Mysterious Deaths of Hackers

I'm going to start by saying that I do not understand hacking at all. I only ever even heard of reddit because I was laid up after surgery and my sister writes on a fiction subreddit a lot and suggested it. So I could be getting a lot wrong.

That said:

Karl Koch's death as described in the wiki certainly sounds suspicious as hell. He leaves for lunch and doesn't come back so his employer reports it, and his car is found with a coating of dust like it had been there for awhile? A perfect circle was burned? His shoes were missing? That's all very suspicious...but none of it is cited. The only links in the last two paragraphs of his biography section, where his death is described, are to acknowledgements of suicide and a link to a book. And even at least one of those citations (from phrack.org no less) seems pretty dismissive of him, claiming his paranoia references the fictional Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. There is no reputable source in that article for these claims.

As for Boris Floricic, it's been 18 years since his death, and in the meantime, we've had countless major hacks where the perpetrators survived and were jailed at worst. Hanging like that is a common method of suicide, but it's a bit hard to force on someone without leaving any indications. Which is more likely...his frankly rather benign-sounding hacks (in the grand scheme of things) caused someone to assassinate him in a clandestine way that made it look like a suicide and thus wouldn't act as a warning for any other talented script kiddies, or that a depressed and alienated man turned to computers and found an unusual talent, then eventually succumbed to suicide for complex reasons?

Barnaby Jack seems even weirder to me because he seems like he went straight and was actively helping corporations and such in the end? He turned his criminal hacking expertise into a career talking about security problems, like many others have in the past. What is the motive there?

Admittedly I've been up for about 22 hours now and I am a bit punch drunk, and like I said, I am not great with computers, but I don't really get this one.

/r/UnresolvedMysteries Thread