An Au Pair Shot A Man In Her Employers’ Home. The Twists In The Case Keep Coming.

Subscribe to HuffPost’s true crime newsletter, Suspicious Circumstances , to get captivating cases, unsolved mysteries and courtroom drama delivered straight to your inbox every week. Sign up here .

A murder trial in a baffling case involving an au pair, her two employers, a visiting stranger and a fetish website has been pushed back to this fall as questions continue to swirl about whether it was self-defense or a premeditated plot.

Juliana Peres Magalhaes, 23, was indicted in April on charges of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Joseph Nathan Ryan, 39, at the Fairfax County home where she lived with married couple Brendan and Christine Banfield, providing child care for their 4-year-old daughter.

When police arrived at the house in the affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., just after 8 a.m. on Feb. 24, 2023, they found Ryan’s body in the Banfields’ upstairs bedroom. Ryan had allegedly been shot twice, by different guns, and died at the scene.

But Ryan wasn’t the only victim.

Not far from his body, Christine Banfield lay dying. The 37-year-old pediatric nurse had been stabbed numerous times in her upper body, investigators said, and died at the hospital.

She was nude, and Ryan, a stranger to the family, was fully clothed, authorities said.

The Banfields’ daughter was at home when the killings took place but was physically unharmed, authorities said.

Peres Magalhaes’ mother, Marina Peres Souza, told the Brazilian news outlet Folha in October that her daughter had acted in self-defense to protect herself and the family. She was shocked by her daughter’s arrest, she said, because Peres Magalhaes told her the case had been closed several months prior.

“They are saying horrible things about my