A death wish and a catfish: How an IRS agent lured his wife and an unsuspecting man to their murders

Christine Banfield and Joseph Ryan were murdered in her Northern Virginia home on Feb. 24, 2023, in a scheme carried out by her husband Brendan Banfield and their au pair, Juliana Peres Magalhaes.

On a Friday morning three years ago, a horrific scene unfolded in a Northern Virginia home: A pediatric ICU nurse, Christine Banfield, was mortally wounded in her bedroom. She’d been repeatedly stabbed. With her was 39-year-old Joseph Ryan. He’d been fatally shot.

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The nurse’s husband — IRS special agent Brendan Banfield — told authorities he killed Ryan, a stranger, after the man attacked his wife.

What prosecutors say actually happened inside the Banfields’ Fairfax County home was the result of something far more convoluted and sinister — a deadly catfishing scheme that was motivated by an affair and relied on a fetish website to lure an unsuspecting man to his death.