Has notoriously paranoid, software inventor and former fugitive John McAfee finally lost his mind?

EVEN sex with the septuagenarian antivirus software inventor can end in a hail of gunfire, such is his fear of assassination.

AS John McAfee’s wife Janice tells it, she was having sex with her husband in the early hours of September 4 in their Tennessee home when McAfee’s notoriously aggressive dogs started barking madly.

Minutes later, the legendary 71-year-old antivirus software inventor and former fugitive was firing bullets into the walls and ceiling of their bedroom.

“(McAfee) thought he heard movement in the crawl space under our bedroom and in the attic,” Janice McAfee, 34, would later recall in a statement to the FBI.

“He then fired his gun into both areas.”

The commotion woke US Army turned security guard Alex Handrick, who lived below the couple in a basement apartment.

Mr Handrick, 28, grabbed his assault rifle and legged it upstairs to find McAfee — stark naked but for an ammunition belt slung around his hips — pumping bullets into the living room ceiling.

“There’s an intruder,” McAfee told Handrick, according to Newsweek.

The incident, which remains under federal investigation, is the latest bizarre twist in the septuagenarian’s scandalous life since selling the company that made him a household name for a reported US$100 million in the 1990s.

John McAfee and his wife Janice in Hong Kong in September this year. Picture: Facebook

John McAfee shows off his tattoos in a recent selfie. Picture: Facebook

He went on a spending spree, acquiring nine homes, a fleet of planes and vintage cars and a collection of expensive art and curiosities, including a dinosaur skull.

In 2009, McAfee reportedly lost the bulk of his fortune in the global financial crisis (although he has always denied this).

He liquidated his assets and moved operations to the lush, Central American island nation of Belize, which consistently ranks among the top five cities in the world for homicides.

John McAfee and his wife Janice visit the Great Wall of China. Picture: Facebook

Anti-virus software inventor and former fugitive murder accused John McAfee had a harem of ex-prostitutes at his Belize compound. Picture: Facebook

WHY IS HE SO JUMPY?

McAfee’s paranoia is legendary.

When news.com.au sought his take on the 2016 Showtime documentary Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, which accuses him of two murders and a rape, he accused director Nanette Burstein of “forcing interviewees to sign false statutory declarations” and “bribing others to lie”.

In Belize, McAfee cultivated an existence and reputation reminiscent of Kurtz, the jungle-dwelling, paranoid, hermit-messiah from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, setting up a laboratory purporting to manufacture plants into antibiotics.

He surrounded himself with a harem of young women, mostly former prostitutes plucked from the tough island streets, and brought many of them to live with him at his heavily fortified beachfront compound on Ambergris Caye, Belize's’s largest island.

He never went anywhere in public without his entourage of hard-bodied, assault-rifle toting security guards and locals gossiped that it was McAfee, and not the local gangs, who ran the town.

A dog stands next to the beachside entrance to the former home of software company founder John McAfee in Ambergris Caye, Belize on November 14, 2012, while he was on the run. Picture: AP

Anti-virus software inventor and former fugitive murder accused John McAfee was surrounded by girls and guns on Belize.

In May 2012, the Belize Police Gang Suppression Unit raided the lab on suspicion it was a front for making meth. No illegal drugs were found and McAfee was never charged but the damage was done and the company was shut down.

According to McAfee, the raid marked the start of a conspiracy to destroy him as revenge for his refusal to be extorted by the Belize government, which he claims is controlled by the all-powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

Seven months later, McAfee found himself accused of murder after his neighbour and fellow American expat Gregory Faull was gunned down at his property two doors.

Police liked McAfee for the crime because the pair were known to have butted heads over McAfee’s widely-feared pack of guard dogs in the months leading up to the 52-year-old’s death.

Mr Faull had complained the animals constantly barked and were prone to attacking passers-by but police believe the catalyst was McAfee’s belief that Mr Faull had deliberately poisoned one of his dogs a day earlier.

When police arrived at his home to interrogate him, McAfee was already long gone.

John McAfee’s security detail at his home in Tennessee. Picture: Facebook

John McAfee is a paid consultant who regularly appears on US television and writes his own column. Picture: Supplied

ATTENTION-LOVING FUGITIVE

Incredibly, McAfee asked American cartoonist Chad Essley to set up a blog so that he could write about his experience while on the run, which he did.

But it was also documented by a handful of edgy tech journos from publications like Wired, Gizmodo and Vice Magazine, some of whom flew to Central America to meet the fugitive at various Central American hideouts.

In a November 2012 interview with Wired, McAfee claimed he was forced into hiding because the Belizean authorities were trying to kill him.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow dismissed the allegations, labelling McAfee “extremely paranoid, even bonkers”.

On December 5, McAfee was arrested in Guatemala after a Vice journalist inadvertently gave away their location by publishing a photograph of him online without removing the geolocation metadata.

McAfee was charged with illegally entering Guatemala and made an unsuccessful bid for political asylum.

On December 6, was hospitalised after suffering two suspected heart attacks — which he later claimed he faked to buy time to allow his lawyer to file a series of appeals that would ultimately prevent his deportation to Belize.

The plan worked and on December 12, 2012, McAfee was released from detention in Guatemala and deported to the United States. He reportedly met his wife Janice in Miami on his first day back on home soil.

CONSPIRACY

According to Newsweek, McAfee and Janice live in constant fear of his assassination by agents of the Belize government.

He “went public” with his allegations after the magazine contacted him for comment over the bizarre post-coital shooting spree in September.

“He has never released the information he claims to have hacked and stolen from the government in response to the raid on his compound, and he believes that powerful forces within the criminal underworld in Belize want to kidnap him in order to find out exactly what he knows,” the magazine said in an article published last week.

“McAfee hopes that going public now will force those hounding him and his wife to back off.”

McAfee told the magazine: “If they wanted to kill me, that would have been easy.

“They can’t kill me because they need to sit me down, remove my fingers or something until I tell them where all this data is stored.”

Belize authorities have rubbished McAfee’s claims to have hacked internal emails sent between senior members of Belize’s CITO as “utter nonsense,” and “the ravings of a sick mind”.