John McAfee is an insane multimillionaire who is wanted for murder in Belize after someone poisoned his dogs. He probably is on bath salts and is about to marry a 20-year-old Belizean girl after giving interviews to Wired and Gizmodo from his house, then blogging about using a double with a North Korean passport to secretly escape to Guatemala. Vice took a photo with him, but someone used the metadata to track him down—first he lied about manipulating the GPS data, then fessed up. He just asked the Prime Minister of Belize to investigate the corruption that led to his set-up. Yesterday he just got arrested. All this has happened in the last three weeks. He is the most interesting man in the world.
You probably recognize his name—he started the famous anti-virus company, but cashed out in 1994. Since then, he’s been a professional crazy rich dude, doing stuff like starting fake lesbian biker gangs and moving to Belize to look for an herbal female Viagra. (That’s gonna get us so much SEO, y’all.) He’s a 67-year-old with frosted tips. We need to reiterate that this guy is a real person.
He’s also a huge liar and self-described prankster. He’s been an avid bath salts blogger, but also claims he hasn’t done drugs since 1983. This summer he tried to start an “observational yoga” facility, which involves sitting and watching people do yoga. For two long primers on the crazypants life of John McAfee, here’s Gizmodo and the New York Times. Keep reading for a recap.
Then came the murder. McAfee—who has been investigated by Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit for guns, armed guards and drugs—claimed that he saw a “contingent of black-suited thugs. A half-hour later, all my dogs had been poisoned.” Then, his neighbor, who had often complained about the unleashed guard dogs, was killed by a single bullet. McAfee claims the Belizean government did it. Not incidentally, the police have never issued a warrant for McAfee’s arrest—all they’ve wanted to do is question him.
McAfee claims he knew nothing about the murder, and when the police came, he hid by “burying himself in sand with a cardboard box over his head to breathe.” That didn’t stop the amazing blog posts about it. He’s been blogging the whole thing, actually—last night he even wrote a post called “Blogging From Jail.”
All this came to a climax last week when Vice decided to send two reporters into the Belizean jungle to find him. Because they’re Vice, they took a photo and uploaded it to the Internet. Because it’s the Internet, someone used the EXIF data to locate McAfee. Arguably that led to his arrest in Guatemala last night. It might not be Vice’s fault, necessarily, but we blame them because those guys suck.
Anyway, the story won’t end here, but the most exciting chapter is probably over. But maybe not! The guy is a press whore and a lunatic. So you never know.