A Husband Who Staged a Murder to Frame a Stranger Gets Life, a Wife's Tooth Found in a Burn Pit, and a 12-Year-Old Failed by the Program.

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, and welcome to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it's Tuesday, June ninth, twenty twenty six. Here's where things stand this morning. In Fairfax County, Virginia, Brendan Banfield, the former federal agent convicted of murdering his wife Christine, and a man named Joseph Ryan, has been sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. In Juno, Wisconsin, the trial they're calling the Tooth in the Ashes is now in its second week, and the forensic evidence against Zachariah Rash is stacking up.

0:44 And just outside Boston, a former police officer accused of killing a young woman named Sandra Birchmore has been told he will stay behind bars until his trial is fall. Three cases, let's get into them. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. There is a threat running through all three of today's stories, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. In every one of them, a woman is dead and the man accused of killing her has an explanation ready to go. An intruder did it. The gun went off by accident. She did it to herself, there's a playbook for this, for taking a death you caused and handing the blame to somebody or something else. Today, we watch that playbook get tested in three different courtrooms.

1:29 In one, it already failed, and on Friday a judge handed down the only sentence Virginia law allows. In another, it's being argued in real time this week with the evidence piling up. And in the third a judge looked the man in the eye and said, you are staying locked up until a jury hears all of it. We start in Fairfax County, Virginia with a case some of you have been following with us since the dead of winter. The o pair a fair murder, and on Friday it reached the only ending Virginia law allows for what Brendan Banfield was convicted of doing. If you were with us back in January, you know the shape of this one.

2:10 But let me bring everybody up to speed, because the two people at the center of it deserved to be more than a lurid headline about a fetish website. Christine Banfield was a pediatric intensive care nurse. Think about what that job is. She spent her working life keeping the most fragile patients in the building, sick children, alive through the night. She had a four year old daughter of her own, and on the morning of February twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, in the family's home in Herndon, she was stabbed to death. The other person who died that morning was a man named Joseph Ryan. For a long stretch of this story, Ryan was treated as a footnote, the stranger, the intruder, the body on the floor. He was not a footnote. He was a man with a family, and his mother said it better than I can, so I'll borrow her words. He had a face, he had a name, He had alive. Hold on to that because the entire scheme depended on the world seeing him as disposable.

3:08 Here's the story Banfield handed police that morning. He said he came across Joseph Ryan attacking his wife with a knife, and he shot Ryan to save her. A tragic home invasion in an affluent suburb. A husband who tried and failed to rescue the woman he loved, tidy, sympathetic, and according to a Fairfax County jury, completely false. Because investigators kept pulling threads. Banfield, a former Internal Revenue Service law enforcement officer had been having an affair with the family's Brazilian aau pair, Juliana Paris Magelaies. Prosecutors say the two of them created an account on a fetish website impersonating Christine and used it to lure Joseph Ryan to the house, telling him he was coming for a consensual encounter. They left the door open, and when Ryan walked in, prosecutors say he walked into a setup designed from the start to make him the fall guy for Christine's murder. And the cruelest detail of the staging, the Banfield's four year old daughter was in the basement of that house while it happened, physically unharmed, but in the building. That's a separate conviction all by itself, child endangerment, and we'll come back to it now. Magalayes pleaded guilty to manslaughter and testified against him, and the defense did what the defense always does with a cooperating witness. Attorney John Carroll argued, you can't trust her. She's only talking to save herself, and look, that's a fair argument to make cooperating witnesses cut deals. But prosecutor Jenna Sans told the jury they

4:42 didn't have to take Maggle Heins's word for any of it. She called it a plethora of evidence. The most damning piece. An expert testified that the blood on Joseph Ryan's hands looked like Christine's blood had been dripped onto him from above, not the smear of a struggle placed staged to make a dead man look guilty. Banfield took the stand in his own defense and called the allegations his word, absolutely crazy. The jury deliberated for nearly nine hours across two days. On February second, they convicted him two counts of aggravated murder, using a firearm in the commission of a felony, and that child, which brings us to Friday. Here's something worth understanding about Virginia. After the death penalty was abolished there in twenty twenty one, aggravated murder became the most serious offense on the books, and it carries a mandatory life sentence.

5:37 There was no real suspense about the number. The question was whether Banfield would show a flicker of anything. He didn't. Before the sentence came down, the family spoke. Christine's sister, Danielle Hawker, told the court her sister's death changed her life in an unimaginable way. Joseph Ryan's mother appeared and reminded everyone again that her son was a p and not a prop and Banfield to the very end insisted he was innocent. Judge Penny Ascarate wasn't moved. She sentenced him to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, no good conduct credits, no conditional release, and then stacked on three more years for the firearm count and five more for endangering his own daughter, all to run consecutively.

6:24 Earlier that week, she'd already denied a motion to throw out the conviction. The judge's words about the case, it reflected a level of cruelty, calculation, and inhumanity that went deeper than anger or impulse. And that's the word that sticks with me on this one. Calculation, because this wasn't a man who snapped. This was a plan. Prosecutors laid out the preparation that went into it. An affair, a fake online persona built to impersonate his own wife, A stranger researched and recruited and lured to a house, a scene so the blood would tell the wrong story. That is not a mistake. That is a choice made over and over on one hundred different days by a man who decided his wife was an obstacle and another human being was a tool. There was a photo investigators found in that house, a frame picture of Banfield and the au pair sitting on the night stand in the master bedroom.

7:24 Not Christine, the woman he was planning a future with. That's who he wanted, and rather than file for divorce like a person, he built a machine to kill the mother of his child and frame an innocent man for it. He thought he was smarter than everyone in the room. He found out on Friday that he wasn't. Now he's indicated, he'll appeal and he's entitled to. His trial lawyer won't be the one handling it, But an appeal doesn't undo Friday. As of this morning, Brendan Banfield will die in prison, and the two names that should outlast his Christine Banfield, Joe Joseph Ryan. From a case that just ended, we moved to one that is happening right now this week in a courtroom in Juno, Wisconsin. We brought you day one of this trial on last Thursday show, and I'll be straight with you. The days since have not been kind to the defense. Before I get into what's new, a reminder of who we're talking about, because her name is the whole point. Crystal Rash, thirty seven years old.

8:41 She was going through a divorce from her husband, Zachariah Rash. Her four kids had been removed from the home and placed in foster care, and the state was moving to terminate parental rights. A hard, painful chapter of anybody's life. And here's what the prosecution wants the jury to understand. She wasn't giving up. This date's prosecutor, Sean Waller, told jurors she was still fighting to stay in her children's lives, working to line up her own apartment, optimistic about a fresh start. She was, not, in his phrase, a woman phasing out of her own life. She was a woman trying to hold onto the parts that mattered most. She was last seen alive on June eleventh, twenty twenty four. And then the part that gives the case its name, a tooth and a fragment of skull turned up in a burn pit on the property. The tooth matched her dental records. The bone match her DNA. So let me walk you through the week because the state has been building this brick by brick. It started with the people who knew Crystal best. A friend of twenty four years testified that while she was actually sitting with investigators about Crystal's disappearance, she started getting Facebook messages from a brand new account claiming to be Crystal, and the messages were wrong, the wording was off, and whoever was behind that account would not do the one simple thing that would have proven it was really her, get on a video call and show her face. Crystal's divorce attorney testified to the same eerie pattern. She had been in constant contact with him about her divorce and her kids, and then suddenly,

10:13 after early June, nothing except one email supposedly from Crystal trying to fire him. It went to the wrong address. He said. She never gave any sign she wanted to let him go. Then the state turned to the machines, which don't have feelings and don't forget. License plate readers showed Crystal's own car barely moved after she vanished, while a silver Mitsubishi tied to Zachariah Rash was getting picked up by cameras all over Wisconsin. Inside that Mitsubishi. A forensic scientist described significant reddish brown staining throughout the front passenger area, the seat, the seat belt, the console. A DNA analyst testified that the blood matched Crystal rash And then there's the phone. Prosecutors say, a dump of Zachariah Rashih.

11:00 His phone showed a progression their word, and you can hear why they chose it. Jurors heard that before Crystal disappeared, the searches were about things like fatal gunshots to the head and how long you can collect widows benefits if taxes were never filed. And after she was gone, the state says the search has changed shape cleaning bones, sulfuric acid, replacing parts of a vehicle, how quickly police can get a warrant, how missing person's alerts work before, how does someone die after? How do I make it disappear? That's the story the state is telling. With that timeline, the forensic week kept going. A forensic dentist matched a recovered tooth and a mirror image tooth from the other side of the mouth to Crystal's dental records. A consultant brought in ground penetrating radar, the kind of technology you use when you suspect the earth itself is hiding something. And excavated a burned area on the property. He found human remains, a charred fragment of the temporal bone, the bone that forms the side and base of the skull, and a detective testified that when he confronted Zachariah Rash about the inconsistencies in his account, Rash conceded he should have told the truth. Asked why he'd been buying drain cleaner, the detective said, Rash told him it was for squirrels. Now the defense gets its case too, and here's their version.

12:24 Defense attorney Zaki Zahawi told the jury the prosecutors have it all wrong, that Crystal Rash tragically killed herself while handling a gun in front of his client, and that Zachariah Rash, knowing it was his firearm and that a divorce was pending, was terrified he'd be blamed, so he panicked. The defense concedes openly that Rash lied to his friends, lied to his family, lie to law enforcement. But lying out a panic, they argue, is not the same thing as murder. Their account of the moment itself, a nine millimeter in the vehicle that discharged while he was driving. And I want to be careful and fair here because this case is still in front of a jury and Zachariah Rash has pleaded not guilty, he is presumed innocent, and twelve people in juno, not me, not you, are going to weigh whether that panic story holds up against that pile of forensic testimony. That's their job and it's the right way for this to work. But there's a detail from day one I haven't been able to shake, and it belongs to Crysteal. Her stepmother testified that Crystal had been afraid of firearms since childhood, that she never owned a gun, never used one. I'm not going to tell you what that proves. I'm going to let the jury do that. I'm just gonna say her name because she was a woman trying to claw her way back to her children when she vanished. Crystal Rash will keep watching this one as it goes to verdict when we

13:55 come back. A name that went by fast on yesterday's show and the young woman behind it, a former police officer, a youth program that was supposed to protect kids, and a judge who just decided he's too dangerous to let out. Stay with me before this last story a warning. It involves the sexual exploitation of a child. I'm going to handle it the way it deserves to be handled, carefully, and I'm not going to give you details that don't belong on the air. But if there are young ears in the room, this is your moment to turn the volume down. Yesterday on this show, we spent the whole hour on police misconduct, and somewhere in the middle of it.

14:42 Inside that lawsuit Karen Reid filed against the Massachusetts State Police, one name went by fast, a young woman named Sandra Birchmore mentioned in connection with an officer from a completely different department. I told you we'd come back to her, So here we are, because Sandra Birchmore deserves a lot more than to be a single ugly line in somebody else's lawsuit. In twenty ten, Sandra Birchmore was twelve years old and she joined something called the Stouton Police Explorers, a program built to show young people what a career in policing looks like, a quasi military youth program, the kind of thing a community holds up as a good influence.

15:23 One of the instructors was a man named Matthew Farwell. Here is what prosecutors allege, and I'm gonna say it plainly and then move on because the details are not for entertainment. They say that by twenty twelve, and when Sandra was fifteen and Farwell was twenty six, the two were communicating online and that text messages established a sexual relationship that began that year a grown man, an instructor, and a fifteen year old girl who had come to that program to be mentored. The state alleges that exploitation continued for years, all the way until her death in twenty twenty one, when she was twenty three. Think about that. The machinery of that, the very program that was supposed to put a trustworthy adult in front of a kid, is the program, prosecutor say, delivered her to the person who would spend the next decade exploiting her. Nobody was paying attention to her, or worse, the people who were supposed to be paying attention were the problem. Sandra Birchmore was found dead in her home in February of twenty twenty one. She was pregnant. She had told Farwell the baby was his, though I'll note that DNA testing later showed he was not in fact the father. Prosecutors alleged that Farwell killed her because he believed she was carrying his child, and that he then tried to stage the scene to look like she had taken her own life.

16:42 He is charged in federal court with killing a witness or victim in an ongoing investigation. I'm not going to describe how she died. It isn't necessary and it isn't respectful, so I'm leaving it there. And here's the development that puts this on today's show. Farwell asked a judge to let him out on release while he waited for trial. His lawyers pointed to his roots in Massachusetts, no criminal record, an honorable military background, and the judge, Emmons Page Kelly said no. She found the government had met its burden on every front that matters at this stage, risk of flight, danger to the community, and obstruction. And she wrote something that even hedged in legal caution lands hard that the evidence against Farwell is, in her words, very strong, if not overwhelming. He stays behind bars. His trial is set for October. Now I have to be square with you.

17:35 About what this is. Matthew Farwell has pleaded not guilty. He is presumed innocent. His defense argues that Sandra Birchmore took her own life, and much of the evidence in this case is still under seal. We have not seen it, and neither has the jury that will eventually weigh it. He is entitled to that trial in October, and he's entitled to make his case. That's how this is supposed to work. And I'm not going to pretend a detention ruling is a verdict, but here's what I can say without touching the question of guilt. A twelve year old walked into a program her community swore was safe. Somewhere in the years that followed. By the state's account, the adults around her failed her so completely that she spent her teens in her twenties being used, and then she died alone in her own home at twenty three. Whatever a jury decides about who did it, that failure is already true. Somebody had to be watching and the system put the wrong person in the room. Someone has to say her name and keep saying it until the trial that's coming actually arrives. Sandra Birchmore that's Daily Crime and Justice for Tuesday, June ninth, twenty twenty six. Brendan Banfield will spend the rest of his life in a Virginia prison, and he can appeal all he wants. It doesn't bring them back. Steen, Banfield, Joseph Ryan say their names. Zachariah Rash's trial continues this week in Wisconsin. He's pleaded not

19:08 guilty and a jury not This show will decide what happened, but Crystal Rash was trying to get back to her children when she disappeared. Crystal Rash and Matthew Farwell will sit in a cell until October, when a jury finally hears the case against him. He gets that trial. He's entitled to it. Sandra Birchmore is entitled to have someone remember she was a child when all of this started. Sandra Birchmore. Three men, three explanations, an intruder, an accident, a suicide, anybody but me. One jury has already seen through the playbook. Two more chances are coming. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, do better. One more thing before we go. Today's story is touched on suicide. If you're struggling or you're worried about someone who is Please reach out to a trusted person or a christ this line in your area. In the US and Canada, you can call or text nine to eight eight. You don't have to carry it alone. If this episode meant something to you, the single best thing you can do is tell one person about it. Word of mouth is how a show like this survives. So share this episode with someone who cares about these cases the way you do. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me what you think about the reorder, about Crystal's case, about whatever's on your mind. I read them. If you're watching on YouTube, hit like and subscribe so these stories keep finding people. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga

20:42 Shark Media. This program is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or verified legal fact. Information is drawn from court records, news outlets, wire services, and AI assisted research. Not all sources agree, and some details may be incomplete, contested, or subject to change as these cases develop. Where uncertainty exists, we flag it. Garrett Fisher is a broadcast host. He is not a lawyer, a detective, or your therapist, though he has opinions on Brendan Banfield. Banfield was convicted on February second, twenty twenty six, and sentenced on Friday, June fifth, twenty twenty six to life in prison without parole, plus consecutive terms for a firearm offense and child endangerment. He maintains his innocence and has indicated he intends to appeal. An appeal does not change the sentence currently in place. His co defendant, Juliana Paris magalais pleaded guilty, demandslaughter, testified for the prosecution, and was sentenced in February to ten years the maximum published accounts differ on the exact ages of Brendan Banfield and of Joseph Ryan. Rather than choose between conflicting figures, we have not stated precise ages on air. On Zachariah Rash, this trial is ongoing as of this recording, with no verdict reached.

22:03 Testimony continued through Monday, June eighth. Zachariah Rash has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocence. Everything attributed to prosecutors or to witnesses is allegation and testimony not proven fact. The defense maintains that Crystal Rash's death was self inflicted, and that mister Rash panicked rather than committed murder. A jury not this program will decide on Matthew Farwell. Mister Farwell is charged, has pleaded not guilty, and is presumed innocent. His trial is scheduled for October, and a conviction would carry a mandatory life sentence. A federal judge has denied his request for pre trial release. Much of the evidence remains under seal. The defense maintains that Sandra Birchmore died by suicide. We have deliberately not described the manner of her death. This segment involved allegations concerning a victim who was a minor when the alleged conduct began, and we limited detail accordingly. We name victims because they deserve to be named. We cover defendants because accountability requires witnesses. We do not convict in advance of verdicts, and we do not pretend that verdicts are always justice. If today's subject matter is weighing on you, support is available in the US and Canada. You can call or text nine eight eight.

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