the claim that they were warding off a random attacker.
And in interviews with detectives, Magalhaes neglected to mention what they considered to be an important detail: that she and Brendan Banfield had begun a romantic relationship several months before the killings.
In a sprawling investigation over many months, officials uncovered photos, described as intimate in a search warrant, and evidence of a New York getaway between the au pair and Brendan Banfield.
By the time Magalhaes was arrested, eight months after the slayings, she had moved into the main bedroom, authorities said.
A framed picture of her and Brendan Banfield was perched on the nightstand, police evidence photos show, and her clothes hung in the closet once used by Christine.
Magalhaes and her lawyer did not respond to interview requests. Brendan Banfield, who declined to talk to police and has not been charged with any crimes, and his lawyer also did not respond to requests for comment. In interviews, Magalhaes’ mother questioned why no one other than her daughter had been charged.
“I pray for the prosecutors and the judge to understand who is guilty in this case, because it is not Juliana,” Marina Peres Souza said in Portuguese.
The first emergency call from 13230 Stable Brook Way in Herndon, Virginia, on February 24, 2023, came at 7.47am. Dispatchers heard a guttural moan, then silence.
The call ended. A minute passed. Then, according to court records, there were two more attempts, within seconds of each other.
On the final call, at 8.02am, Magalhaes begged for help, frightened as she described the scene and seemingly too flustered to give an address. Then another voice came onto the phone: Brendan Banfield’s.
He had just shot a man, he said, because that man had stabbed his wife.
Officials arrived minutes later and appraised the scene.
Ryan, 39, was lying on the floor of the Banfields’ main bedroom. And, court records show, Christine Banfield was bleeding from stab wounds to her neck. Both would die.
Outside, reporters soon filled the quiet street, lined with sedans and family minivans where violent crime like this is rare. Residents emerged from their brick and vinyl-sided houses and crowded near the footpath, whispering to one another as Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis appeared in front of cameras.
“We know what our 911 caller, the husband, told us,” Davis said. “But we have a lot of work to do to substantiate that claim, or to otherwise identify the person responsible for that crime.”
Exactly what had unfolded in the five-bedroom, brick-fronted Colonial would preoccupy the community for months.
Christine Banfield, a paediatric intensive care nurse, was known as a devoted caretaker and mother who would line up neighbourhood playdates. Banfield was organising a bike ride for the littlest children in the area in the days before she died, Raynelle Grace, who lived nearby, said the day after the killings.
Grace said Brendan Banfield was the block’s Dallas Cowboys fan, known to chat about football. An IRS spokesperson said Brendan Banfield joined the agency in 2009 and its criminal investigations division roughly four years before the killings, around the time property records and social media show that the couple moved to Herndon from Long Island.
The Banfields “seemed like the all-American family”, Grace said.
Questions piled up though, as authorities began peeling back the layers of what had happened that February morning - and the many decisions that had led to that fatal day.
Magalhaes, the daughter of a single mother who cleans houses for a living, arrived at the Banfields’ home in 2021, part of an au pair programme that assigned more than 1100 participants to Virginia that year. She dreamed of big opportunities for her family, promising a better life, said Souza, who recalled responding: “Please, don’t go”.
Within a year, according to court records, she and Brendan Banfield were entangled in a secret affair that Souza and a close friend of Magalhaes said they knew nothing about.
On the morning of the killings, Brendan Banfield was scheduled to report for work at 7.30am. But a search warrant affidavit alleges that, after leaving his neighbourhood at around 7.10, he pulled into a nearby McDonald’s and sat in his vehicle until Magalhaes called him at 7.37.
At the same time, Ryan pulled up to the Banfield home for a planned rendezvous with a woman identified in a dating app as “Annastasia9”, portrayed in a profile photo on the social networking platform FetLife as a petite woman in a one-piece bathing suit.
According to the account Magalhaes gave detectives, she had left the house not long after Brendan Banfield and planned to drive to the National Zoo for a day trip with the Banfields’ then-4-year-old daughter.
But moments after leaving, she realised she had forgotten their lunches in the refrigerator and turned back to retrieve them. She told police that she saw a man walk in as she looked back at the house. She said she called Christine Banfield, who did not answer.
Magalhaes next called Brendan Banfield. After he arrived at the home, he, Magalhaes and the little girl went inside. Magalhaes left the girl in the basement, officials said in court, and followed Brendan Banfield up the stairs.
The two found Ryan hunched over Christine Banfield with a knife at her throat, Magalhaes told detectives. She also said she saw Brendan Banfield pointing a gun at Ryan.
She then told detectives that Brendan Banfield shot Ryan once while Ryan stabbed Christine Banfield. Brendan Banfield then asked the au pair to retrieve a Glock stored in a safe in the main bedroom’s closet.
Magalhaes soon fired the gun at Ryan, she told authorities, though her lawyer said in court that the au pair was unsure whether the bullet had hit him. Ryan Campbell, the lawyer, also said his client fired because she believed the man posed a threat to her and others in the house.
“You have a stranger in the house and a dying woman,” Campbell said in court. “Mr Banfield, who is of law enforcement, then shoots him once.”
When authorities worked to untangle what brought Ryan to the Banfield home, they discovered that, within eight days of the killings, both Magalhaes and Brendan Banfield had got new phones. The au pair created a new iCloud account, and the husband deleted his account activity, a search warrant affidavit states.
They discovered, too, that the FetLife account that Ryan had been messaging with was maintained on Christine Banfield’s computer – despite not finding “one iota of evidence that she was into knife play, binding, BDSM”, prosecutor Eric Clingan said.
Instead, they found who had access to a photo used on Annastasia9′s profile, and where it originated.
A month before the killings, authorities said, Christine Banfield sent a picture of herself to her husband, which Magalhaes’ lawyer said she also sent to herself in an email: a petite woman in a one-piece bathing suit.
Hours later, prosecutors said, the photo was uploaded to a new FetLife profile, username Annastasia9.
Ryan, who went by the username tacosupreme7000, was open about his activity on FetLife, his friend Don Arnold said, though Arnold described him as an old-fashioned man who respected women.
Two other people close to Ryan, including his mother, declined to speak on the record about the case ahead of Magalhaes’ trial.
Using Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, Ryan and Annastasia9 discussed rough sex, Campbell said, including experimenting with blood play – an arrangement in which one person deliberately cuts another.
Annastasia9, whose real identity remains unknown and who neither police nor prosecutors have publicly said was Christine, wrote that she cheats on her husband “whenever she wants to”, Campbell said in a motion. He said that, at one point, the users spoke using a voice-call feature on the app.
Ultimately, the users decided to meet on that February morning.
Authorities would later say the au pair’s account to detectives was difficult to reconcile.
At a hearing for Magalhaes in December, prosecutors questioned why she would go into the main closet to retrieve another weapon when Brendan Banfield could have fired a second round at the man.
Prosecutors added that it made little sense for Magalhaes to shoot Ryan in self-defence if Brendan Banfield’s round had incapacitated him. At a hearing in April, a medical examiner testified that the first bullet had at least partially blinded Ryan.
Then there were the calls to first responders: Why had more than 10 minutes passed before Brendan Banfield and Magalhaes contacted 911 for the final time, prosecutors asked.
“That is not what a person in that situation would do unless they were trying to cover something up,” Deputy Attorney Kelsey Gill said at the December hearing.
From her cell in the Fairfax County jail, Magalhaes dreams of Brazil.
“I am tired of this place, this situation,” Magalhaes wrote in Portuguese to her mother in a June email, which Souza provided to the Washington Post. “I am unhappy, and nothing makes me happy. I just want to get out of here and go back home to be with you guys.”
“We will be together soon, with God’s grace, mommy,” she added, about a week after turning 24.
Her mother, whose nickname for her daughter is “little rare jewel”, believes she will be found not guilty and will return home. “Of course, she will,” Souza said. “She is innocent. It was self-defence.”
In multiple hearings, Magalhaes’ lawyer pointed to what he said was an inconsistency on the part of prosecutors.
Both bullets killed Ryan, Campbell claimed, yet only Magalhaes remains behind bars. Campbell also sought to minimise their relationship, saying in court that intimate encounters with the husband were casual, and that Magalhaes was on dating apps.
Banfield, now 39, remains employed at the IRS, a spokesperson for the agency said. He was also working as an Uber driver, though his access to the app has been paused pending the outcome of the investigation, the company said.
Since the killings, he has pleaded no contest three times to failing to pay attention behind the wheel, court records show.
Souza said Banfield remains in close touch with Magalhaes.
During an April preliminary hearing, Banfield walked into a crowded Fairfax County courtroom and up to the stand, poised, for the first time, to publicly speak about the killings. Magalhaes leaned forward in her seat, pressing against the courtroom table with her shackled wrists as she watched a prosecutor question him about the case.
“In the weeks and months prior to that date, did you engage in an adulterous relationship with the defendant?” a prosecutor asked.
“I’ll take the Fifth,” Banfield said, exercising his constitutional right to remain silent and to not potentially incriminate himself.
“What information were you aware of that someone was likely to come to your home that day?”
The Fifth.
“Did you use your IRS firearm to shoot Joe Ryan?” the prosecutor pressed. Banfield stared at his lawyer, who shook his head.
The Fifth.
Magalhaes gave Banfield an intense look. He glanced up at her, then turned away.
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