The wild and eerie life of supposedly dead anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee is only becoming more mysterious.
McAfee was widely reported to have hanged himself inside a Spanish jail in June 2021 while awaiting US extradition on tax evasion charges. But, according to his Belizean ex-girlfriend Samantha Herrera, he faked his own death, moved to Texas and is still alive.
“I don’t know if I should say, but two weeks ago, after his death, I got a call from Texas: ‘It’s me, John. I paid off people to pretend that I am dead, but I am not dead,'” Herrera claims in the Netflix documentary “Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee,” out Wednesday.
Herrera says he told her that “there are only three persons in this world that know I’m still alive” and then asked her to run away with him.
The Post attempted to contact Herrera but was unsuccessful.
According to Herrera, she and McAfee, who was living in San Pedro, Belize, started dating when she was 18 and planned to marry. McAfee and Herrera fled the nation in 2012 after the suspicious death of his next-door neighbor, Florida man Gregory Faull.
Herrera not only lammed it with the person of interest, but also recruited her relative, prominent lawyer Telésforo Guerra, to become his attorney.
“His side of the story is that they’re after him because he didn’t pay off the government. They wanted to hurt him, to get rid of him,” Herrera says in the film, adding that McAfee was able to connect the Belizean government to corruption.
With Guerra’s help and after suffering a heart attack in Guatemala City, McAfee managed to safely return to the United States. Soon after, he broke things off with Herrera and married a former prostitute from Miami, Janice Dyson, according to the film.
Guerra — whom McAfee jokingly told, “Unfortunately, you will have a potential criminal in the family now” — died the following year, local news reported.
“Running With the Devil” director Charlie Russell is perplexed by Herrera’s claims that McAfee is still alive.
“I don’t know what I think and I don’t think she does,” Russell told Esquire. “She says it, then she looks at the camera, and I can’t work out whether she thinks it’s real or not. She’s someone who was very angry at John.
“He promised them a life together and I think they were genuinely in love, despite the huge age difference, I think he offered her a real different future, then he literally ditched her at the border and I think that’s very painful for her and it’s taken her years to get over that.”
Prior to the suicide reports, McAfee had been repeatedly tweeting that if he was found dead in jail, it would not be suicide. In 2019, he got an arm tattoo reading “$WHACKD” to backup the sentiment.
