A new television report revisits how Joseph Ryan was drawn into a staged encounter that ended with two people dead.

FAIRFAX, Va. — Joseph Ryan entered a Reston home in February 2023 believing he had agreed to a consensual sexual role-play encounter. He instead became the unwitting target of a plan to kill a woman, frame him as her attacker and leave no surviving witness, according to prosecutors and the jury that convicted former federal agent Brendan Banfield.

More than three years later, Ryan’s mother is trying to separate her son’s life from the false story built around his death. Deirdre Fisher said in an interview featured by A&E’s “Killer Investigations” that Ryan understood the importance of consent and would not knowingly have attacked Christine Banfield. The episode revisits a case that first appeared to involve a husband protecting his wife from a violent intruder, then unraveled into evidence of an affair, online impersonation and a carefully staged double killing.

Ryan, 39, and Christine Banfield, 37, died after the encounter inside the Banfields’ home on Feb. 24, 2023. Brendan Banfield, Christine’s husband and an IRS criminal investigator at the time, called 911 and said he had shot an intruder attacking his wife. Police found Ryan dead from gunshot wounds and Christine critically injured. She later died at a hospital. The family’s Brazilian au pair, Juliana Peres Magalhaes, initially supported Banfield’s account and told officers she had seen Ryan attacking Christine.

Investigators eventually concluded that Ryan had not broken into the home and did not arrive with an independent plan to harm Christine. Prosecutors said Brendan Banfield and Magalhaes, who were involved in a romantic relationship, posed as Christine on FetLife, an online community used by people interested in sexual fetishes. They communicated with potential partners until Ryan agreed to a tightly controlled encounter at the house. The messages instructed him to bring a knife and take part in conduct that was presented to him as consensual role-play.

That distinction has become central to Fisher’s effort to defend her son. Ryan’s willingness to take part in an unusual sexual scenario did not mean he had agreed to commit a real assault, prosecutors said. He believed he was communicating with Christine and that the rules of the encounter had been established with her approval. The prosecution’s case was that Banfield and Magalhaes exploited those expectations, using Ryan’s interest in role-play to place him in a setting where his actions could be deliberately misrepresented after his death.

Fisher told the television program that she knew her son was interested in sexual role-play but also knew him as a person who cared about consent. She objected to the early image of Ryan as a stranger who entered a family home to attack a woman. That account came from the surviving people in the house and was repeated before detectives had reconstructed the online communications and relationships surrounding the deaths. Ryan could not explain why he was there because he had been killed at the scene.

The case began to shift as investigators examined the household and the digital evidence. Police found photographs suggesting an intimate relationship between Brendan Banfield and Magalhaes. After Christine’s death, Magalhaes moved into the primary bedroom and placed her belongings in Christine’s closet, according to evidence described during the investigation. Detectives also traced communications between Ryan and an account that appeared to belong to Christine but that prosecutors said was controlled by Banfield and Magalhaes.

Magalhaes was arrested months after the killings and initially maintained the self-defense account. She later pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Ryan’s death and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. At Banfield’s trial, she testified that the affair had developed while she lived with the family and cared for the couple’s young daughter. She said Banfield discussed wanting Christine gone because he did not want to divorce her and risk sharing custody. According to her testimony, he told her it would be easier if Christine were “not in the picture.”

Magalhaes described a plan in which Ryan would be lured to the home under the false identity, placed in a compromising scene with Christine and then blamed for her killing. She testified that Banfield shot Ryan and stabbed Christine with the knife Ryan had brought for the planned role-play. Magalhaes admitted firing a second shot at Ryan after he moved. Prosecutors said the couple’s child had been taken to another part of the house before the killings, a circumstance that later supported a child-endangerment charge against Banfield.

Banfield denied planning either death and testified in his own defense. He said he believed his wife had arranged the encounter and that he shot Ryan after finding him attacking her. He called Magalhaes’ version of a coordinated murder plan absurd. His lawyers attacked her credibility, emphasizing that she changed her account after spending more than a year in custody and obtained a reduced charge in exchange for her testimony. They also pointed to disputed digital-forensic evidence and argued that investigators could not prove Christine had lost control of her devices.

Prosecutors answered that the online conduct made little sense as Christine’s independent activity. They noted that the account rejected men who wanted to meet first or move the encounter to a hotel, while selecting a stranger willing to follow unusual directions at the Banfield home. They also argued that messages were not sent at times when Christine was home without her husband and the au pair. The evidence could not identify the hands on a keyboard, but prosecutors said its timing and content supported Magalhaes’ description of the impersonation scheme.

A Fairfax County jury convicted Banfield in February 2026 of two counts of aggravated murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony and child endangerment. The verdict rejected his claim that the deaths resulted from an unexpected attack. In June, Circuit Court Judge Penney Azcarate sentenced him to life in prison without parole. She described the crimes as calculated. The sentence closed the principal criminal case after years of investigation, pretrial disputes and competing accounts of what occurred inside the bedroom.

Magalhaes received the maximum 10-year sentence for manslaughter in February despite prosecutors’ recommendation that she be released based on time served and her cooperation. Azcarate said the assistance she provided did not erase her participation. Magalhaes apologized to both families and said she had abandoned her values during the relationship. Fairfax County prosecutors said she is expected to be deported to Brazil after completing her sentence.

The legal outcomes established that Ryan was not the predatory intruder portrayed in the initial emergency call. Yet Fisher said the first account attached a damaging label to her son before the public learned about the fake profile and staged encounter. Her appearance in the documentary shifts attention away from the affair that drove much of the coverage and toward the person selected as a convenient scapegoat. Ryan’s private sexual interests became part of the evidence, but they also made it easier for his killers to construct a story they believed others would accept.

Christine Banfield’s relatives have likewise emphasized the lives lost rather than the sensational details surrounding the prosecution. Christine was a pediatric intensive care nurse and a mother. Ryan was a son, nephew and grandson whose family said his choices were distorted to excuse what happened to him. With Banfield serving life without parole and Magalhaes serving a 10-year term, the families remain left with the consequences of a plot that relied on both victims being unable to contradict it.

Author note: Last updated July 30, 2026.