It’s a plot basically out of Law and Order: SVU (and one other case I will bring up later). Here’s the outline.
This guy Brendan Banfield was married to a woman named Christine. I can already tell you that if you search Google Images for Christine, there are some “very skinny” photos and some “very large” photos, probably post-pregnancy. If you remember the Chris Watts case, as most do, a big thing happening there was Watts got more jacked as he had kids, and eventually strayed. It doesn’t look like Brendan Banfield got jacked, but the straying is probably because of the kid and the body image, which is what men commonly hide behind.
He strayed with his nanny (cliche), who was Brazilian (double cliche). Seems like they wanted Christine out of the picture, so here’s what they did: they took a bikini photo that Christine sent her husband, and they put it on a fetish site saying she was seeking rough sex + knife play. It appears Brendan was on the site, faking to be his wife, messaging some perv named Joseph.
On the morning in question, Brendan went to McDonald’s at 7:10am (random), and the Brazilian nanny was taking the kid to the zoo (do zoos open that early?). My guess is that they left the front door unlocked.
The perv Joseph came in, probably with a knife thinking he was gonna get some tail and some knife play simultaneously, and Christine freaked out and fought back, because she has no idea what’s going on.
Joseph, the perv, kills Christine. So that murder is on him, legally.
Then Brendan and the nanny magically return, and they kill Joseph.
But so far, only the nanny is locked up, on a second-degree charge for killing the perv. Brendan, who is an IRS investigator (ha), is still out. However, in the video above, the nanny is sending emails to her mom back in Brazil essentially saying she’s ready to talk. So, she’s likely going to flip on Brendan, and he’s going to the pokey, potentially for life.
Weird set-up here that could have worked in some parallel universe, but human dynamics are insanely complicated.
This is vaguely similar to the 1995 Mark Winger case. Winger wanted his wife out of the picture, too, and he saw a note from an airport van driver about needing to return something to her — so he concocted an ambush where the airport van driver supposedly killed his wife, and he killed the van driver.
In reality, Winger got convicted of killing both of them, but initially he was seen as a “hero” for defending his wife. Brendan Banfield, good ol’ IRS boy, could have been seen as the same for killing perv Joseph, who just knifed his wife in their home. But now Brendan will probably be investigating something else, not your taxes, but rather the prison library.
PS Mark Winger went into prison in 2002, and he’s still there. Banfield will likely face the same future.