The tragic end of a fascinating mathematician

Conspiracy theories about John McAfee's suicide in the Brians 2 prison in Barcelona have not been slow to appear. The latest one circulating in the networks suggests that the inventor of the first antivirus could have stored 2.1 terabytes of compromising information on corruption in the United States in the Miami building that suddenly collapsed and under the rubble of which dozens of corpses could still be found.

Like all conspiracy theories, this latest one is based on a first truth or half-truth: the accusations made by McAfee himself about a large part of the US political class and the tycoons who, in the shadows, are using it to achieve their supposedly unspeakable ends. It is what McAfee himself called the dark side of a poisonous conjunction of political and financial power.

In any case, the only reality that is now indisputable is that the brilliant mathematician will no longer be a nuisance or a threat to whoever allegedly wanted to liquidate him. As soon as he learned that the Spanish government had decided to comply with the extradition request from the United States, he decided to take his own life by hanging himself in the cell of Brians 2, where he had spent the last months of his life. If it is confirmed that no one else was involved in his death, John McAfee would have ended up like his father, a military man who had been stationed in the United Kingdom, where John was born in 1945, and who shot himself when his son was only fifteen years old.

For his mother, the suicide was a liberation, at least the constant beatings by her violent husband were gone. McAfee lost his father, but he was also freed from the frequent beatings that allegedly shaped his character and his preparation for "a life of kill or be killed". 

He had little trouble rising to prominence as a promising mathematician at Roanoke College in Virginia, from which he would eventually be expelled for contravening its strict rules of behaviour, especially with regard to drinking and sex, which McAfee would practice unrestrainedly. He went almost immediately to work for Univac in Tennessee, programming employee cards, incorporating a list of data that gave the company previously unknown control over its workers. It would not last long; drugs had entered his life and would hardly leave him throughout his tortuous existence.

His undoubted talent was exploited by companies such as the Missouri Pacific Railroad, where he achieved complete automation in train traffic, or NASA's Institute for Space Studies, where he collaborated in the development of software to extend the life and alter the routes and orbits of satellites. His big breakthrough came at Xerox, where he ended up managing its operating systems, but above all at Lockheed's aerospace division. It was there that he managed to design the first computer antivirus in history.

Based on a virus created in Pakistan, McAfee immediately perceived the threat that its infection could spread at lightning speed throughout the world's computer network. So he devised a programme that would automatically achieve two primary goals: identify viruses and prevent them from infecting computers. Thus he created the world's first antivirus software, which he registered under his name. His licence sales made him a multimillionaire.

In 1989 he founded his own company, McAfee Associates, specialising in anti-virus development. He was the shield against all the hackers for whom breaking through McAfee's barriers became a personal challenge. Listed on Wall Street, his company was left in the hands of his partners and disciples while McAfee, with a considerable fortune in his pocket, decided to devote himself to yoga, from whose practice and the growing number of disciples who followed him he became convinced that he had become a Higher Self. It was around this time that he dabbled in so-called natural medicine, and attempted to create natural antibiotics in Belize. 

The experiment did not go so well. Several clues and numerous testimonies from his neighbours pointed to him as the author or inducer of the death of another North American in the Caribbean country, whose government also accused him of manufacturing medicines without a licence and stealing ancestral knowledge from the indigenous people. He then took refuge in Guatemala, which, after denying him refugee status, eventually extradited him to the United States.

He would be released in exchange for helping the FBI decrypt iPhones used in mass killings, but he would return to prison, first in 2019, in the Dominican Republic, where police found an arsenal of illegal weapons on his yacht, then in 2020 in Spain, which was responding to a request from the United States to arrest him for massive tax evasion. The Audiencia Nacional authorised his extradition on 23 June, so that he could be tried for a crime that could lead to 30 years in prison. John McAfee would not let a day go by before hanging himself in his cell and putting an end to a life in which he knew the heights of glory and worldwide recognition for his talent and alternated them with a descent into the hells of alcohol and other drugs in industrial quantities.