Talking Dateline: Temptation

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1:05Hey, everyone, it's Andrea Canning, and we are talking Dateline. And today we are talking about Blaine's episode called Temptation. Hey, Blaine. Hello, my love. How are you? All right. Yeah, there's so much to unpack with this episode. Yes. And if you haven't seen it, you can watch the episode on Peacock or listen to it in the Dateline podcast feed and then come right back here. Later, we'll have an extra clip from Juliana's testimony, then Blaine will answer some of your social media questions about this episode. Okay, let's talk Dateline. Let's do it. Blaine, just give us a recap on this episode.

1:41Sure. So this is something that happened in Northern Virginia in a suburb. You have Christine Banfield, who is a pediatric ICU nurse, her husband, Brendan Banfield, and their au pair or live-in nanny from overseas, Juliana, and they have a little girl. And so one morning, basically, Juliana says that she sees a strange van pull up in the driveway. The husband and the nanny essentially go upstairs, and they say that they find Christine, the wife, there with Joe Ryan, kneeling over her, stabbing her. Brendan shoots him. And so you have two people dead, Joe Ryan and Christine Banfield. Police say from the very beginning that something just doesn't add up.

2:19They start looking into the digital footprints of each of them, and they find that there have been these communications on this sexual fetish website that seemed to have planned a meetup at the Banfield's home. Well, detectives soon realized that even though Joe Ryan is the person who is on one end of these conversations, and that's real, that the other person, the profile, supposedly Christine, really wasn't her. And so they say, okay, this is a catfishing scheme. Somebody set this up to make it look like Christine wants him to come in. Who were these people? Well, as the investigation goes on, they realize that it was Juliana and Brendan Banfield who were basically posing as Christine to use that as a piece of their murder.

3:02This is a very, very twisted story. Beyond. Yes. One of the most twisted stories I've seen in a long time. And let's get into it by, you know, just how you opened the whole show, you know, by really focusing on the daughter and all of this, the four-year-old daughter. It was unbelievable because, right, she's four years old. And so she certainly wasn't conscious of what was happening, even as all of this was going on around her, the subsequent arrests and trial. It's very likely that she just didn't have a full grasp of what was going on. Yes. But later she will very much grow up. I mean, this case was all over the news.

3:37She will know that the details of what happened to her mom at the hand of her dad, and she'll know that she was in the basement for that whole thing. And so I just thought about just the later trauma that's going to come to her. Also, I mean, she's four years old. My oldest daughter's four years old. And so it really just pulled at my heart in so many different ways. Yeah, I could see it on your face. And for me as well, you know, just having just come out of the young children phase, I still have one. But it's just unimaginable. What struck me as being so incredible in this episode is we have a lot of episodes where we have body cam.

4:17We have 911. I mean, this thing played out like it felt like you were there. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a dateline this much in the moment where it starts with 911. Then you've got body cam. So you're seeing inside the house. You're seeing the nanny. You're seeing the husband. Then you're seeing the husband in the ambulance. Then you're seeing the husband at the hospital. I mean, it was remarkable. I think the moment that stands out to me, and I was shocked that we had this, the video of Brendan when he finds out that Christine has died in the hospital. Oh, my goodness. I marked that down when I was making notes.

4:54Yes. I mean, you see his reaction and then a chaplain comes in. They say the Lord's Prayer together. So all of this in the context of later what prosecutors kind of string together is what their plot was. It's mind-blowing. And you know what surprised me? One, and this is – as I was going through the interviews, everyone keeps talking about he's an agent. He has an issued weapon. It took a lot of questions to find out exactly what his specialty was. He's an IRS agent. He's an investigator with the IRS. And so I had to get several people to walk me through that because I was like, what is – is he arresting people for IRS crime?

5:31Like what exactly is that? Nobody could give me a definitive like what does it look like when he's arresting somebody type of thing. But yes, if there's tax fraud, any sort of investigations that kind of fit into that, that's where he comes in. But yes, he's basically deputized. I mean, he can carry a weapon, all of those types of things. Just going back to that prayer for one second. I mean, it was chilling when you know, like what we know now, right? It's chilling. When you look at it in the moment, and I was trying to see if I could tell if he was acting or not. Like, I didn't get this impression that he, you know, oh, my gosh, he's acting or he's not crying or, you know, you know, like how law enforcement always is pointing out things like he didn't look like a grieving spouse or he didn't look like.

6:15I thought he looked somewhat normal for the situation. I don't know. What did you think? I mean, I think that if I have learned nothing else in my time at Dateline, I've learned that everybody grieves differently. There are no two reactions that are the same. And so kind of trying to read the tea leaves, even though we do it, investigators do it, people do it all the time. It really can often be a futile effort because sometimes people are overcome with grief and they're the ones who killed the person. Or sometimes they just really are very stoic and that's just their coping mechanism. Maybe they're in shock or whatever.

6:48And amazing that there were people at the police department who really thought Christine brought this on herself in the way that she was – not being killed, obviously, but that she was actually on the site. That she was a participant. She was a willing participant. It was the opinion of the data analyst, essentially, that if you can't see someone else doing this, how can you prove that it wasn't this person, right? I mean, there were just kind of varying degrees of how do you prove something and where do you fall on this? Whereas the other detectives that you heard, they were like, there's no other way.

7:23There's no other explanation for what this could be. Like, you're not just looking at these data points. You're looking at the entire context of who this person was. And when you explore her in this context, there's nothing that leads you to that, you know? Yeah. And who knew the rabbit hole that they were about to go down with this fetish website? Gosh, it makes my life feel so boring when I hear about these websites out there. And also you like trying to figure out what the heck is this? It's very interesting to me that there are so many things happening that I just have no, I had no frame of reference.

8:00I had no understanding. I just learned a lot in doing this episode. And you can see it. You were learning in the moment. When he said larping or larping, larping, like your face, I was like, it's play fighting with swords, but with costumes kind of. And again, no disrespect or anything toward those who are interested in this. This is just a very new and all of this was very, just very interesting to me. So I really was learning in real time as I was doing those interviews. And I was trying to get them to explain it to me in a way of like, how will people understand this? Like, how do I understand this?

8:34Just kind of put it, you know, almost not visualize, but give it to me in terms I can understand. It was interesting to learn more about this kind of fetish community because the investigator said that one thing that was really important was once they started talking with other people that Joe Ryan had connected with, they found that even with what they were acting, he was very respectful. There were boundaries. They were always clearly communicated. Everyone was very into like permission and boundaries and consent and everything. That was such a big piece of it and that he was very much following and had always followed those rules.

9:08And so that's what made investigators kind of say, this doesn't seem to add up to the person that everyone else says that they know. Because you want to jump to conclusions with someone like Joe Ryan. You know, you surely are like, oh, he must be violent. He's on this website, whatever. But then it turned out that was not the case. Ryan was like collateral damage. Collateral damage. Yeah, that's exactly how they treated him in this. Yeah, absolutely. When we come back, Blaine is going to share an extra clip from Juliana speaking at trial and her insights into that.

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11:14So let's talk about this relationship with Brendan and Juliana. And, you know, you talked about this in the show. You know, a lot of people have au pairs. I mean, I had an au pair from my whole childhood. So I was drawn to this story from the very beginning, Andrea, because I'm an au pair host mom. I have hosted au pairs to care for my, you know, my kiddos. And so the way that I first learned about this story, believe it or not, my au pair at the time, this was making the rounds in their kind of au pair chat groups and their networks. And she's like, Blaine, have you heard about this story? This is before Juliana's arrested.

11:56This is before all of this. This was back at the very beginning, just the fact of like, oh my God, a host mom got killed and this au pair was in the middle of it. It really was big news in the au pair community. So she brings it to me. She's like, have you heard about this? I'm like, oh my God, no, I haven't heard about this. Mind you. This is a first Blaine to get a story tip from the au pair about a questionable au pair. I'm sorry. Continue. No, it's hilarious. So she and I had a fantastically close relationship and still do today. And she's also from Brazil. So that's another piece of it, right?

12:26So you're talking about this Brazilian au pair network. And so she's hearing through the grapevine and she's telling me, I'm like, oh, that's crazy. So watching this unfold, I was like, oh, gosh, I really want to do this story. But also because I know the beauty that the au pair host mom relationship can be, like how beautiful that relationship can be. Yeah. So I mean, staying in each other's lives like we were our au pair got married. We were all in her wedding. Right. Like my husband walked her down the aisle. I mean, we were very close with with her entire family, met her parents when they've come to visit, like the whole thing.

13:01Oh, you're a special au pair mom. Well, she was a special au pair, I have to say. But to go on beyond that, yes, this notion that inside her home – I mean there are so many levels of betrayal here. Inside Christine's home with her husband, the person she's trusting to take care of her kids. And also this is kind of like a weird heartstring thing that only moms will understand. The Banfield daughter really loved the au pair, right? And this is somebody who, again, is cheating with your husband and plotting all these things but like has the love of your child. I couldn't even – it's hard to wrap your mind around it, right?

13:37I mean that's something that – It really is. There are so many levels and layers to that. Such a betrayal. They're in the house. They're interacting with your family, your friends and, you know. I mean – There are – the age range of au pairs goes from like 18 to 25. I want to say 26 is when you officially age out. There is a wide range of maturity that kind of falls within that spectrum, right? That's true. You get 18-year-olds, but you get somebody who's just very grown and mature on the other end, and you just sometimes don't know what you're going to get. And so that's why you do an interview process before.

14:12There's lots of FaceTimes, lots of Zoom calls, right? Like, I mean, it really is – somebody kind of described it as like almost speed dating. Like you're trying to figure out like who's going to be the best fit for your family. You FaceTime and, you know – and so one would imagine that Christine thought that she, you know, had a connection. The other piece is I learned from her friends that her experience with her first au pair was fantastic. She had a really close relationship with the first young lady. Gosh, talk about a 180. That's what I'm saying. Exactly. So, of course, you go into your second au pair thinking, OK, it was a great experience the first time around.

14:42Let's go for the second time. And they had that thing in common of Juliana had worked in health care back home in Brazil, according to Christine's friends. So she's thinking, OK, we have a connection. Right. And she was very wrong. Yeah. I was a nanny for David Hasselhoff, which some people know. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't know that. Yes. And for his two little girls. And, you know, that I actually started as an intern at Baywatch. And that's how that relationship was formed. So they really knew at the by the by the time they asked me to move in with them. They really knew who I was. You know, they're living nanny.

15:17Yes. Yes. Like you see everything, every single thing. You're not a you're not a fly on the wall. You're like, you're part of it. You're part of the family. Yeah, essentially. Yeah. And, you know, when you're hosting an au pair, it's not just like, okay, this is my boss. right? But like the terms host mom and host dad really are used with like intentionally because, I mean, these are young people. You're bringing them over. They're coming for an experience. There's a cultural exchange, right? Like we would do things like, you know, our au pair would cook for us. She would cook Brazilian food and we'd take her out and do this.

15:47I mean, it really is this kind of – she was teaching our kids like Portuguese, like, you know, like, you know, my daughter speaks in Portuguese. You're going to be getting social media DMs from au pairs everywhere after this saying like, can you hire me? But it's a fun experience. Yeah. If it works well, if it works. Yeah. Let's just continue this thought of Brendan and Juliana in this relationship. We have a clip of more of Juliana's testimonies. Let's listen to that. So you began a sexual relationship with the defendant in August of 2022. when you were how old? I was 21. And when this relationship began, did you ever think about how it might end?

16:30No. I didn't really think it was a serious relationship.

16:40And did the defendant ever talk with you about any long-term plans for the two of you? Not initially. Not initially. Did he ever, though? Yes. When did that talk start? I think it started after he talked about his plan. Okay. And did he ever talk about the two of you getting married or the two of you having children? Yes. And did you take any photos of you and the defendant after you began a romantic or physical relationship? Yes. And you said you had posted some things to social media? Yes. Okay. In that post, who is present in that post? He's the person behind the emoji. And who is behind the emoji?

17:35Brendan. And is it you and Brendan singing in that post? Yes. I was just beside myself with these posts that she was making, these social media posts. Oh, my. I wrote OMG, the bathtub photo, the emojis. So she's like. It was a grown man. She's got emojis over the face of a grown man. What the heck? I thought that was the strangest detail. I mean, on a couple of layers. One, it really does show and shows the relative immaturity of Juliana. Oh, my gosh. A young lady, you're posting, you got all this stuff, but you got an emoji over his face. And then Brendan, the other piece, though, is just kind of like, again, social media.

18:19Social media is going to be the downfall of everybody. Like, well, maybe just don't post. Maybe just don't post. And then also the photos next to the bed. Like they're photos of themselves. Like they didn't think there was a chance, like her clothes in the closet. They didn't think maybe we, you know, police might look at us for this crime and they might at some point have a search warrant and come and search the house and like see all this. And the crazy thing is for as much thought as Brendan put into this, right, as much as he understands how investigations work, all of these things, that was something that apparently was not part of the calculus.

18:56But police told me they were like seeing that house, one, the fact that all of Christine's photos were gone. So your mom, you know, your wife, the mother of your child has been murdered brutally. You'd expect to see the pictures. You'd expect to see the house pictures, the family pictures around the house, rather. Those were all taken down. They were all, it was like she was erased. And then, yes, Juliana had moved her clothes in. She had her lingerie lying around. She had this kind of couple booed up picture, if you will, sitting next to them on the nightstand. And so - I can't, I can't. Investigators say that if they had any doubt before, seeing that was just what made them say, OK, something's going on.

19:34We're on the right track here. Yeah. Let's talk about Juliana's proffer where she is about to reveal exactly what happened that morning. It wasn't until Brendan was arrested and that's when they told us, OK, then there was a change. And Juliana's attorney called and said, you know what? She wants to talk. Here's what's crazy. So just even leading up to that, Andrea, again, she was quiet. I mean, she was holding the secret, spending all these months in jail while Brendan was out free. She wasn't saying a thing. She never cracked. She never said anything. But they're writing these love letters back and forth to each other, which are wild in and of themselves.

20:13We couldn't put as much detail of the letters inside. But I mean, these letters were very just syrupy, sweet, love bombing. One of the investigators said love bombing to me, and that's exactly it. At one point, he's writing out song lyrics, Matchbox 20, Push, which was an odd song choice in my opinion. But he was writing out song lyrics to her. I mean, he's talking about what he loves about her physically. I can't believe that you're mine. All of these things. So detectives are reading all of these, of course. But Juliana's still not saying anything. That's what was shocking. It wasn't until Brendan was arrested and that's when they told us, okay, then there was a change.

20:55And Juliana's attorney called and said, you know what? She wants to talk. And she talked. If there's one thing that stands out to me, Andrea, about hearing Juliana talk both during her proffer and during her testimony on the stand is just how even she was. I mean, no emotion, no remorse, no anything. I mean, she really is just laying out this plan in a cold, almost matter of fact kind of way. And the prosecutor who had been working on it at the time told me he was like, I couldn't sleep that whole weekend. Like just hearing that was so disturbing to him. What was really hard to hear was Juliana talking about the plan, turning off Christine's phone, you know, Brendan waiting in the bathroom of the McDonald's, her, you know, letting Brendan know Joe is here.

21:47You know, it's just it was so planned out and methodical and just yuck. During Juliana's proffer, she talks about the fact that Brendan kept saying, Christine's a bad mother. She's a bad mom. She's lazy. She doesn't do this. She doesn't do that. And so there was this strange like that was just seemed to be part of the calculus of it or even just kind of the warped justification for putting together such a terrible plot. plot. And I really didn't get the impression based on, I mean, we don't know this family, obviously, but based on listening to the friends. And, you know, Christine was like this hardworking mom.

22:22She's going to work. She's like helping to pay the bills and she's raising this kid. And I just never got the impression somehow that Christine was a bad mom. I mean, she was the exact opposite. She was a fantastic mom by all accounts, by what everybody's saying. It was important, I think, in the defense to have Brendan testify because this is a case of self-defense, according to Brendan. And I think juries, when you are a victim of something where you have to defend yourself and your wife is being attacked, they are going to want to hear your story because they want to see you. They want to read your body language.

23:00They want you to recount what happened. I mean, it was very important, I think, for him to be up there, even though, So, you know, whether you believe him or not, I think it was important. Because the story that he was that Brendan was was saying was his story was so different from what prosecutors were alleging, obviously. Right. The same same end result. Christine, Joe Ryan are both dead, but he has just a completely different story. I do think that, yes, hearing him on the stand is one thing, hearing him tell his story. But in talking with the prosecutors, just there was so much his body language, but also his demeanor.

23:37And one of the things that stood out to, for instance, Drew Wilder, the reporter we talked to, was just how his demeanor changed when he talked about Juliana. And he kind of perked up and he talked about her. But when he spoke about Christine, again, who, according to Brendan, in his telling of the story, was his wife. They had no problems. They were very loving. When he spoke about Christine, it was very minimal. He mentioned her very little, very rarely mentioned her by name. It was just a very different way of relating to her when he was on the sand than he did to Juliana. The judge, you know, was limited, obviously, in what she could give Juliana.