The photo by the bed
On the nightstand stood a large framed photo. It showed Brendan Banfield, smiling, with his arm around a young blonde woman.
It was not Christine. It was Juliana, the au pair.
The photographer found the same thing around the house. On the mantel and on the bedside tables, the photos of Brendan and Christine had been replaced with photos of Brendan and Juliana. Her clothes, including lingerie, were hanging in the main bedroom closet next to his.
The grieving widower and the only other eyewitness were a couple.
Later that same month, Fairfax County police arrested Juliana Peres Magalhães and charged her with second-degree murder in the death of Joseph Ryan. Brendan was not charged. Not yet.
“Simple and fun”
Detectives kept working on the FetLife account, and on the blood.
Prosecutors would later lay out what they believed had really happened. Brendan and Juliana had started an affair in August 2022. Within weeks, according to Juliana, he was talking about a “plan to get rid of” his wife. Divorce was out: he didn’t want to split the money, and he didn’t want to share custody of their daughter.
So he went looking for someone to blame.
Using Christine’s laptop and a new email address, the two of them set up a fake FetLife profile in her name, with her photos. According to Juliana, they only posted when Christine was at home, so her phone’s location would match the activity. “He knew that we needed to have some alibis,” she later said.
Posing as Christine, they searched for a man who would act out a violent “rape fantasy” at the house. Then they found Joseph Ryan, who used the name TacoSupreme7000. The conversation moved to the Telegram app, and for about a month they groomed him.
The instructions, as prosecutors read them to the jury, were blunt. “The door will be unlocked. Christine will be asleep in bed. Come straight upstairs.” He was to bring a knife, zip ties and chains. And he was not to stop, even if she seemed to be calling for help, because that was what she really wanted.
Ryan sent a photo of the chains and the knife he planned to bring.
Juliana said they also prepared the scene. They got new phones and new Apple IDs. Brendan checked which neighbors had doorbell cameras, had new soundproof windows put in, and changed his morning routine. He took her to a shooting range.
The morning of February 24
According to Juliana, Brendan used an app on Christine’s phone that morning to unlock the door. He confirmed Ryan’s arrival time from her phone, switched it off and hid it in a kitchen drawer. Then he handed Juliana his personal gun and left.
He drove to a McDonald’s nearby and waited. The restaurant’s cameras recorded him there. At 7:37 a.m. he walked out of the bathroom with his phone to his ear, got in his car and drove off. The call logs showed it was Juliana calling.
Juliana had been sitting in her car with the little girl, watching the house. When Ryan arrived and went inside, she called Christine’s switched-off phone, so the call logs would show she had tried to warn her, and then called Brendan.
They went in through the basement, left the 4-year-old there, and went upstairs.
Ryan looked up at them, Juliana said, “shocked.” Christine cried out, “Brendan, he has a knife!” Brendan shot Ryan.
Christine told Juliana to call 911. She dialed at 7:47 a.m., but Brendan signaled her to hang up, and she did. The dispatcher called back and got no answer.
Juliana said Brendan sent her to the bathroom for towels. When she came back, he was stabbing his wife in the neck. She crouched by the bed with her hands over her ears and eyes. When she saw Ryan still moving, she shot him in the chest.
Then, she said, Brendan scooped up his wife’s blood and dripped it onto Ryan, so the stranger would look like the attacker.
Only then, at 8:02 a.m., did he let her call 911 again.
The blood
Juliana’s account came from a woman with every reason to save herself. Prosecutors said they did not need to rely on it.
They waited for the blood analysis before charging Brendan. Experts would testify that the bloodstains on Ryan’s hands looked as if Christine’s blood had been dripped onto him from above, not left there by a man attacking her. “The blood cannot lie,” prosecutor Jenna Sands told the jury.
In September 2024, a grand jury indicted Brendan Banfield on aggravated murder charges. He was arrested and held without bond.
A month later, Juliana pleaded guilty to manslaughter and agreed to testify against him. For nearly a year she had stood by him. Brendan’s mother had been paying for her lawyer, she later said, and she feared losing it if she turned.
The trial
Brendan Banfield went on trial in Fairfax County Circuit Court in January 2026, with cameras in the courtroom.
Juliana testified first. She described the affair, the fake profile, the McDonald’s, the knife.
His lawyer, John Carroll, said she had been arrested only “to flip her against my client.” He pointed out that two detectives who doubted the catfishing theory had been moved off the case, and that Brendan’s DNA was not found on the knife.
Then Brendan took the stand himself. He admitted the affair, and other affairs before it. He said his wife had her own interest in violent sex, and his defense argued that Christine herself had been talking to Ryan. He said he loved her.
He told the jury he had left the house that morning for an important meeting with a manager that might have led to a promotion. After that testimony, his own acting supervisor at the IRS came forward. He told the court there had been no such meeting.
On February 2, 2026, the jury found him guilty on every count: two counts of aggravated murder, using a firearm in a felony, and child endangerment.
“It reflects evil”
On February 13, Juliana Peres Magalhães was sentenced to 10 years in prison, the maximum for manslaughter. The judge refused the “time served” deal prosecutors had recommended. She will be deported to Brazil when she is released.
On June 5, 2026, Judge Penney Azcarate sentenced Brendan Banfield to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“The level of cruelty, calculation and inhumanity in this case reflects something far deeper than anger or impulse,” she told him. “It reflects evil.”
Joseph Ryan’s mother, Deirdre Fisher, spoke to the court about her son, a caring man who stood up for the underdog, neglected dogs included. “He had a face, he had a name, he had a life,” she said.
Brendan Banfield still says he is innocent. On the morning of February 24, 2023, he told a 911 dispatcher that he had shot the man who stabbed his wife. Eight months later, the photo beside his bed showed who he had planned his new life with.
