Timothy Stryker seemed to have it all - a wife and four children, a six-figure income, a home in the mountains and a high-tech company poised to make him a millionaire many times over.
But something snapped inside the computer whiz, who at age 30 founded a software company called Galacticomm in Fort Lau-der-dale.On the night of Aug. 6, Stryker, 41, pulled off a remote road in the Blue Mountains in northwest Colorado, stepped out of his car, and put a bullet through his head.
A man who once boasted he knew how to solve the world's problems lay dead near some sagebrush, a suicide note tucked in his waistband.
Stryker once described himself as "a laid-back, barefoot programmer."
But beneath his easygoing demeanor lurked a darkness that he seldom shared with friends, family or business associates.
Stryker suffered from severe bouts of depression, according to his sister, Terry Stryker Mer-ri-field, a physician in Wichita, Kan. The medication he took didn't seem to help, she said.
"The reason he gave was covered deeply by a depression-controlled view of the world," said Merrifield, who read the note addressed to his wife, Christine. "He said that he had hardly a happy moment in his entire life, and that he could not see it getting any better at all."
All his life, Stryker wanted to be a Renaissance Man.
In addition to building his software business, he wanted to create a perfect society based on compassion and love.
Disgusted with American politics, Stryker began a movement called Superdemocracy to computerize voting and help people follow politics in cyberspace.
He authored three books, but saw their sales languish. Undaunted, he planned to write many more. He also was pursuing his passion for computer-generated art.
"Tim took himself very seriously. He really felt that he had all the answers," said Peter Ackerman, who helped edit Stryker's 1993 book, "Think A Little: Evolutionary Perspectives On The Future Of Civilization," which sold less than 3,000 copies. "Based on his philosophy, he had a high level of frustration."
Stryker relinquished day-to-day control of Galacticomm three years ago and moved from South Florida to Utah. He said it was a better place to raise his four children, Ace, Mars, Asia and Zach-ari-ah.
He bought a house on a mountain slope overlooking Salt Lake City, and began pursuing his lifelong interests. He remained chairman of Galacticomm and retained ownership of just more than 50 percent of the company.
Friends described him as brilliant, arrogant, affectionate, visionary and impatient. One thing remained constant throughout his life - Stryker was forever thirsting for knowledge.
"Most people listen to the radio while driving around in their cars. I think about things," he wrote in the opening chapter of "Think A Little," a rambling tome on the world's problems and how to fix them.
"I sit and puzzle over why birds have feathers, and why my wife looks so good, and where the world is going. . . . I also read a lot, and bits and pieces of what I learn suggest new fields of thinking to explore."
Merrifield said her brother had exhibited a keen intelligence since he was a child. He taught himself to play guitar, wrote and painted. He loved animals; once he built elaborate castles, complete with turrets, moats and lights, for his pet gerbils.
Born in Washington, D.C., Stryker moved with his family to Hong Kong and Taiwan for a few years during his teens because his father was employed by the U.S. Information Service.
Stryker graduated from Brown University in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and designed a coin-operated video game soon after that. Soon, he was a consultant for the Florida Solar Energy Center, General Electric and a number of other firms.
He founded Galacticomm in 1985, quickly building it into a big player in the electronic bulletin board market. The company made modem boards and wrote software that allowed anyone with a desktop computer to get into the bulletin board business.
Stryker mostly hired people like him - more comfortable in jeans and T-shirts than suits and ties and with a love for computers and technology.
Like his personality, his business practices were eccentric, said Scott Brinker, Galacticomm's chief operating officer and one of Stryker's closest friends.
To show his appreciation, Stryker would take his 50 or so employees on all-expenses-paid weekend jaunts to the Caribbean. To reward an engineer who worked particularly hard on a project, he once dumped a wastepaper basket filled with $10,000 in cash on the employee's head.
"Tim always thought to push beyond the envelope what the rest of us mill around in," Brinker said.
Though immersed in the daily rigmarole of running Galacticomm, Stryker never lost sight of his ultimate goal: to improve the world through computers, Brinker said.
That belief spawned the Superdemocracy movement, which aimed to connect all Americans with cyberspace so they could vote on national policy - and eliminate Congress, state legislatures, city councils and the court systems.
Stryker believed such high-tech, direct democracy would eliminate special interests, corruption, miscarriage of justice and other ills of the American political system.
His disdain for the system ran deep. He yearned to literally move to a remote island and become a benevolent dictator to his faithful.
While Stryker delved deeper into his passions and reduced contact with Galacticomm, big changes were under way at the company. It reinvented itself after the Internet made the bulletin board business obsolete.
Today, Galacticomm's customer base reads like a who's who of corporate America - Sony, Sega of America, McDonnell Douglas, MCI and AT&T among others. It has annual sales of $7.5 million.
Stryker had been frustrated with Galacticomm's slow growth - though no one knows if he was upset enough to kill himself, Merrifield said.
"Looking back, you could always say, `Jeez, should I have noticed this or noticed that?' But realistically there was no clue."