Goateed, tattooed millionaire software pioneer John McAfee, who is on the run from police in Belize after the murder of his neighbor, claims that the authorities are trying to pin the killing on him.
"They will kill me if they find me," McAfee, whose whereabouts are still unknown, tells Wired magazine. "They've been trying to get me for months. They want to silence me."
In the interview, the 67-year-old McAfee detailed how he hid from a contingent of police who showed up at his one-acre beachfront estate shortly after the body of Gregory Faull, 52, was discovered by a housekeeper on Nov. 11 with a bullet in the back of his head.
McAfee, who insists he has nothing to do with the Faull's killing, claims to have eluded authorities by burying himself in the sand and placing a box over his head so that he could breathe.
"It was extraordinarily uncomfortable," he tells Wired. When asked about his neighbor's murder, he insists he knew "nothing – other than I heard he had been shot."
A spokesman for police in Belize says that the local authorities simply want to speak with McAfee about Faull's murder.
"It would be quite nice for him to come in and answer some of the questions that could lead to the closure of this case," spokesman Raphael Martinez tells Reuters. "He is not wanted for murder, but he is wanted for questioning as a person of interest."
McAfee's current predicament is a sad twist for the man regarded as one of Silicon Valley's first Internet entrepreneurs to strike it big.
Two years after taking his anti-virus software company public in 1992, he sold the firm for a reported $100 million, then dabbled in everything from teaching yoga to creating one of the first online instant messaging services before moving to Belize in 2008.
source: people.com
