Two Years of Unanswered Questions: What Really Happened to John McAfee in Barcelona?

Janice McAfee has spent over two years in limbo, haunted by a mystery that Spanish authorities seem determined to bury. Her husband, the legendary cryptocurrency pioneer and anti-virus software founder John McAfee, died in a Barcelona prison cell in circumstances that officially closed when a Catalan court ruled his death a suicide. Yet for his widow, the case remains wide open—because she has never been allowed to see the autopsy results that might finally give her answers.

“The authorities refused to release the autopsy. I’ve tried repeatedly, but they won’t let me see it,” Janice revealed in an exclusive interview. “There’s an option for an independent autopsy, but it costs €30,000. I simply don’t have that money.” The financial barrier to uncovering the truth about her husband’s death stands as both a practical obstacle and a symbol of her current desperation—Janice now survives by taking whatever work she can find, eking out a living on the margins while living in an undisclosed Spanish location.

The Unsettling Details of John McAfee’s Death

Janice’s doubts about the official narrative stem from specific inconsistencies she observed in the prison’s account. When her husband was discovered in his cell with a ligature around his neck, the jail records indicated he still had a pulse and was breathing. Yet what happened next troubled her deeply.

“The jail report said he was alive when they found him—with a weak pulse, but a pulse nonetheless,” Janice explained. “What I found disturbing was that doctors appeared to perform CPR without first removing the ligature from his neck. I’m trained as a certified nursing assistant. You don’t do that. The first thing you learn in CPR is to clear the airway. You remove any obstruction before beginning resuscitation. From the jail video, that didn’t happen.”

She remained deliberately measured in her critique: “I don’t know if it was negligence, incompetence, or something more troubling. I don’t want to speculate too much, but it feels sinister to me. What I do know is that I talk to people who still can’t believe he’s dead. And I still don’t know how he was hanged—whether it was with a rope, a shoelace, or something else.”

Despite the Catalan court’s suicide ruling, Janice cannot accept it without evidence. “We spoke every single day after he was imprisoned near Barcelona. I don’t believe it ended the way they claim it did. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t—I simply don’t know. That’s the torture of it.”

The Mystery of the $100 Million Fortune

John McAfee’s death became exponentially more complicated when questions about his wealth emerged. Once worth over $100 million after he sold his shares in the antivirus company bearing his name in 1994, his official net worth had supposedly shrunk to just $4 million by the time of his death—a dramatic and largely unexplained decline.

The financial narrative grew murkier when McAfee was arrested on U.S. tax evasion charges, with prosecutors claiming he and his associates had generated $11 million through cryptocurrency promotion schemes. Yet from behind bars, he told his 1 million Twitter followers: “I don’t have anything. But I have no regrets.”

Janice confirmed a bleaker picture. Her husband left no will, no estate, and no inheritance structure. More intriguingly, he had deliberately kept her in the dark about certain matters—ostensibly to protect her. “He told me there was information he had made public, 31 terabytes of data that he supposedly released, but he never shared any of it with me. I have no idea where it is or if it even exists. John said he did this to keep me safe, to ensure I wouldn’t become a target for the people he feared.”

Yet Janice has inherited nothing but questions. With a $25 million judgment against her husband from a wrongful death lawsuit and U.S. court orders tied to his estate, she cannot expect any financial inheritance. The result: a widow who once moved in circles of wealth now survives on odd jobs in a foreign country.

Life in Limbo: Safety Concerns and Persistent Questions

After her husband’s death, Janice feared she might become a target herself. John had repeatedly assured her that authorities pursued only him, not her. But she understood the cryptocurrency world they inhabited well enough to know that reassurances sometimes ring hollow.

“John always told me he would never tell me anything that would endanger me. That was comforting,” she said. “But after his death, I worried about my safety for a long time. Now I feel safer because I genuinely have nothing—no information, no hidden assets, no secrets. I don’t even fully understand how my husband died, much less what he possessed. If I had nothing to hide before, I certainly have nothing now.”

Janice’s safety concerns kept her from immediately returning to the United States. As a U.S. citizen, she faced genuine uncertainty about what her legal status might be given her husband’s criminal charges and the complications surrounding his death.

Netflix’s Narrative and the Question of Legacy

When Netflix released its documentary “Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee” last year, Janice watched the filmmakers’ version of her life spread across screens worldwide. The narrative painted her and her husband as fugitives, sensationalized their story, and reduced their complex reality to entertainment.

“The documentary focused on the reporters’ interpretation rather than the actual truth,” Janice reflected critically. “They tried to create a public figure through sensationalist storytelling but fundamentally missed the point. They should have been asking the harder questions: Why was John willing to become a fugitive? Why did I stay with him? What was he actually running from?”

Her main concern isn’t defending herself or her husband from judgment. Rather, she worries about how history will remember him. “People forget quickly—the world moves so fast now. All I hope is that John is remembered truthfully, that his story isn’t reduced to a Netflix plot twist. He deserves better than that.”

The Final Wish

Through it all, Janice remains focused on one concrete objective: honoring her husband’s last wishes. John had asked to be cremated if he died. His body remains in the prison morgue where he died—held by authorities with no clear justification.

“His body is still there two years later. They don’t need it anymore,” Janice said quietly. “I had the money for an independent autopsy two years ago, then a year ago. Now I don’t. But that’s okay. What matters is doing what I can for John. I’m not the victim—he was. I need that autopsy report not to fight with Spanish authorities, but simply to know what happened to my husband.”

She doesn’t seek justice, which she views as increasingly illusory in the modern world. She seeks only clarity, closure, and the ability to finally lay her husband to rest according to his wishes.

Until then, Janice McAfee remains suspended between grief and determination, between the woman she was and the life of precarious odd jobs she now leads—waiting for answers that authorities seem unwilling to provide and for funds she doesn’t have to secure an independent investigation into one of cryptocurrency’s most controversial deaths.