Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 8:02 in the morning on February 24, 2023, a young woman called 911 from a house on Stable Brook Way, just south of Herndon, Virginia.
She was stuttering and gasping for breath.
“I need help,” she said. “My friend, she’s been stabbed with a knife and now she’s bleeding a lot. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
She could not get the address out. A man took the phone from her. He gave his name, Brendan Banfield, and told the dispatcher he was a federal agent.
“There’s somebody here, I shot him,” he said. “But he stabbed her. She’s bleeding. She’s got several marks on her neck. What do I do?”
The woman who was bleeding was his wife.
A nurse, an agent and an au pair
Christine Banfield was 37. She was a pediatric intensive care nurse. She and Brendan had been together for close to 20 years. They had a 4-year-old daughter.
Brendan worked for the IRS as a criminal investigator, a federal law enforcement officer who carried a government-issued gun.
The woman who had made the 911 call was the family’s au pair, Juliana Peres Magalhães. She had come from Brazil in October 2021, at 21, to live with the Banfields and help look after their little girl.
When police got to the house that morning, they found Christine in the upstairs bedroom with stab wounds to her neck. Brendan was kneeling over her with his hands on her neck. He told officers he was putting pressure on the wounds to slow the bleeding.
A few feet away lay a man nobody in the house seemed to know. He had been shot twice, in the head and in the chest. He was dead.
His name was Joseph Ryan. He was 39 and lived in Washington, D.C.
The Banfields’ daughter was found in the basement, unharmed.
The story they told
Brendan and Juliana told the police that they had shot an intruder. Brendan would tell the full story many times over the next three years, the last time to a jury.
He had left for work early. Juliana was taking the little girl out for the day. Then, from outside, Juliana saw a strange man go into the house. She called Christine, who didn’t pick up, and then called Brendan, who was at a McDonald’s nearby.
He raced home. He went in through the basement so he wouldn’t be heard, and crept upstairs.
In the bedroom, he said, he found the stranger kneeling over his wife with a knife. He drew his gun and announced himself as police. Christine shouted, “Brendan, he has a knife!” Then, he said, the man stabbed her, and he fired.
Juliana, he said, had grabbed his second gun from a safe and shot the man too.
It sounded like a home invasion that a federal agent had stopped too late. He and the au pair were the only living witnesses.
“Your wife has died”
Christine was rushed to the hospital. Brendan went too.
Fairfax County police officers stayed with him there, and their body cameras kept recording. At 8:43 a.m., one camera caught him standing in the emergency department, waiting.
Later that morning, a doctor came in to tell him. Christine was dead. On the officer’s camera, he sobbed.
The questions
The police had what looked like a tragic but simple case. It had problems from the start.
There were no signs of a forced entry. The man in the bedroom was not a burglar who had wandered in off the street. Joseph Ryan had driven to the house, parked in the driveway and walked in, on a morning when Christine was home asleep on her day off.
And nobody could explain why. The Banfields had no known connection to him at all.
Detectives started going through phones and computers. They found that Ryan had been chatting with someone on FetLife, a social site for people interested in fetishes. The profile used Christine’s name and Christine’s photos.
At first it looked as if Christine herself had invited a stranger over and something had gone horribly wrong. That was one theory inside the police department, and it would later split the investigation.
Meanwhile, life in the house on Stable Brook Way went on. Juliana stayed. The weeks turned into months.
On October 13, 2023, nearly eight months after the killings, a police crime scene photographer came back to the house with a search warrant.
He walked into the main bedroom, where Christine had been attacked. And he photographed the nightstand beside the bed.
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