Man who plotted with au pair to kill wife gets life sentence

Brendan Banfield, a former federal law-enforcement officer with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole after a Fairfax County judge said the murders of his wife and a second man were part of an “unfathomable” and “evil” plot.

The sentence, imposed Friday in Fairfax County Circuit Court, closed a case that prosecutors said was driven by an affair, proximity and betrayal inside the Banfield home in Herndon, Virginia. Jurors convicted Banfield in February 2026 of murdering his wife, Christine Banfield, a pediatric intensive care nurse, and Joseph Ryan, a stranger prosecutors said was lured to the home as a fall guy.

Prosecutors said Banfield was romantically involved with the family’s Brazilian au pair, Juliana Peres Magalhães, and that the two plotted to kill Christine Banfield and blame Ryan’s death on him. Ryan was allegedly drawn to the home through a fetish website, a detail that deepened the public fascination with a case that mixed domestic violence allegations, a staged crime scene and an affair between a husband and the caregiver living inside the household.

Banfield maintained that he shot Ryan after finding him attacking his wife on the morning of Feb. 24, 2023. Prosecutors countered that the scene was staged to resemble a home invasion, and the jury ultimately rejected his version of events. At sentencing, prosecutors asked the court to impose the maximum punishment, arguing the evidence showed planning, deception and intent rather than a split-second reaction.

Judge Penney Azcarate delivered the mandatory life term and said the crimes were severe enough to justify the harshest outcome. “Life in prison is a punishment reserved for a very small number of individuals,” she said, before calling the case exceptional in its brutality and calculation.

Magalhães had already received a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty in connection with the scheme. Banfield’s sentence now leaves one of the most closely watched murder cases in Northern Virginia resolved at the top of the state’s punishment scale, with the court concluding that conspiracy and premeditation, not chaos, defined what happened inside the home.