He was dubbed 'the craziest man in tech', which is saying something. The prime minister of Belize, where John McAfee became an international fugitive and built a fortress home, put it more bluntly, branding him 'bonkers'.
Nobody who encountered British-born McAfee came away with a mild impression of him.
Whatever the exact nature of the computer software tycoon's death, he would at least have relished the fact that it caused a stir.
As he awaited extradition to the U.S. to face tax evasion and cryptocurrency fraud charges, he had repeatedly tweeted from his Barcelona jail that, if he died there, people should be suspicious.
On Wednesday, eight months after his arrest, 75-year-old McAfee was found dead in his cell.
Officials have indicated he hanged himself just hours after a Spanish court authorised the extradition.
He was dubbed 'the craziest man in tech', which is saying something. The prime minister of Belize, where John McAfee became an international fugitive and built a fortress home, put it more bluntly, branding him 'bonkers'
The charges, including allegations he evaded paying millions of dollars, could have landed him in prison for decades and McAfee — who put his name to the world's most famous anti-virus software — may well have considered suicide preferable.
However, it's also true that the notoriously combative and paranoid McAfee — someone, say friends, who people crossed at their peril — enjoyed making enemies almost as much as he loved his other passions of drugs, guns and girls.
Technology barons love to shake off their super-nerd image and cut a bit of a buccaneering dash, no matter how tame the reality.
The heavily tattooed McAfee, however, was the real McCoy — colourful, engaging and eccentric, but also an unhinged and unnerving figure whose outlaw image created an aura of danger that was much more than just for show.
An attention-hungry master manipulator, he estimated that he had been arrested 21 times in 11 countries for offences including drug trafficking, illegal arms ownership, tax evasion and stock market fraud.
The troubled technology genius, who married a prostitute he once hired and tried not to go anywhere without being armed to the teeth, admitted himself that he was hardly perfect. 'Boy, I do live an exciting life,' he said in one interview.
'It's too exciting sometimes. But that happens if you live on the edge, which I like to do because that's where most discoveries are made. I'm a curious person but sometimes I fall off.'
To begin with, at least, he managed to keep his balance, despite a calamitous upbringing in Virginia after being born on a U.S. Army base in Gloucestershire in 1945 to an English mother and American serviceman.
Nobody who encountered McAfee came away with a mild impression of him. Whatever the exact nature of the computer software tycoon's death, he would at least have relished the fact that it caused a stir. Pictured: McAfee in prison
His father was an abusive alcoholic who fatally shot himself when John was 15.
McAfee said it deeply affected him, driving him to drugs and alcohol from an early age.
His academic career looked promising until his other vice, young women, ended it in the late 1960s when he was thrown out of a Louisiana university for sleeping with an undergraduate he was supposedly mentoring.
He focused his career instead on computer programming, working for Nasa, Lockheed and Xerox.
By the 1980s he was a successful engineer in Silicon Valley, albeit one who admitted he drank a bottle of whisky a day and not only snorted cocaine at his desk but sold it to colleagues.
He experimented with hallucinogenic drugs that sent him 'stark, raving mad'.
Meanwhile, as personal computers became ubiquitous, so did viruses. The first, called the Pakistani Brain, was able to wipe clean a PC's hard drive.
McAfee infected his own computer with the virus and then devised a program that would disable it.
He launched his anti-virus software business in 1987, and within five years it controlled almost 70 per cent of the market.
In 1994, he made at least $100 million when he sold his company.
Now he could freely indulge his real passions as a 'lover of women, adventure and mystery'.
He bought nine luxurious homes across the U.S., filling them with expensive art and furniture.
He turned his 400-acre Colorado estate into a yoga retreat where he went out with a string of teenage girls.
The home of anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee is seen in San Pedro November 14, 2012
He also bought a landing strip from where he set up a new extreme sport he called 'aero-trekking' which involved flying ultra-light aircraft dangerously close to the ground.
He closed the business after a passenger died in a crash.
The victim's family sued him but, claiming he had been all but wiped out financially in the recession, McAfee left the U.S. in 2008 and moved to the tax haven Belize.
But here his problems only got worse as he was able to give even freer rein to his vices. He effectively
