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Jury selection begins in the Brendan Banfield trial as Joseph Ryan’s mother remembers her son and disputes claims about his death.
HERNDON, Va. — Jury selection is set to begin in Fairfax County in the trial of Brendan Banfield, a case that has drawn local and national attention for nearly three years.
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Prosecutors contend Banfield and his family’s au pair, Juliana Peres Magalhaes, came up with an elaborate plan to kill his wife, Christine Banfield, and a man, Joseph Ryan. Magalhaes has pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Prosecutors say she and Banfield were having an affair, and she is expected to testify against him.
Ahead of jury selection, Ryan’s mother, Deirdre Fisher, spoke in an exclusive interview with WUSA9 about her son and how she wants him remembered.
Ryan, who was born in Woodbridge, Virginia, was “wise beyond his years,” Fisher said, recalling a moment from his infancy: “He wasn’t even one yet. He was sitting on a stack of phone books … and he looks at my mother and says, ‘Grandmom, may I have a tissue, please?’”
“We were shocked,” she explained, “because he wasn’t even one yet and he just said a sentence.”
Fisher described her son as someone who loved sports and jiu-jitsu and was passionate about social justice and animals. “He would go to like a pound or to, you know, animal rescue place and ask for the oldest, ugliest dog,” she said. “Always little dogs. He loved to take them around with him.”
She also spoke about his hobbies, including live-action role-playing, or LARP. “Joe was a famous LARP. His name was Korak,” she said, laughing as she remembered him dressing up for events. “He had a giant rubber fish that he would use as the weapon, so he’d run through the forest and hit people with a giant rubber fish.”
They were extremely close, Fisher said. “I don’t think everybody gets to have a close relationship with their grown son where their son calls them all the time and wants to talk for hours into the night. But I was fortunate.”
Their last conversation was a “silly text conversation” on Feb. 23, 2023, about Ryan’s weight loss. “He was really happy that night before he was killed,” she said. “He was proud of himself.”
Ryan was shot and killed Feb. 24, 2023, inside the home of Brendan and Christine Banfield in Fairfax County. Fisher said she remembers every detail of learning about his death. “I remember when I got the call from the detective … I could hear my own voice screaming,” she said. “It was almost like it was outside of my body hearing that he had been killed.”
Investigators say Ryan was invited to the Banfield home through a sexual fetish website by someone he believed was Christine Banfield to act out what investigators have called a “violent sexual fantasy.”
Fisher says her son was anything but violent. She shared that her son had talked to her about consensual role play. “What he was into was sometimes consensual BDSM … but it was role play,” she said.
When asked about reports that Ryan brought a knife and restraints to the home, Fisher said, “I didn’t have a reaction to that at all because Joe and I had discussed the idea of cutting and knife play… Joe was not into cutting. He didn’t like to create blood.”
She drew a distinction between role play and violence. “Knife play, it’s just an object that you bring but don’t use,” she said. “And stabbing, that’s an act of violence … intended to harm.”
Fisher rejected the idea that her son was ever violent. “Joe was never violent with women,” she said. “You don’t wake up at 39 and decide, OK, I’ve never been violent with women in my entire life. Now I’m gonna stab a woman to death.”
She said that is why she did not believe the initial account from Banfield and the au pair that Ryan was shot because he stabbed Christine Banfield. The au pair later took a plea deal and confessed to authorities that the plan was Brendan Banfield’s idea. The two created a fake profile, pretended to be Christine, got Ryan to the house, shot him, and that Banfield stabbed his wife with the hope of blaming Ryan.
Fisher said the portrayal of her son has been painful. “That my son had done something wrong or that he was this creepy fetish guy, well, that’s a lie,” she said. “He was a consenting adult, yes, but he wasn’t a violent man who hurt women.”
“He didn’t need to apologize for that, and he didn’t need to die for that,” she added.
As the trial begins, Fisher said she is focused on holding onto memories of her son. Standing near his ashes, she said, “My plan is one day when after I pass, Joe and I will go together some place. That’s the plan. But for now he’s sitting up there.”
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