Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee

What is the series about?

Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee is a Netflix documentary about John McAfee — the eccentric founder of McAfee antivirus software — who became the chief suspect in the 2012 murder of his neighbor Gregory Viant Faull in Belize and spent the final decade of his life as a fugitive, provocateur, and defendant. Directed by Charlie Russell and released on August 24, 2022, the feature-length film (1 hour 45 minutes) charts McAfee's extraordinary unraveling: from wealthy tech pioneer to wanted man to a corpse found in a Spanish prison cell. It is not a conventional murder mystery with a courtroom resolution. It is something stranger and, for many viewers, more unsettling — a portrait of a man who outran accountability until he simply couldn't anymore.

The Case

The documentary's central crime is the killing of Gregory Viant Faull, McAfee's next-door neighbor on Ambergris Caye, Belize. Faull was found dead in his home with a single gunshot wound to the head. Belizean police identified McAfee as the chief suspect almost immediately. The two men had reportedly been at odds over McAfee's dogs and his general behavior in the area, where he had established a sprawling compound and, by various accounts, was living an increasingly erratic and paranoid lifestyle.

Rather than submit to questioning, McAfee fled, beginning a months-long flight through Belize and into Guatemala. He gave interviews along the way, contacted journalists, and turned his escape into a media spectacle — a pattern that would define the remainder of his life. He was never formally charged with Faull's murder. No other suspect has been publicly identified or prosecuted for the killing.

John David McAfee was born in 1945 and made his fortune founding McAfee Associates, the antivirus software company that became one of the most recognized names in cybersecurity. By the time he settled in Belize in the late 2000s, he had already lost much of his wealth in the 2008 financial crisis and had retreated to Central America, where he pursued various business ventures and, according to reporting, a lifestyle marked by guns, drugs, and armed security. He never returned to Belize after 2012.

McAfee's later legal troubles centered on U.S. federal tax-evasion charges. He was arrested by Spanish authorities in October 2020 and held in a prison outside Barcelona while extradition proceedings moved forward. In June 2021, a Spanish court approved his extradition to the United States. Hours later, McAfee was found dead in his prison cell. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging. He was 75 years old. The murder of Gregory Faull remains officially unsolved.

Production

The documentary was directed by Charlie Russell, who built the film significantly around archival footage captured while McAfee was on the run in 2012. That footage — much of it recorded by journalists who embedded with or tracked McAfee during his flight — gives the documentary an unusual texture: the subject is performing for the camera even as he is evading law enforcement. Russell also incorporated interviews from that period, lending the film a sense of real-time chaos rather than retrospective reconstruction.

The production had to contend with a subject who died before the film was completed and released, and with a story that resists clean narrative resolution. The Faull murder was never solved. McAfee was never tried. The tax case that ultimately imprisoned him was a separate matter entirely. Russell's task was to weave these threads into a coherent portrait, and critical opinion was divided on how successfully he accomplished that.

Netflix acquired and released the documentary as a standalone feature on August 24, 2022, positioning it within its established library of high-profile true-crime programming.

Reception

The film holds an IMDb rating of 5.9/10, suggesting a mixed audience response. Critical reaction tracked a similar ambivalence. CNN's review observed that the film "can't make sense" of McAfee's life — a pointed critique suggesting that Russell's documentary ultimately reflects its subject's chaos more than it illuminates it. The Guardian framed the documentary in terms reminiscent of Tiger King, describing it as a wild tale of a millionaire who ran for president while wanted for questioning in a murder investigation, implicitly raising questions about how seriously such a figure should be taken.

Tom's Guide suggested the documentary was "so wild it could make Tiger King look tame," which served both as genuine description and as a marketing comparison that shaped audience expectations going in.

The most pointed controversy came from participants. A MarketWatch report noted that some individuals who appeared in the documentary attacked its handling of their involvement, with at least one describing Netflix's approach as "shady and low." This kind of participant backlash — common in true-crime productions where subjects feel their words or images were used out of context — added a layer of off-screen drama to the film's reception.

Some reviewers also noted that McAfee's story had been extensively covered before the documentary's release, which may have blunted its impact for audiences already familiar with the broad outlines. For viewers coming to the case fresh, however, the sheer accumulation of detail — the Belize compound, the flight, the dogs, the paranoia, the tax charges, the prison death — was reportedly sufficient to sustain the film's nearly two-hour runtime.

The Case Today

The murder of Gregory Viant Faull remains officially unsolved as of this writing. No charges have ever been filed in connection with his death. Belizean authorities named McAfee as a person of interest and sought to question him; he refused to cooperate and left the country. With McAfee's death in June 2021, the practical possibility of a murder prosecution effectively closed.

McAfee's U.S. tax-evasion case was dismissed following his death, as criminal proceedings cannot continue against a deceased defendant. His estate and the circumstances of his prison death have attracted ongoing speculation, with some of McAfee's associates publicly questioning the suicide ruling — claims that have not been substantiated by official investigations.

Gregory Faull's family has received no formal resolution. His death remains a footnote in a story that, in the media and in documentary form, has consistently centered on the man suspected of killing him rather than on the victim himself — a framing that has not gone unnoticed by critics of the true-crime genre.