The wildest parts of John McAfee's life were real. A few weren't

In 2012 a reporter from Wired sat with John McAfee in Belize and watched him pick up a gun. McAfee said it held one real bullet. Then he pulled the trigger. Then he pulled it again. And again.

Nothing happened. McAfee later called it a magic trick and said the reporter, Joshua Davis, had been naive to fall for it.

That is the man whose name sits on one of the best-known antivirus brands on Earth. A list of his exploits is going around online again, and it reads like a film script. Most of it is true. A few of the best bits he made up himself.

Who was John McAfee before the chaos?

He was born on 18 September 1945 in Cinderford, England. From 1968 to 1970 he worked as a programmer at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

In 1987 he founded McAfee Associates, one of the first companies to sell antivirus software. It went public in October 1992 and raised over $40 million.

He resigned in 1994, and at his peak he was worth around $100 million. By August 2009 that had fallen to about $4 million.

A year later Intel bought McAfee Inc. for $7.68 billion. By then its founder was living in Belize, behind a compound with armed guards.

What happened in Belize?

In April 2012 police raided his property in Orange Walk. He was not charged. Then things got darker.

On 9 November 2012, four of his 11 dogs were poisoned. McAfee said someone else did it. Two days later his neighbour on Ambergris Caye, a 52-year-old American named Gregory Faull, was shot in the back of the head. Faull had complained about the dogs.

Police wanted to question McAfee. He was never charged with the killing. But years later, in 2018, a Florida court ordered him to pay $25 million to Faull's estate.

Photo: Pgbk1987 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Did McAfee really fake a heart attack?

Yes, and it was the final move in a getaway that started in Belize. Instead of talking to police, he vanished. By his own account he wore disguises and spent about three weeks in hiding with his girlfriend, Samantha.

Her uncle was a former attorney-general of Guatemala. So that is where they went, slipping across the border.

He also blogged that a body double carrying a North Korean passport in his name had been sent to the Mexican border as a decoy. Nobody else has ever confirmed that part.

Guatemala arrested him on 5 December 2012 for entering the country illegally. The next day guards found him on the floor of his cell.

A doctor checked him and found his heart and blood pressure were normal. He went to hospital anyway. He later told ABC News, "Sure I faked it," and tweeted that the stunt bought his lawyers time.

It worked. On 12 December 2012 Guatemala deported him to Miami instead of sending him back to Belize.

Was his wife really sent to kill him?

Sort of. The night after he landed in Miami, McAfee went out in South Beach and met a sex worker named Janice Dyson.

By her own account in the Netflix documentary Running with the Devil, her pimp had introduced her to cartel bosses who wanted McAfee dead. She spied on him for them and was told to poison him.

Instead, she told him everything. They worked it out, and in 2013 she became his wife. There's no evidence she was ever a trained assassin, but the real version is strange enough.

What did McAfee do next?

He got louder. In February 2016 he offered to crack the encrypted iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter. He later called the offer a publicity stunt.

He also ran for president, twice. In 2016 he finished second in the Libertarian primaries and third at the party convention. In 2020 he tried again and failed to win the nomination.

In July 2019 he was arrested in the Dominican Republic on weapons charges, in Puerto Plata, where his yacht was docked.

Then came the taxes. McAfee said he had not filed a tax return since 2010 and called it a protest. US prosecutors had another word for it.

On 5 October 2020 an indictment was unsealed charging him with tax evasion on more than $4.2 million of income from 2014 to 2018. Prosecutors said he hid property, a vehicle and a yacht under other people's names. He faced up to 30 years. Hiding money is an old trick, though few went as far as the CIA officer who kept 298 gold bars at home.

That same day he was arrested at Barcelona's El Prat airport. The next day the SEC filed a complaint involving $23 million in digital assets, and in March 2021 he was charged with crypto fraud.

How did John McAfee die?

On 23 June 2021, Spain's National Court approved his extradition to the United States. Hours later McAfee, aged 75, was found dead in his cell at Brians 2 prison near Barcelona.

The autopsy confirmed suicide by hanging. His family appealed. On 29 September 2023 a Barcelona court closed the case for good, finding no suspicious element of a criminal act.

Photo: Jordiferrer / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

McAfee had tried hard to predict it. On 30 November 2019 he tweeted, "If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm." The arm carried a tattoo reading $WHACKD, which was also the name of a crypto token he was promoting at the time.

On 15 October 2020, ten days after his arrest, he tweeted that "if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine."

His body stayed in a Barcelona morgue for two and a half years, until 14 December 2023. Janice still disputes the suicide ruling. In November 2023 she said he left no will and no estate.

Which parts of the McAfee legend are made up?

Most of the wild stuff is real. A handful of the favourite claims are not.

• He was behind the Snowden leaks? No evidence. It traces back to a 2013 video of his own titled "I'm Behind Edward Snowden".
• He bugged Hillary Clinton's staff with free laptops? In January 2013 he blogged that he handed 75 cheap laptops loaded with keyloggers to officials and police in Belize. There was no Clinton link, and even the Belize version was never confirmed.
• He blackmailed the government into letting him skip taxes? There was no blackmail. There was an indictment.
• A body double crossed the border with his passport? The only source is McAfee's own blog.
• He's still alive? Samantha Herrera says a caller told her weeks after his death that he faked it and lives in Texas. Nothing has ever backed it up.

The truth was already wild enough. He just couldn't resist making it wilder.