An IRS agent accused of murdering his wife in a plot to be with his child’s au pair turned on the waterworks in court on Wednesday as the jury was shown police bodycam video of the moment he was told his spouse was dead.
Brendan Banfield bowed his head and wiped away tears while he watched footage of himself during his trial for the murders of his wife, Christine Banfield, and a stranger, Joseph Ryan.
The father-of-one denies fatally stabbing his wife in the neck after shooting Ryan as part of a twisted scheme to frame her death as a home invasion in order to start a new life with his Brazilian nanny, Juliana Peres Magalhaes.
Fairfax County Police Officer Zachary Beckner, called by the defense on Wednesday, was one of the first officers at the scene of the double murder at the Banfields’ house in a leafy Washington, DC, suburb on Feb. 24, 2023.
In Officer Beckner’s bodycam video, a doctor approaches Banfield and the cop, telling him, “Your wife has died,” and describing her catastrophic blood loss.
“I can explain what happened when she arrived here, but you were there, and it sounds like there was a lot of blood loss,” the doctor told Banfield in the video.
“I was trying to apply pressure,” Banfield interrupted the doctor at one point, while discussing his wife’s wounds.
“I mean, those were enormous wounds, and you know, it’s not,” the doctor responded, to which Banfield said, “There was so, there was so many.”
“Yes, and the neck is not compressible. So it’s not possible, really, to stop all the blood loss,” the doctor said in Officer Beckner’s bodycam video.
Banfield is heard sobbing loudly in the video, as the doctor reassures him that everything had been done to save his wife’s life.
“Everything that was possible to be done was done for her right away. You did a, a wonderful, you know, you did everything that was possible. It’s not a survivable injury,” the doctor told Banfield.
Magalhaes testified last week that she and Banfield created a fake profile for Christine on a sex fetish website to lure Ryan to the house in an effort to pin the murder on him.
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