For three decades, rap legend and cultural icon Tupac Shakur’s killing has remained one of America’s great unsolved mysteries, spawning countless books, documentaries and long-form investigative journalism pieces. Now, the man accused of orchestrating his 1996 shooting is finally headed to trial with his memoir, as well as a Netflix docuseries on Diddy, serving as key evidence.
Jury selection began on Monday in the case against Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, who is facing one charge of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang in Shakur’s death. Prosecutors allege Davis both ordered the killing of Shakur and provided the murder weapon. (Davis has maintained his innocence.)
On the night of Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur was shot four times with a Glock .22 pistol while his car was stopped at a red light in Paradise, Nev. The bullets came from a white Cadillac that had pulled up alongside Shakur’s vehicle — which was being driven by his label boss, Marion “Suge” Knight — and struck the hip-hop artist in the chest, arm and thigh, while one of the bullets grazed Knight in the head. Shakur succumbed to his injuries six days later.
Police arrested Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, a member of the South Side Crips gang, on Oct. 2 in connection with the shooting — only to release him the same day without being charged. Shakur and his entourage had attacked Anderson in the lobby of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on the night of Sept. 7, mere hours before the shooting, after an affiliate of Shakur’s (and member of the rival Mob Pirus Bloods gang) recognized Anderson as someone who’d attempted to rob him. Two days after the shooting, on Sept. 9, the South Side Crips and Mob Pirus Bloods engaged in an all-out gang war that culminated in three deaths, and Anderson was shot in the leg and confined to a wheelchair. On Sept. 12, Shakur’s mother, Afeni, filed a wrongful death suit against Anderson, which was settled before Anderson perished in another gang shooting in 1998.
Though Anderson has long been suspected of being the gunman who fired the fatal shots that killed Shakur, his uncle, Davis, who was seated in the white Cadillac, had also been implicated in the drive-by shooting. Greg Kading, a former LAPD detective who’d participated in the task force that investigated the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., self-published the 2011 book “Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations,” which not only implicated Sean “Diddy” Combs in the killing of Shakur, owing to the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry, but also included portions of a taped interview Davis did with police in 2008 where he claimed Diddy had offered him $1 million to assassinate Shakur and Knight.
“[Diddy] took me downstairs and he’s like, ‘Man, I want to get rid of them dudes…’ I was like, We’ll wipe their ass out quick, it’s nothing,” Davis said in the confession, according to Kading’s book.
Davis subsequently spent years boasting about his purported role in Shakur’s killing. In 2018, to drum up anticipation for his upcoming memoir, he appeared in the BET docuseries “Death Row Chronicles,” where he discussed the night of Shakur’s murder, suggesting that the murder weapon was passed from someone in the backseat of the white Cadillac, but he wouldn’t say who. “Going to keep it for the code of the streets,” Davis remarked, adding, “It just came from the backseat, bro.”
Davis released his memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” in 2019, whose intro stated, “I’m one of the only living eyewitnesses to Tupac’s killing,” before describing the night of Shakur’s killing in detail. In the book, Davis claims that he got a Glock and entered the white Cadillac with three others, looking for payback against Shakur and Knight for what they’d done to Anderson. “No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed, the shit was about to go down!” he wrote.
The book continued: “Tupac made an erratic move and began to reach down beneath his seat. Pac pulled out a strap, and that’s when the fireworks started. One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back.”
According to The New York Times, a detective within the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who had been assigned to dig into the Shakur cold case stumbled upon Davis’ memoir and used it as evidence to build his case against him. “In 2023, he read aloud excerpts from the book to a grand jury, which ultimately indicted Mr. Davis on one count of murder in Mr. Shakur’s killing. Mr. Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty and denied any involvement,” reported the Times.
“Had he never decided to take money and go on BET and talk about this situation, had he decided to never write the book, he would not, probably, have ever been prosecuted for the crime,” Marc DiGiacomo, a prosecutor on the Davis case, said during a hearing last month.
Meanwhile, Michael Sanft, a lawyer for Davis, has claimed that his client embellished many of the stories in “Compton Street Legend,” declaring during the hearing, “We’re putting way too much credence and value and weight on statements that are made for entertainment purposes only.”
In addition to Davis’ memoir, there is the matter of “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” a four-part docuseries directed by Alexandria Stapleton and produced by 50 Cent that was released Dec. 2 of last year on Netflix. The doc revealed that one year before Shakur’s killing, Diddy allegedly announced to “a whole room full of Crips” at a party that he would pay any amount for Shakur and Knight to be killed, and also re-aired portions of Davis’ interview with police — first circulated by Kading in “Murder Rap” — wherein he said Diddy met with him and offered $1 million to kill Shakur and Knight. (Diddy has denied any involvement in Shakur’s death.) Shakur’s estate filed a civil suit against Davis in April, alleging that grand jury transcripts and “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” have “revealed the existence of a broader, more complex conspiracy to murder Tupac that involved much more than mere retaliation for a prior altercation.”
On July 18, 2023, the Las Vegas Police Department searched the home of Davis’ wife in Henderson, Nevada, in connection with the Shakur case and arrested him on Sept. 29 of that year. He’s been awaiting trial ever since, but is currently being held in Nevada’s High Desert State Prison on a separate conviction for a jailhouse fight, resulting in a sentence of 16 to 40 months. Experts believe that Davis’ trial for the killing of Shakur should last about a month and, although the death penalty is an option for first-degree murder convictions in Nevada, prosecutors will not be seeking it.
