Former IRS agent gets life without parole in Virginia double murder case

A Fairfax County judge sentenced former IRS law-enforcement officer Brendan Banfield to life in prison without parole after jurors found him guilty in a case that prosecutors said turned a family home into the center of a murderous deception.

Judge Penney Azcarate called Banfield’s conduct “evil and calculated” and said the crimes were almost impossible to comprehend. She imposed the state’s harshest available punishment for aggravated murder after Virginia abolished the death penalty in 2021, adding extra prison time for child endangerment and a firearms offense.

The verdict closed a three-week trial that followed a 19-month investigation into the deaths of Christine Banfield, 37, and Joseph Ryan, 39, at the Banfields’ Reston home on Feb. 24, 2023. Fairfax County prosecutors said Banfield and Juliana Peres Magalhães staged the scene to make it appear that Banfield had come upon an attack in progress, but the jury accepted the state’s theory that the pair worked together to eliminate Christine Banfield so they could be together.

Magalhães, who testified for the prosecution, told jurors that Banfield wanted to marry her and have children with her and that he did not want a divorce because Christine Banfield would have more money and custody advantages. Prosecutors said Joseph Ryan was lured to the house through a fetish website. The family’s 4-year-old daughter was home during the killings, a fact that deepened the jury’s view of the case and led to additional child abuse and neglect charges.

Banfield was indicted on Sept. 16, 2024, after investigators revisited the case with new information, and a Dec. 16, 2024, grand jury indictment added felony child abuse and neglect and felony child cruelty counts tied to the same events. Fairfax County prosecutors said the final verdict included two counts of aggravated murder, one count of using a firearm in the commission of a felony, and one count of child abuse and neglect.

Banfield continued to insist he was innocent at sentencing and argued there had been disagreement within the police department over the investigation. The judge said his lack of remorse weighed heavily in her decision. The sentence marked the end of one of northern Virginia’s most disturbing domestic murder cases, one that gripped the public not just because of the killings themselves, but because a man once entrusted with enforcing the law was convicted of helping stage them.