They eventually met Ryan, who went by the username tacosupreme7000, and lured him to the family’s home under the pretense of a rape fantasy scenario. Prosecutors said Ryan agreed to a set of rules: Don’t meet before the fantasy, bring a knife and zip ties, and – most importantly – don’t stop, no matter how scared Christine Banfield seems.
Brendan Banfield cried in court Tuesday while listening to the 911 call Magalhaes made from the Banfields’ home that February.
In the first emergency call from the northern Virginia home, the only sound is a guttural moan, then silence. About 15 minutes later, another 911 call comes from the home, and this time the Banfield family’s Brazilian au pair can be heard begging for help, breathing hard and too flustered to give an address. Then Brendan Banfield’s voice cuts in.
“There’s somebody here,” Brendan Banfield can be heard saying on the call. “I shot him. He stabbed her. She’s bleeding out. There’s several marks on her neck. What do I do?”
This is where the cover-up began, United States prosecutors argued on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) at the outset of Banfield’s murder trial.
Banfield would later tell investigators that Magalhaes had called him to tell him she’d seen a strange man entering the house, and he rushed back to the home to find Ryan with a knife to his wife’s throat, so he shot him.
But Fairfax County prosecutor Jenna Sands urged jurors Tuesday not to believe that version of events.
Joseph Ryan was killed at the Banfield home in February 2023. Credit:
In opening statements, Sands argued that Banfield and Magalhaes, the then-22-year-old au pair, were deeply in love, but Banfield worried that if he left his wife he would lose custody of their young daughter.
Instead, Sands said, the couple impersonated Christine Banfield on a fetish website, where they met Ryan and lured him to the family’s Herndon-area home under the pretense of a rape fantasy scenario.
Sands said Magalhaes messed up the plot by making the 911 call too early, and only called back later after both she and Banfield had shot Ryan and Banfield had stabbed his wife repeatedly in the neck.
Defence attorney John Carroll told jurors on Tuesday to be sceptical of Magalhaes’s version of events, saying she had maintained her innocence for a year but eventually changed her story to match prosecutors’ theory in exchange for a sweetheart deal.
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Carroll pointed to correspondence from Magalhaes to Banfield while she was in jail, saying she wrote to him “They want you” and “They want me to say things that aren’t true”.
“The whole reason she was arrested was to flip her against my client,” Carroll said during his opening remarks. “There’s a vulnerable person who is open to prey for what they need. And I would respectfully suggest that Juliana Peres Magalhaes is the linchpin in all of this.”
Banfield also faces child abuse and child endangerment charges related to his daughter, who was four years old and in the basement of the northern Virginia home when the killings occurred. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts. The trial is expected to last four weeks.
The Washington Post
