The four-year-old daughter of the Virginia mother murdered in a twisted rape fantasy plot allegedly orchestrated by her philandering husband and their sultry Brazilian au pair asked the mistress nanny hours after the killing if she was going to marry her father.
The young girl posed the startling question to the naughty nanny — 25-year-old Juliana Peres Magalhães — soon after her mom, Christine Banfield, was found dead in their Northern Virginia home, a police victim advocate who witnessed the odd exchange testified Thursday, the Washington Post reported.
“Are you going to marry my daddy,” the motherless youngster asked Magalhães.
The advocate said the au pair then replied, “I wish.”
The witness explained the eyebrow-raising interaction was the first sign she believed Christine’s IRS agent husband, Brendan Banfield, was hiding something, the outlet reported.
The chilling new details emerged as Brendan, 40, stands trial, accused of stabbing his 37-year-old wife to death and fatally shooting a would-be patsy inside the couple’s Herndon home on Feb. 24, 2023.
He was cuffed in September 2024 and charged with staging a rape attempt to “get rid” of his wife and run off with their daughter’s much-younger live-in nanny, with whom he had been having a lusty affair.
Brendan and Magalhães allegedly lured a supposed attacker — 38-year-old Joseph Ryan — to their home by posing as Christine on a fetish website, where they pretended she was looking for someone to live out a violent rape fantasy with, prosecutors alleged in his explosive murder trial last week.
Ryan then snuck into the home with a knife while the husband was allegedly lying in wait with his IRS-issued handgun.
Brendan and the au pair deliberately burst into the bedroom in the middle of the orchestrated assault and fatally shot Ryan in the head, then allegedly used his blade to stab Christine in the neck and face until she died, Magalhães testified after striking a plea deal.
The illicit pair made it appear the husband had heroically tried to save his wife’s life, prosecutors alleged.
Brendan allegedly decided to murder Christine just two months after he began sleeping with Magalhães, then 21, because he didn’t want to pay for a divorce and thought she was a “terrible” mother who “wasn’t good” for their young daughter.
Magalhães moved into the home with her alleged killer lover — hanging her lingerie in Christine’s closet and sleeping each night in the very bed where the mother had been murdered.
The illicit nanny was arrested in October 2023 and charged with murder. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter the following year — a month after Brendan was arrested.
She will be sentenced after Brendan’s anticipated weeks-long trial, during which his defense argued she was only arrested to “flip her” against her ex-flame.
Banfield, who no longer works for the IRS, faces life in prison if convicted.
