Antivirus pioneer John McAfee dies behind bars in suspected suicide

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John McAfee, the pioneer creator of popular computer antivirus software, has died in an apparent suicide at a Spanish prison, on the day that a court approved his extradition to the U.S. on tax evasion charges. 

McAfee, 75, was found dead on Wednesday afternoon in his cell in Brians 2 Prison in Barcelona, with officials saying that the early investigation points to a suicide, the Catalan justice department said.

It came just hours after a Spanish court approved McAfee’s extradition to the United States, where he is wanted on tax-related criminal charges that carry a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

McAfee still had opportunities to appeal his conviction but could not stand more time in jail, his lawyer Javier Villalba told Reuters. 

‘This is the result of a cruel system that had no reason to keep this man in jail for so long,’ Villalba said. 

Villalba said that McAfee had committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell. 

McAfee had been held in Spanish prison since his arrest in October, when the U.S. Justice Department announced charges that McAfee and his supporters insisted were politically motivated.  

His death follows a wild, controversial life filled with legal issues and foreign adventures, including allegations that McAfee murdered his American neighbor in Belize, a claim that was never proven in criminal court. 

Soon after his arrest last year, McAfee’s Twitter account posted a dark hint suggesting that if he died in an alleged suicide, a conspiracy would be to blame.

‘I am content in here. I have friends. The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine,’ he tweeted referring to persistent theories that sex predator Jeffrey Epstein did not take his own life, as authorities ruled. 

In one of his final tweets, presumably dictated to his wife from behind bars and posted on June 16, McAfee denied having any hidden assets, claiming the fortune he made in an alleged cryptocurrency scam had ‘evaporated.’

‘I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing,’ the tweet stated.  

McAfee had praised conditions at the prison where he was being held in Spain, though his Twitter account sometimes complained about the food.

‘Life in Spanish prisons is like the Hilton compared to the abject surrealism and dehumanization of American prisons. Here I am treated as a human being instead of a number,’ McAfee said in a letter written to his wife, according to El Diario.

For years, McAfee had been living in self-imposed exile, fleeing what he claimed was a vast web of corruption and conspiracy in the U.S. 

In January 2019, McAfee fled his heavily fortified Tennessee compound with wife Janice, 38, claiming a grand jury was preparing to indict him on tax-related charges and taking to the high seas to escape.

Touring the Caribbean on his ‘Freedom Boat’ also allowed McAfee to avoid a $25million judgement in a wrongful death lawsuit over the 2012 murder of his neighbor in Belize, Gregory Viant Faull. 

McAfee was never criminally charged with the murder and he always strenuously denied it. He continued to trot the globe until his arrest in Spain last fall. 

McAfee claimed to be trapped in Cuba by nefarious forces in June 2019, and that July he was briefly detained in the Dominican Republic after officials accused him of loading his yacht with high-caliber weapons. 

Last year, Tennessee prosecutors charged McAfee with evading taxes after failing to report income made from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consultancy work, as well as income from speaking engagements and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary.

The charges referred to the three fiscal years from 2016 to 2018, according to the Spanish court’s ruling on Wednesday. 

The entrepreneur was arrested last October at Barcelona’s international airport. A judge ordered at that time that McAfee should be held in jail while awaiting the outcome of a hearing on extradition.

McAfee’s wife Janice said in a statement on Sunday that he had been targeted by prosecutors ‘for speaking out against the corruption within their government agencies.’

‘These eight months John has spent in prison in Spain have been especially hard on his overall health both mentally and physically, as well as financially, but he is undeterred from continuing to speak truth to power,’ she added. 

In a hearing held via videolink earlier this month, McAfee also argued that the charges against him were politically motivated and said he would spend the rest of his life in prison if he was returned to the U.S. 

McAfee linked the charges filed by the Internal Revenue Service to his failed bid to run as a Libertarian Party candidate in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a second such attempt. 

‘In late 2018, I announced I would run again and I also announced I would target the IRS and its corruption and two months later the IRS filed charged against me,’ he told the Spanish High Court during the first hearing of his extradition trial.

‘I believe the charges are politically motivated.’ 

McAfee added that that given his age, almost 76, he would spend the rest of his life in jail if he were to be convicted in the United States.

‘I am hoping that the Spanish court will see the injustice of this,’ he said, adding ‘the United States wants to use me as an example.’

In Washington, the IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Spanish prosecutor, Carlos Bautista, dismissed the claim of political motivations, insisting the Libertarian Party rarely gains more than 1 percent of votes in U.S. elections.

‘He is a tax rebel, nothing else. A millionaire who doesn’t want to pay taxes,’ Bautista said. ‘He will benefit from all guarantees of due process.’

Silicon Valley’s eccentric outlaw: How John McAfee overcame his own father’s suicide to pioneer anti-virus tech before spending his millions on a rock star lifestyle with drugs and women before paranoid conspiracy theories led him to Spanish jail

John McAfee, the eccentric 75-year-old antivirus software pioneer who killed himself in a Barcelona jail cell on Wednesday within hours of learning he’d be extradited to the US, lived a colorful life of womanizing, government conspiracies and running from the law.  

McAfee started McAfee Associates in 1989. He sold it to Intel in 2010 for $7.7billion. 

Born in the UK on a US army base, McAfee hated the US government and said in the past that he felt as British as he did American, despite growing up in America. 

When he was 15, his alcohol father shot himself. McAfee said in a 2012 interview with Wired that it he woke up ‘every day’ with his father. 

“Every day I wake up with him. Every relationship I have, he’s by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust. So my life is f****d.’ 

He studied at Roanoke College in Virginia, where he took up drinking, then briefly attended Northeast Louisiana State College before being kicked out in 1968 for sleeping with one of his undergraduate students when he was a PhD. 

His first job in computers was at the Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis. They were trying to use an IBM computer to schedule trains in 1969. McAfee made a system that produced optimized train routes. 

As his career in computers blossomed, his drug and alcohol addiction exploded. It was usual for McAfee to do acid before a shift at work and to snort lines of cocaine off his desk while drinking a bottle of whiskey in a day.

His first wife – the student he married while he was a PhD student – left him in the 1980s because his addictions were spiraling out of control. 

In 1983, alone in his home with no possessions because he’d sold them to buy drugs, he said he contemplated suicide. Instead, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and was sober from then until his death. 

In 1986, he started McAfee Associates out of the home he lived in in Santa Clara, California, after reading about how a computer virus from Pakistan was infecting American computers.

He launched an anti-virus software and advertised it on messaging boards, making it available to people for free. 

Within five years of launching, major companies across America were using it. Then, they started paying a licensing fee for it in 1990. McAfee started earning $5million a year. 

He publicized his business by making Americans fear cyber security attacks or viruses from overseas, drawing on his own paranoia to make them paranoid too and invest in software. 

It was a controversial way of doing business, but one he defended. 

In 1990 for example, he claimed there was a Michaelangelo virus that would damage 5million Americans. Less than 100,000 were impacted but McAfee’s sales soared.  

The strategy proved lucrative for him- in 1992, McAfee Associates went public on NASDAQ at $80million. 

McAfee married his second wife, Judy, and the pair set up in Silicon Valley. He opened a Colorado yoga studio in 2000 and for many years, lived a life that was relatively free of scandal.

But later in his life, the paranoia started to apply to Americans, specifically the government, who McAfee was convinced were out to get him and he became jaded with his life. 

By 2009, after suffering financially in the Great Recession and growing tired of his wealth, he had sold most of his possessions and was divorced for the second time. 

One thing he wanted to hold on to was an expansive property in Belize that he purchased in 2008. He moved there in April that year. 

Over the next several years, McAfee cut ties with what he called ‘polite society’ to live in Belize and mingle with the locals. He frequented a bar called Lover’s, which was also a brothel, where he said he belonged. 

Though he had a girlfriend – Jennifer Irwin – the owner of Lover’s procured a 16-year-old girl for him in around 2010. 

Within a month of meeting her, the pair were sleeping together and McAfee was building her a bungalow on his property. 

The girl, Amy Emshwiller, was also interviewed by Wired in 2012. She said she wanted to rob McAfee, who she thought was a dumb millionaire. 

By 2013, McAfee had a harem of seven women living with him on the property. DailyMail.com exclusively revealed photographs of the harem, where he appears shirtless, hugging them, clutching a spear. McAfee met his second wife Janice Dyson, a prostitute, in 2012. The pair remained married until his death. 

While decidedly unquiet, McAfee didn’t have legal problems until 2012, when he was named as a person of interest in the murder of his neighbor in Belize, Gregory Faull. 

Faull was found dead in his home, which was next door to McAfee’s compound, with a single gunshot wound in his head. Prosecutors in Belize suggested McAfee might have been involved because he had long argued with his neighbors about the guard dogs on his property. 

To avoid detection, he sent out a ‘double’, he claimed, to act as a decoy.

The double was arrested but he was able to make it out of the country, fleeing Belize for Guatemala. He was then arrested and extradited to the US – at the request of the Belize authorities. 

He flew to Miami, which is where he met Dyson in a bar and where he hired her for the night. 

Charges relating to Faull’s death never came but he was sued by Faull’s family in a wrongful death suit. In 2015 , he was charged with driving under the influence in Tennessee, but his major legal troubles in the US didn’t start until 2019. 

That is when he announced he had fled America because he and other members of his failed 2020 campaign to become president, had been charged with tax evasion in a federal indictment. 

McAfee made no effort to hide that he didn’t pay US tax. He said repeatedly that he didn’t believe in the system. 

McAfee and Janice took to the seas aboard his ‘Freedom Boat’ and cruised the Caribbean as McAfee issued a series of bizarre pronouncement and threats to expose ‘corrupt’ US officials he claimed were unjustly pursuing him. 

He was cryptic about where he was but always spoke with the media and communicated with fans on Twitter. 

In one incident, McAfee revealed that one of his teleconference-enabled ‘body doubles’, Jay Pizzle, had disappeared while in route to deliver a keynote speech for him in Barcelona

‘No-one’s heard from him. I’m not a conspiricy [sic] theorist, but I don’t believe in co-incidence. I have no clue. But would the U.S. go that far to silence me?’ McAfee said.

‘We spoke with Jay the night before he was supposed to leave. All was fine and he was excited to go on the cruise,’ tweeted McAfee in an update

‘His flight was to leave the following morning. We know only that he did not show up for his flight and he was not seen at the airport,’ said McAfee.

McAfee responded with wide-ranging threats to release information he said would expose corruption at the highest levels of the CIA, as well as other U.S. authorities.

‘If I’m arrested or disappear, 31+ terrabytes of incriminating data will be released to the press,’ McAfee said in one recent tweet.

McAfee also issued a video statement vowing to release a web page detailing corruption within the U.S. government.

‘There is corruption that goes far deeper, however, and that is the corruption of those who reach for more power, in order to be more corrupt,’ he said.

In July 2019, he tweeted that he’d been captured on his boat in the Dominican Republic. He and five others were suspected of traveling on a yacht carrying high-caliber weapons, ammunition and military-style gear, officials on the Caribbean island said at the time. He was later released.

In 2020, he popped up in Norway, claiming to have been arrested for wearing a thong as a COVID-19 mask.   

In October 2020, he was arrested in Spain and was finally taken into custody. He was still in jail when prosecutors in the US charged him with a pump and dump cryptocurrency scheme in April 2021. 

The Justice Department claimed that he would knowingly inflate the price of a cryptocurrency by tweeting about it, with the sole intention of selling it at a peak once people were interested in it. 

There were several examples of currencies that surged in value after McAfee tweeted about them then plummeted which backed up the Justice Departments’ claims. 

He denied wrongdoing, saying he’d only ever tried to help followers, and insisting that the US government was corrupt. He was able to communicate his innocence on Twitter from Spanish jail, and through spokespersons. 

McAfee tweeted in 2020 that he had ’47 children’ and dozens more grandchildren but that he’d never met any of them. He called the kids ‘lazy’. None of his children have been identified publicly. 

His widow, former prostitute Janice Dyson, tweeted a long statement on Fathers Day on Sunday claiming John was being vilified by the American media and the authorities.  

‘The US authorities are determined to have John die in prison to make an example of him for speaking out against the corruption in their government agencies. There is no hope of him ever having a fair trial in America because there is no longer any justice in America. You either play ball or get f***d.

‘Happy Fathers’ Day John Davod. Father of many, loved by few.’ It’s unclear where she is.