On November 12, Belizean police announced that anti-virus software tycoon John McAfee was wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Gregory Faull, his neighbor on a tropical island. The police launched a manhunt in the tiny Central American nation, which is still ongoing.

As the news broke, I was just finishing up a six-month investigation into McAfee’s life for a Wired magazine feature planned for the January issue. In light of the murder and ensuing manhunt, Wired published the feature early, and at expanded length, as a 13-chapter e-book.

The short version: McAfee is a complex and volatile person. I can say that in my two visits to Belize, and in dozens of phone conversations, McAfee was reasonable and lucid. But on a number of occasions, he snapped.

A few weeks before Faull was killed and the police went after McAfee, the retired millionaire called me in the middle of the night. He told me that he was staying at a resort near his villa called Captain Morgan’s Retreat and had gone for a walk on the beach at dusk. In a breathless, spooked tone, he recounted how he’d heard loud motors approaching and instantly knew it was the Gang Suppression Unit (GSU), an elite force within the Belize police that had previously detained McAfee on suspicion of manufacturing drugs.

McAfee took cover on a porch, behind some bushes, but said that GSU members materialized out of the darkness and surrounded him without saying anything. They simply stared at him for hours. “It was freaky, freaky, freaky,” he said. By this time, I was accustomed to his manic energy but in this call, he sounded genuinely unhinged. Take a listen:

As evidence that he wasn’t hallucinating, McAfee sent me a series of photos of boot prints in the sand. This, he said, was solid evidence that a large number of military and police members had mounted an operation against him. The security guards on the property, however, said they hadn’t seen anything and told McAfee that “no one was here.”

Over the course of October, McAfee sounded increasingly paranoid. He talked about walking down the beach and seeing a GSU “frogman” walk out of the water in full SCUBA gear.

The bootprint

On October 20, McAfee was staying at a luxury condo development south of his villa. Around midnight, he heard the sound of the GSU engines again. Samantha, his girlfriend, heard it too and then they noticed that somebody was trying to open their front door. McAfee jammed a bar of soap between the door handle and lock and felt that that would hold them off for awhile. They went on to the second-story balcony, which was 20 feet off the ground. McAfee was desperate to get away and decided to walk along a narrow ledge to his neighbor’s balcony in the darkness.

“This is way too much for someone my age, you know,” he said. “I was way the fuck up there.”

He made it and laid down on his back. Samantha stayed out on their balcony and said men entered, breaking open the front screen door. She could see them inside, but they never came out to talk to her.

“Why wouldn’t they have said to Samantha, ‘Where is he?’” I asked.

“I don’t have a clue,” he responded.

McAfee says there were 30 to 40 police, army, and coast guard personnel, but, as it got light, they disappeared. “These people slowly sort of evaporated,” he said.

At 5:30 that morning, Chris Allnatt woke up to watch a soccer match and was astounded to find McAfee on his balcony. He opened the glass door and noticed that McAfee was lying in a pool of his own urine. His clothes were soaked. “What the fuck are you doing here, John?” Allnatt said.

The two men knew each other: Allnatt was the real estate agent that sold McAfee his villa in 2009. Allnatt made McAfee a cup of tea and walked him back to his unit. Allnatt saw no damage. The screen door was intact. Nor did he see any sign of the GSU. Allnatt also checked with the building’s security guards, who reported nothing unusual.

Allnatt returned to clean the urine off his balcony and discovered a small plastic bag of a gray powder hidden behind a pot near where McAfee was lying. Allnatt was sure it was drugs, which surprised him. McAfee has insisted that he has been sober since 1983 and has waged his own war on drugs in the small Belizean village of Carmelita.

“The guy has lost it,” he says. “He’s joined history’s list of great geniuses who’ve gone mad. He needs serious help.”

Nonetheless, Allnatt doesn’t think McAfee killed Faull. “Almost certainly what happened there was he suggested it to somebody, and then one of his many Belizean hangers on probably took it upon himself to do John a favor,” Allnatt says. “Because John surrounded himself with gang members. These are not nice people.”

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Photo: Brian Finke/Wired