In this article:
- Netflix’s recent documentary Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee follows two Vice journalists who meet up with the infamous software millionaire John McAfee in Belize as he tries to flee the country to avoid being investigated for the murder of his neighbor.
- Throughout the film, McAfee seems to be in constant fear of being tracked down by government-paid assassins who want to kill him so that he can’t release the sensitive information he ascertained via hacking.
- However, in 2021, McAfee was detained in a Spanish prison and found dead in his cell. The official cause of death was suicide, but could it have been a political murder? To take it even further, is John McAfee still alive and in hiding somewhere?
The name John McAfee has taken on a somewhat mythical quality in modern times. As the story of his departure from the First World and descent into a life of murder, drugs, and guns amidst the palm trees of Belize becomes increasingly popularized, it becomes harder and harder to believe that he’s the same man that was once responsible for creating a pioneering antivirus software.
It becomes even harder to believe that McAfee was a profound programmer after watching the recent Netflix documentary Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee. And wild it was.
This documentary follows two journalists for Vice that go to meet McAfee in the jungles of Belize as he prepares to flee the country (which is, apparently, full of assassins hellbent on killing McAfee) and seek refuge in Guatemala.
In the process, Robert Castoro and Robert King, the two journalists crazy enough to take on this assignment, cross borders illegally, face the impending fate of being locked up in a Guatemalan or Belizean prison, and even nearly get shot by McAfee himself when he comes under the influence of copious amounts of bath salts.
I’d highly suggest streaming this Netflix documentary immediately if you haven’t seen it yet. It is entirely insane.
However, one of the most shocking moments of the entire film comes at the end, after McAfee gets locked up in a Spanish prison awaiting extradition to the U.S. for tax evasion and is found dead, hanging from a noose in his prison cell.
McAfee’s former girlfriend Sam Herrera claimed to have gotten a phone call from McAfee after the time of his alleged death in which he said that he was still alive and in hiding. But how much truth is there to this claim? Is John McAfee still alive and out there somewhere? Will the “McAfee Is Alive” conspiracy theory replace the “Tupac Is Alive” conspiracy theory?
Wanted: Dead or Alive (But Mostly Dead)
To start at the beginning of when John McAfee’s insane alternative lifestyle started making news headlines, in 2012, McAfee’s neighbor Gregory Faull was found dead with a gunshot wound in his head.
As the story goes, Faull couldn’t stand the constant barking of McAfee’s dogs, which annoyed him and scared his pet bird. So, one day, McAfee found that all his dogs had been poisoned, writhing in pain, and so he brought them out to the yard and shot them to put them out of their misery.
Naturally, McAfee blamed Faull for the death of his dogs and, not long after, Faull was found dead in his home.
But, John McAfee tells another version of the story. Despite going on the run after being named a “person of interest” in the murder investigation, McAfee maintained his innocence up until the moment of his death.
In the words of McAfee himself, “I was never charged with murder by Belizean authorities or any other authority. It was a suit based entirely on media reporting.” McAfee was also ordered to pay $25 million to Faull’s estate in a wrongful death suit filed in the U.S. District Court of Florida.
According to McAfee, though, this was all a setup by the Belizean government, who had become aware that McAfee had hacked into their databases and extracted incriminating evidence of high-level government corruption.
Thus, the Belizean government needed to do away with McAfee before he could release this information and besmirch the good name of Belize on an international stage.
Of course, despite the fact that McAfee claimed he had heaps of incriminating files from the Belizean government, none of these files were ever released before McAfee’s death. Regardless, it was for this reason that McAfee often referred to himself as a “political prisoner” and sought refuge in Guatemala, and then refuge in the Dominican, and then refuge in the United States.
While on camera for the Running with the Devil documentary, McAfee often made it seem as if he and his entourage had to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice because he had received intel that some unnamed assassin was en route to put a bullet in his brain.
However, as the documentary went on, it seemed more and more clear that these assassins were in McAfee’s mind, possible side effects of the outrageous cocktails of drugs he was consuming on a daily basis.
At one point in the documentary, though, McAfee (in the middle of a drunken stupor) hints at the fact that he knew the entire narrative he had created of a man on the run from faceless hitmen was a fantasy. “I will fabricate whatever reality I see fit to keep eyeballs on us, Robert,” he said to the videographer.
So, while it may seem as though this entire wild goose chase was a fabrication, there’s still the fact that McAfee would be found dead in a prison cell years later.
While the official cause of his death was suicide, years earlier, McAfee had tweeted: “Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: ‘We’re coming for you McAfee! We’re going to kill yourself’. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn’t. I was whackd. Check my right arm.”
So, the circumstances around McAfee’s death were fishy, to say the least. The fact that he was believed to hold sensitive information and that he died by hanging calls to mind the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Even fishier still, at the end of the documentary, McAfee’s former girlfriend Sam Herrera claims that she received a phone call from John claiming that he was still alive after his alleged death. However, this is to be taken with a grain of salt.
Is John McAfee Still Alive?
The final scene of Running with the Devil certainly implies that Sam Herrera believes that McAfee is still alive; however, in an interview with MarketWatch, Herrera herself claimed that her words were taken out of context.
She said that the phone call she received was from someone who claimed that they were a still-alive John McAfee but that, after asking the caller a series of personal questions about McAfee, it became more and more clear that it was a hoax.
Herrera even went so far as to describe the filmmakers’ actions as “shady and low.”
On top of that, McAfee’s widow Janice McAfee has publicly stated that she believes John to be dead. When asked directly whether she thought John might still be alive, she responded, “Based off of the information that I have and I have received regarding his death, I don’t believe that he is.”
So, despite the fact that all credible information points to the fact that McAfee is indeed dead, conspiracy theories about his whereabouts continue to circulate on the internet. And, in my opinion, that’s not surprising.
McAfee lived a Gonzo-style life of mystery in which fact and fiction were blended into one. He was a real-life superhero or supervillain, depending on who you ask, and his choices and actions eluded the comprehension of all of us normal onlookers.
Is it hard to believe that McAfee faked his own death? Well, I’d argue that it’s equally hard to believe that a tech multi-millionaire was hiding in Central American jungles, brandishing stockpiles of automatic weapons, and consuming lethal doses of bath salts.
When it comes to the life of John McAfee, pretty much anything is believable.