Forget ‘Tiger King’: Software Billionaire John McAfee Lived the World’s Wildest Life

1. He could still be alive.

In his last years, McAfee often took very young women as lovers — some of whom were prostitutes or otherwise led very tough lives. In Belize his girlfriend was 18-year-old Samantha Herrera, and he took her with him when he fled Belize for Guatemala in 2012 after the killing of his neighbor Gregory Faull. When McAfee was deported to the U.S. in 2013, he left Herrera back in Belize. He landed in Miami and the very next day hired a prostitute, Janice Dyson, whom he would later marry. Dyson was still his wife at the time of his death. But it’s Herrera we see at the end of the film, telling director Charlie Russell that she got a mysterious call several weeks after McAfee’s death. She said it was John and he told her he paid people off to fake his death and is now living in Texas. Is it true? Herrera comes off as more convincing than you might think, and Russell says he doesn’t know.

2. He might have secretly killed his own father.

Alex Cody Foster, a ghostwriter McAfee hired to write his autobiography, plays some tapes of interviews he did with McAfee and doesn’t even realize their significance until the cameras are rolling. Foster says that McAfee told him his childhood was miserable: He watched his drunken father violently beat his mother and endured his violence personally as well. One day, when John was 15, his father shot himself dead. Or did he? We hear McAfee’s voice on the tape: “I want to change the world. I want my children and grandchildren and your children to have a better world than us where we have some love,” he says. “And there’s a certain humanity — this world I’ve lived in, growing up with a father who broke my arms and abused me to the point where it was unbearable, abused my mother … to the point where I did something about it.” Foster, looking shell-shocked, addresses the camera: “Whoa. I never remembered that. I didn’t know he said that. ... I feel like that was an admission right there.”

3. He could have been a contender (for an Oscar).

Had the early coding gig not worked out, McAfee might have given Marlon Brando some competition in the acting department. When he went on the lam to Guatemala from Belize, McAfee was arrested for entering the country illegally and was in some serious hot water. But as always, he had a scheme up his sleeve. While the federales swarmed his hotel in Guatemala City, McAfee alternately smoked cigarettes, played the flute and kibitzed with his girlfriend’s uncle, a highly connected attorney. Oh, and he also chose that moment to propose to Herrera. But then we see McAfee being whisked off in an Interpol van, and the next thing you know he’s on a gurney being taken to the hospital because he’s had a heart attack. Only he hasn’t really had one. He faked it, with great success. Guatemalan officials washed their hands of him and put him on a plane to Miami. He said later that he had “played the crazy card”: “It was a deception, but who did it hurt? I look pretty healthy, don't I?” He added: “Everyone was looking for me, and they did not catch me. I escaped, was captured and they tried to send me back. Now I’m sitting in Miami. There had to be some ineptness. What’s a better story: Millionaire madman on the run.”

4. He admits to having wanted to kill his family during three “lost months” of drug use in the 1970s.

In the 1970s, while married to his first wife, Lindsay, the mother of a daughter with whom McAfee was photographed when she was young but whose identity he always kept secret, McAfee began doing heavy drugs and drinking. His wife finally left him and took their daughter to his mother’s home in Virginia. According to No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes, a collaboration with Scottish writer Mark Eglinton, McAfee overdosed on DMT, the powerful hallucinogenic and so-called spirit molecule, and lost contact with reality for three months.  “I was going to kill my mother, my wife, and my baby daughter because God had told me to,” he told Eglinton. “It’s important that you don’t judge me here, my friend. In my mind, this was the only thing I could do.”

Janice Dyson

Joan Mateu/AP Photo

5. His widow is almost as much of a character as McAfee himself.

Janice Dyson was 34, older than most of McAfee’s women, when he spotted her outside a cafe in Miami and paid her for a day and night of sex work. Dyson had worked as a prostitute for more than 10 years; before McAfee, her most steady relationship was with her violent pimp, and she rarely saw her son. She was refreshingly honest when asked if it was love at first sight with McAfee.  “F--- no. … I just saw an opportunity,” she says. Dyson says in the documentary that when her pimp found out who McAfee was, he introduced her to cartel bosses who wanted to kill him — and she acted as a paid spy for them for a while at her pimp’s behest. She said she continued spying on him after their 2013 wedding, finally confessing everything to him. The couple, who are seen dancing, joking and sometimes shouting at each other, lived in a gun-filled Tennessee mansion before relocating to the Dominican Republic (where they were arrested for gun possession) and then to Spain. She has shown the same flair for paranoid melodrama as her late husband. In December 2021, she posted a peaceful photo of a beach with palm trees. The text read: “Since John’s death there has been an effort to guarantee I would not make it to my next birthday although I believe the ultimate goal is to ensure that I do not leave Spain alive.”