An abusive childhood, father’s suicide, addiction to alcohol and drugs, allegations of relationships with underage girls, a multibillion-dollar anti-virus software, a runaway from justice, a twisted tech-hero who ended up dead in a jail — John McAfee’s life is the story of a mighty fall rivaling Hollywood movies.

Creator of the famous McAfee antivirus software, 75-year-old McAfee allegedly killed himself in his Spanish prison cell on June 23.

Here is a look at his dramatic life.

Born in Cinderford, UK, John was a British-American computer programmer, a businessman, and a two-time presidential candidate in the US. While people were trying to protect themselves from the ‘evils of the world’, McAfee came up with a brilliant idea of making anti-virus software.

After working for some big companies such as NASA, General Electric, Siemens, Univac, and Xerox, McAfee landed a job with one of the biggest US defense contractors, Lockheed Martin.

There, while working on a classified voice-recognition program, he came across the idea of a virus and was stunned and fascinated by this new thing. McAfee built software to disinfect computers and made an empire around the idea which gave him wealth and stability. The tech legend, however, wanted more.

A man known for his impulsive nature, McAfee quit the company in 1994, a little after taking it public, and decided to follow his other passions, which led him to a road filled with controversies.

Reportedly, McAfee suffered a huge loss of wealth in 2007 and that led to him dabbling in several other areas such as herbal antibiotics, instant messaging platforms, secure network devices, politics, and bitcoin.

However, the tech giant who is lauded as a ‘guru’ in the industry soon became a runaway.

In 2008, McAfee left his billionaire life and moved to Belize in Central America, where he decided to cure some other infection.

“I came across a concept called quorum sensing, which is the technique that bacteria use to communicate with each other,” he once said. “Up until about 10 years ago, we didn’t even know that bacteria did communicate, but we find out they have a very sophisticated communication system. I wanted to explore and investigate that to see if we could come up with new antibiotics”.

However, his venture did not work well as he had regular problems with his lead microbiologist and the local authorities, which also led to several raids and he started making the headlines for a ‘barbaric assault’, but what stood out at that moment was his affair with a 16-year-old ex-prostitute.

The media started focusing on his twisted love relationship with the girl who once put a knife to his throat to scare him and once tried to kill him by putting a bullet in his head, but missed. McAfee, already known for his past encounters with drugs and alcohol, now became infamous for having various affairs.

A little later, Gregory Faull, a sports bar owner shifted next to McAfee and detested the tech giant’s lifestyle. The two were a textbook case of neighbors not getting along, and soon Faull was found dead in his house pool and McAfee decided to flee rather than co-operate in the police investigation.

Fearing he would be “silenced”, McAfee became a runaway but continued regularly appearing on the internet in the form of social media posts and blogs, to make sure the ‘corrupt’ authorities couldn’t make him disappear if he got caught. The man, known to protect computers, disguised himself for years to protect himself from getting caught and was soon classified as a “person of interest” in Belize in the case of Faull’s death.

The only constant in his life, at this point, was his twisted love relationships with minors. However, that changed too. John met Janice Dyson in 2012 when she was reportedly hired as a prostitute by the tech giant and got married in 2013. Dyson, however, in an interview, claimed she was hired to pass on information about McAfee to a ‘criminal underworld during the first few years of their marriage.

After a brief arrest, he quickly went low-key, obsessed with cryptocurrency and that led him to several controversies and trouble with the government.

This also birthed an interest in politics in him, and he sought the Libertarian Party nomination for the President of the US twice, in 2016 and 2020, but failed at that too.

By now, McAfee’s name became synonymous with trouble and he became a target for the US authorities for tax evasion in 2019.

After running away from the authorities for a bit, he was eventually caught in Spain in 2020. After spending the majority of the coronavirus lockdown year in Spain’s Centre Penitenciari Brians 2, the court ordered his extradition to the US.

However, he could not travel to the US. After ending a call with his wife with the words, ‘I love you and I will call you in the evening’, McAfee, reportedly, took his own life in the prison cell.

His wife, Janice McAfee, blames “the US authorities for this tragedy. Because of these politically motivated charges against him, my husband is now dead.”

McAfee is dead but his story is far from over. He had once said that if he dies in prison-like the disgraced American financier Jeffrey Epstein, ‘I didn’t do it. His widow has claimed that McAfee is not a suicidal person and that US authorities wanted him ‘dead in prison to make an example out of him.’

Only time will tell what really happened in that prison.

Source: source