How police arrested a suspect in the 1990 ‘Lovers’ Lane’ cold case murders in Houston
Floyd William Parrott, 64, was arrested in connection with the 1990 murders of Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson, the Houston police said. (Houston Police Department)
(HOUSTON, Texas) — A man who had a history of impersonating law enforcement has been arrested in a 1990 cold case double murder known as the “Lovers’ Lane” killings, authorities said.
Floyd William Parrott, 64, is charged with capital murder for the killings of Cheryl Henry, 22, and Garland “Andy” Atkinson, 21, Houston police said.
The victims’ car was found parked in a cul-de-sac on Aug. 23, 1990, police said. Henry and Atkinson, who had been dating for a few weeks, were found near the car, according to court documents. Both of their necks were cut with knives and they were tied up with rope, documents said, and Henry was raped.
At least 100 people were looked at as potential suspects over the decades, but Parrott was not one of them, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said at a news conference on Friday.
In late 2025, a Houston police sergeant was looking into a tip that named Parrott, and the sergeant found a Houston police report from 1996 in which Parrott was named as the suspect in a sex assault, court documents said. Parrott claimed the sex was consensual, documents said, and a grand jury declined to indict, Teare said.
The DNA from the 1996 case was “recently placed” into CODIS, the national law enforcement DNA database, documents said, and that DNA was found to be a match to swabs from Cheryl Henry’s sexual assault exam at her autopsy.
“A June 1990 sexual assault case also had a case-to-case hit,” court documents said.
Teare said Parrott impersonated law enforcement in the late 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s.
In May 1988, Parrott was arrested for impersonating a police officer, court documents said. He was again arrested for impersonating a police officer in May 1990, and he was out on bond when the June 1990 sex assault and the August 1990 murders occurred, court documents said.
Parrott lived in the Houston area for most of his life and left a few years ago, Teare said. He was arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Wednesday and is awaiting extradition to the Harris County, police said. Investigators interviewed Parrott on Wednesday and he denied knowing Cheryl Henry, according to court documents.
“Cheryl was my best friend. We did everything together,” Henry’s younger sister Shane Henry, said at the news conference.
“Hearing that the person responsible has finally been caught does not bring her back,” she said, “… but it does bring a sense of relief knowing that justice is moving forward.”
Teare said the DA’s office believes Parrott committed “numerous different types of crimes.”
“If you recognize this individual and he pulled you over … call us,” he said.
“If you met him once, if you met him at a club, if you knew him at all, reach out,” he said.
Teare said the DA’s office can be reached at 713-274-5640.
Khelin Marcano, Stiven Prieto and their one-year-old daughter Amalia were released from immigration detention this month. (ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — As Khelin Marcano was preparing for her routine scheduled appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December, she debated packing a bag full of her 1-year-old daughter’s clothes. While she and her husband had been attending appointments without issue, she knew others were being detained at government buildings by immigration authorities.
“When they told us we were being detained, it felt like we already knew, all along,” Marcano told ABC News.
The family, including 1-year-old Amalia, was quickly sent from El Paso to Texas’ Dilley immigration detention center, where they were detained for 60 days — joining hundreds of other families that the government has held for durations that advocates say exceed the limits established by federal court rulings.
Those restrictions stem from the Flores Settlement, a 1997 legal agreement that a federal court has interpreted to mean that the government generally should not hold children in immigration custody for more than 20 days.
As of last month, there were about 1,400 people being held at Dilley, including children and parents, according to RAICES, a legal immigrant advocacy group. The facility was closed during the Biden administration and was re-opened last year as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown ramped up.
The 60 days that Marcano, her husband Stiven Prieto, and their daughter were held there is three times the general legal limit permitted by the settlement.
“The Trump administration is holding children and families in detention for prolonged periods of time, weeks, months,” Elora Mukherjee, the family’s lawyer, told ABC News. “Children and families at the Dilley facility don’t have access to sufficient clean drinking water, where they don’t have access to sufficient nutritious food, [and] don’t have access to adequate medical care.
‘Why does this happen to us?’ The family entered the U.S. using the Biden-era Customs and Border Protection app in 2024, according to court documents. They were processed and granted parole to live in the country while applying for asylum. The family was released last week after their 60-day detention and their first court date is scheduled for 2027, according to their attorney.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the family “was released into the country under the Biden administration,” and confirmed their detention.
“For years, the Flores consent decree has been a tool of the left to promote an open borders agenda,” the DHS spokesperson said. “It is long overdue for a single district in California to stop managing the Executive Branch’s immigration functions. The Trump administration is committed to restoring common sense to our immigration system.”
Early on during their detention, the family says 1-year-old Amalia developed a persistent fever. Marcano told ABC News that despite her repeated pleas for medication, the medical staff dismissed the symptoms.
“The doctor told me that fever was a good sign because it meant she was actively fighting a virus,” Marcano said in Spanish. “I got really upset … and told her that whatever the case was, a fever is not a good thing. If she didn’t know that fever could kill people, or that fever could cause convulsions, fever would never be good.”
In a habeas petition Marcano filed against the government, she and her attorney claimed the Dilley facility lacked basic hygiene and nutrition, and that they saw bugs in the food. They alleged that the tap water smelled so strongly of chlorine that the family spent their limited funds on bottled water for their daughter.
Marcano told ABC News that at one point during their detention, Amalia seemed to lose her strength and collapsed in her arms.
“I grabbed her and I dressed her and I took her back to the clinic, and I began to argue with the doctors, asking who would be responsible for my daughter if something happened to her,” Marcano said.
Marcano said it was only then that staff at Dilley transported her and Amalia by ambulance to a regional hospital, and later to a larger hospital in San Antonio. The 1-year-old was diagnosed with COVID-19 and a respiratory virus. according to the family and their habeas petition.
According to Marcano’s complaint, hospital staff provided her with a nebulizer and Albuterol to treat Amalia’s respiratory distress — but when they returned to the Dilley facility, the staff immediately confiscated both the nebulizer and the medication.
“They took her treatment away,” Marcano said. “Why does this happen to us if we have done everything right? I was begging the officers to please help me get out of there, and no one listened to me.”
The family was released together shortly after they filed a habeas petition. Marcano told ABC News that, while inside the facility, she met families with pregnant women and saw children as young as 2 months old.
Long-term effects Several immigrant advocates and attorneys told ABC News that the Trump administration is keeping children and families who are seeking asylum and other forms of legal relief in prolonged detention.
In Minneapolis, where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was detained along with his father on their way home from school last month, local school officials told ABC News that immigration authorities had detained four other students from the district. One of them, 11-year-old Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano, was detained along with her mother for more than one month, according to the family’s attorney, Bobby Painter.
“They were pulled over by ICE and pulled out of their car, thrown on an airplane and sent to Dilley, all in the span of maybe 24 hours,” the attorney said.
Some families have been held for months, attorneys told ABC News.
“The effects of detention are long-term on children,” Mukherjee, Marcano’s attorney, told ABC News. “Children who are with their parents and who are safe with their parents should never be detained when it’s not in a child’s best interest.”
The DHS, in a statement, said “being in detention is a choice.”
“We encourage all parents to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App,” the spokesperson said. “The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now.”
Since being released, Marcano said her daughter hardly cries at night anymore like she did when they were at the detention center.
“We’re feeling very good and thank god for his blessings,” she told ABC News. “We’re still a little on edge about what we were planning to do given everything ahead. So we’re left here thinking about what is going to happen to us and that gives us a bit of fear.”
“Are they going to leave us alone?” Marcano said. “That’s what we hope, but we don’t know.”
Brendan Banfield testifies in his own defense on Jan. 28, 2026, during his double murder trial in Fairfax County, Virginia. (Pool/ABC News)
(FAIRFAX, Va.) — A jury has reached a verdict in the double murder trial of a Virginia man accused of killing his wife and a stranger lured to their home under false pretenses in an elaborate plot to get rid of his spouse so he could be with his au pair, with whom he was having an affair.
Brendan Banfield, 40, is accused of stabbing his wife to death in their home in Fairfax County and fatally shooting a man he allegedly “catfished” on a fetish website. Prosecutors said he pretended to be his wife to lure the man to their home for what was believed to be a consensual fake rape scenario in order to frame that stranger for his wife’s murder.
The jury deliberated nearly nine hours over two days, starting Friday, before reaching a verdict Monday afternoon. The verdict is expected to be read in court at 5 p.m. ET Monday.
The former IRS agent was charged with aggravated murder in 2024 following a monthslong investigation into the deaths of his wife, 37-year-old nurse Christine Banfield, and the man, 39-year-old Joseph Ryan.
Prosecutors accused Brendan Banfield of plotting the murders with the family’s au pair, 25-year-old Juliana Peres Magalhaes, who was initially charged with second-degree murder in connection with the deaths.
Ahead of the trial, Peres Magalhaes pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Under the plea agreement with prosecutors, she will receive time served for testifying against Brendan Banfield.
During closing arguments on Friday, the prosecutor made the case that the murders were premeditated.
“He was in love with Juliana. He can pretend that this was a fling and affair — he’d had them before, no big deal. He was in love with Juliana,” prosecutor Jenna Sands said. “He was afraid of losing her. He needed to get rid of his wife so that they could be together, so that they could marry, so that they could have those babies that he was picking out names for.”
Sands said there was no evidence that Christine Banfield had previously used dating or fetish websites, argued that there were signs that the crime scene had been “manipulated,” and reminded jurors that during the au pair’s testimony, Peres Magalhaes “told us how the plan was crafted and how it played out.”
The defense, meanwhile, pushed back on the catfishing theory, questioned the thoroughness of the investigation and argued that there were conclusions made based on confirmation bias. The attorney, John Carroll, claimed that prosecutors pressured Peres Magalhaes to change her story and that she “secured herself a deal that benefited her.” Carroll also said Brendan Banfield didn’t have to testify, but he did as they sought “to get the truth out there.”
“Is it reasonable, after a six- to eight-week affair, that someone is going to try to get rid of their companion of 19 years, wife of 12 years? Is that reasonable?” Carroll asked the jury. “You heard from my client: He thinks it’s absurd.”
During his testimony, Brendan Banfield called the allegations “absolutely crazy” and said his affair with Peres Magalhaes was just that and nothing more.
He said he came home on Feb. 24, 2023, after the au pair called to alert him about a stranger in the home. He said he went up to his bedroom with his gun drawn and found his wife naked with Ryan and that she called out, “Brendan, he has a knife!”
“I was extremely terrified,” Brendan Banfield told the jury. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more panicked in my life.”
He said he fired his government-issued firearm, striking Ryan in the head, after the man appeared to stab his wife.
Prosecutors said Christine Banfield was stabbed seven times in the neck.
Peres Magalhaes testified that Brendan Banfield expressed his desire to “get rid of” his wife in October 2022, saying, “At first, I thought he was joking.”
She testified that she had helped Brendan Banfield catfish Ryan on the fetish website to lure Ryan to the home.
Peres Magalhaes told the court that Brendan Banfield told her he wanted to marry her and have children with her, and that he didn’t want to divorce his wife because “she would have more money than he would” and because he wanted custody of the couple’s daughter.
Brendan Banfield was additionally charged with using a firearm while committing or attempting to commit murder and child endangerment. The couple’s then-4-year-old daughter was in the house at the time of the killings, in the basement.
“He left her in the basement, knowing that Joe Ryan was upstairs,” Sands said during her closing argument. “He left her in the basement while he shot and killed Joe Ryan. He left her in the basement while he stabbed his wife.”
Stock photo of a child filling a glass of tap water. (Cavan Images/STOCK PHOTO/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Turning on the tap for a glass of water or to wash produce may become significantly less predictable because of climate change.
According to a study published in Communications Earth & Environment, climate change is making access to drinkable water more difficult in the United States.
Hazards intensified by climate change, like drought and flooding, threaten both the quantity and quality of drinking water across the U.S., according to the study.
As a result, water utilities serving 67 million customers across the U.S. are at high risk from climate hazards, roughly a fifth of the entire U.S. population.
Looking at 1,500 municipal water utilities across the country, researchers found that water utilities in every U.S. region are vulnerable to climate hazards. While drought impacts water utilities in the Western states more directly, saltwater from coastal flooding worsens groundwater quality, and extreme cold can wear on pipes. Additionally, water utilities in the upper Midwest and Northeast are particularly vulnerable to climate hazards due to older infrastructure.
“Much of our infrastructure was built many decades ago,” Costa Samaras, professor of civil environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of the study, told ABC News. “It was built not for the climate that we’re experiencing now.”
Given the age of existing infrastructure and lack of adaptive capacities, water utilities are less likely to quickly recover from increasingly common climate hazards. According to the study, water utilities are already experiencing higher operating expenses and more revenue lost from hazards.
The study found that some of the largest water utilities in the country are also some of the most vulnerable to climate hazards. In Texas, where the most vulnerable utilities serve a growing number of customers, more investments in water utility infrastructure are key to keeping up with the increasing population.
To make matters worse, most drinking water utilities in the U.S. are not financially planning for future climate risks. As water utility companies try to keep their costs down, short-term emergency fixes are prioritized in order to resume service while investments to prevent more extreme future hazards get put on the back burner.
“When you’re not thinking strategically about asset management and long-term planning, it’s really easy to become stuck in a negative financial loop,” said Zia Lyle, postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the study. Intensifying climate risks create larger financial burdens on utility companies to maintain service, limiting investments in future resilient infrastructure.
In addition to poor asset management, the study found that bond disclosures for the municipal water utilities do not typically include information on climate risks.
“The lack of disclosure here indicates a real systematic lack of climate risk assessments,” said Lyle. “When we interviewed drinking water utility managers, some of them were just unaware of how this range of hazards can affect all the different aspects of their system.”
Though it is becoming more common, only 30% of utilities discussed climate change in their bond statements in 2024. Without disclosure, those buying municipal bonds are left unaware of the risks their drinking water utilities face. In six states alone — Michigan, Illinois, California, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Texas — bond debt is currently around $500 million. Paired with decreased funding from the federal government, the lack of assessment and disclosure only increases the financial strain on drinking water utilities.
As climate hazards intensify, the financial risk combined with climate risks puts millions of customers and water utilities in a vulnerable position.
Some states are addressing the risks their drinking water utilities face. In Colorado, Denver Water is currently assessing the risks drought poses to their utilities so that they can plan appropriately and ensure water for their customers in the future.
Between appropriate risk assessment and increased investment from the state and federal governments, ensuring future access to drinking water is still possible.
“Now is the time for systems to invest,” said Dr. Zyle. “Overall, capital is more affordable now, and they can make these investments before it becomes too expensive.”
