Trouble in Paradise, Part 5

>>> greg faull's tropical adventure lasted five months and ten days and even though he had plenty to do on his island paradise, it was a rare day, said his father and stepmother that greg didn't call just to shoot the breeze.

>> always kept in touch. after he went to belize , i think he got a little homesick, and he was calling us just practically every night.

>> then on sunday afternoon, november 11th , art and roseanne got on the plane at the end of a long night and art got on his phone and there was this message from the american embassy .

>> i said no, it can't possibly happen. not greg , you know. i don't think anyone could have overpowered greg if he'd had a chance, and i suspect that he just never had a chance.

>> the irony is he went there partly because the crime rate was so low.

>> that's right. that's one of the reasons he went there.

>> yes. in fact, the murder of an ex-pat american was extraordinary, a very rare event here in belize . but that's not yet story made headlines on monday morning.

>> computer software creator john mcafee in hiding.

>> the news was all about mcafee , a man not only on the run, but apparently determined to turn being on the lamb into multi-platinum performance art , blogging, e-mailing, blogging reporters near and far. tamara sniffin co-owner of the san pedro sun on ambergris caye was among the first to get a call from mcafee .

>> i would just hate to have to see you have to resort to going into hiding because, unfortunately, it doesn't look that good when that happens if you can understand that.

>> at first it seemed certain that a massive police dragnet would be deployed to capture this missing millionaire, but in belize , at least in this case, the policeman hunt seemed to evolve at a curiously sedate face. the fugitive mcafee armed with a smartphone and a laptop sprang into action, thumbing his nose at belize as he went telling one and all that he was innocent and as he insisted in this call to cnbc that he barely knew greg faull will.

>> i had absolutely nothing to do with it and i did know him, but just barely. we spoke perhaps 50 words in five years.

>> then mcafee upped the ante. not only did he deny committing the murder, he proposed an astonishing idea. the bullet that killed faull had really been meant for him because the government of belize wanted him, john mcafee , dead.

>> the first thing i thought about was, oh, my god. he's a white man. i'm a white man. someone -- the government's finally decided to off me. they got the wrong white man.

>> it all sounded so crazy. here was john mcafee , a celebrity businessman spinning dark conspiracy theories from some jungle hideout. right now, sir, i am holed up in a place where the mattress here has lice. i've never experienced that before.

>> joshua davis , a contributing editor for "wired" magazine and nbc consultant was in the midst of writhe a profile piece on mcafee when story broke.

>> let me ask you point-blank just for the record.

>> no, sir. no, sir. it's not even funny.

>> okay.

>> that first, frantic week he spoke to mcafee several times a day and from the beginning mcafee seemed determined to tell his story as if it were an action epic.

>> he says that the police came to his property on sunday. he saw them coming. he thought it was another attempt to harass him. he didn't know about the murder that point and he dug a hole in the sand like a dog and buried himself and put a cardboard box over his head so that they wouldn't find him. he stayed there for hours, he says, until the police left and then he ran off.

>> mcafee told davis he was not alone, he had a young girlfriend with him.

>> sam is quite the soldier. she has been with me for the past couple of months.

>> his plan, if there was one, seemed to be to use the media's fascination with him to change the subject from who killed greg faull to a scattershot series of claims about high-level corruption in the belizean government.

>> belize was founded by pirates. the offspring of those pirates still reside here and the country has a pirate attitude, you know, governed by fear. we collect our dues by extortion.

>> this from the same man who just three years earlier had appeared on cnbc to gush enthusiasm about belize ? he even reached into his own pocket once to hire his own camera crew promoting the place. what happened? if you knew the story behind the story, but joshua davis did, and the story he would tell was disturbing.

>>> coming up --

>> he takes one of the bullets and he chambers it, closes it and spins the cylinder and he puts it to his head.

>> a deadly game and john mcafee was playing for keeps when "trouble in paradise" continues.