Au Pair Affair Murders: The Brendan Banfield Double Murder
On February 24, 2023, pediatric ICU nurse Christine Banfield, 37, and a stranger named Joseph Ryan, 39, were killed inside a home in Herndon, Fairfax County, Virginia, in a double homicide staged to look like a home invasion. The investigation eventually turned on Christine's husband, former IRS criminal investigator Brendan Banfield, and the family's 22-year-old Brazilian au pair, whose cooperating testimony and forensic evidence of a staged crime scene produced two aggravated murder convictions and a life sentence.
Christine spent her early career as a sexual assault nurse examiner, sitting with strangers on the worst nights of their lives, and she died inside a story her own husband wrote to make her look like the author of it. This one has a fake profile on a fetish website, a young woman from São Paulo who came over to watch a toddler, a detective who got moved out of his unit right after his findings pointed the wrong direction, and a federal investigator who was certain he understood how these cases get solved.
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