A new Netflix documentary about John McAfee suggests the late anti-virus software tycoon may have murdered his own father. Watch the trailer here:
McAfee was best known for his antivirus software of the same name, which he created in 1987 after being employed at companies such as NASA, Xerox and Lockheed Martin, and ultimately sold to Intel.
After making his fortune, he became wanted on suspicion of murder in Belize following the death of his neighbour Gregory Faull, who had been fatally shot in November 2012.
Advert
It was at this point that McAfee invited two Vice journalists to join him on the run in Guatemala – their bizarre adventure now the subject of a new Netflix film, Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee.
“Through raw, revealing footage and interviews with fugitive tech pioneer John McAfee, this documentary uncovers new layers of his wild years on the run,” a synopsis from Netflix says.
Along journalist Rocco Castoro and cameraman Robert King, the film also features insight from ghost writer Alex Cody Foster, who was hired by McAfee to write a book about his life.
As he gathered material, Foster was given unprecedented access to the tech millionaire’s back story - including one particularly troubling anecdote about his father, who had apparently died by suicide when his son was still a teenager.
Advert
In the documentary, Foster remembers how McAfee had described having a difficult relationship with his allegedly abusive dad.
McAfee can be heard saying in one of Foster’s voice recordings: “I do want to change the world. I want my children and grandchildren and your children to have a better world than we had, where we do have some love.
“And there is some humanity - that the world that I lived in, growing up with a father who broke my arms and abused me to the point that it was intolerable, abused by mother... until the point that I did something about it.”
A shocked Foster then says to the camera: “Woah. I never remembered that. I didn’t know he said that. Holy s**t.”
Advert
He adds: “I feel like that was an admission right there.”
And that wasn’t the end.
Foster continued: “I started developing a theory. So I posed it one day to Jimmy, he was John’s executive advisor.
“I said, ‘Jimmy, what about John’s dad?’ He was like, ‘What about him?’
Advert
“I said, ‘I have this weird feeling, Jimmy, that John shot him.’
“And Jimmy looked at me, and he had this crazy look in his eyes. He was like, ‘How the f**k did you know that?’
“And I said, ‘I didn’t, but now I do.’
“Jimmy told me that John confided in him that he shot his father when he was a teenager. He’d killed him and made it looked like a suicide.
“This is a dangerous man, he’s hurt a lot of people.”
Advert
The murder of Gregory Faull remains unsolved.
In July last year, McAfee was found dead in his Barcelona prison cell shortly after Spanish authorities authorised his extradition to the US – his apparent suicide garnering worldwide speculation after his wife Janice claimed he was not suicidal, and that his note had been forged.
Watch Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee on Netflix now.
Topics: TV and Film, Netflix, Documentaries
Jess Hardiman