Duane “Keffe D” Davis spent years talking about the night Tupac Shakur was killed. Now, nearly three decades after bullets tore into the car carrying the rapper on a Las Vegas street, a jury will decide if Davis talked himself into prison for life.
Jury selection started this week for Davis’ long-awaited murder trial. The 63-year-old former gang leader is accused of helping plan the September 1996 drive-by shooting that killed one of hip-hop’s most influential artists.
Prosecutors have something rare for a murder case this old: years of statements from the defendant placing himself at the center of the story.
What they do not have, according to filmmaker and longtime Shakur case researcher RJ Bond, is the murder weapon, the getaway car, or the three other men authorities say were inside it.
“I think actually the biggest misconception that people have in the case is that there’s actually any evidence,” Bond told The Informer. “There’s no gun, there’s no car, there’s no witnesses.”
Davis is charged in Clark County, Nevada, with one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon. He has pleaded not guilty and faces life in prison without parole if convicted. About 75 prospective jurors were summoned Monday as attorneys questioned whether they could fairly and impartially decide one of the most famous cold cases in American popular culture.
The trial before Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny is expected to last as long as five weeks. Marion “Suge” Knight, the Death Row Records co-founder who was driving the BMW in which Shakur was riding when he was shot, could be among the witnesses. Knight is serving a 28-year sentence for an unrelated voluntary manslaughter conviction.
“Hopefully we’ll find out some new information. And more importantly, the right person is charged and convicted for Tupac’s murder,” William Lesane, Shakur’s cousin, stated.
‘He’s His Own Worst Enemy‘
Questions about whether prosecutors have charged the right man and if they can prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt are now at the center of a trial built in significant part around Davis’ own words.
Authorities have described Davis as the “shot caller” in a hastily assembled revenge plot after a fight inside the MGM Grand on Sept. 7, 1996. Shakur and members of his entourage beat Davis’ nephew Orlando Anderson after a Mike Tyson fight.
Prosecutors contend Davis obtained a gun and was riding in a white Cadillac with three other men as they searched for Shakur and Knight. The Cadillac eventually pulled alongside Knight’s BMW near the Las Vegas Strip. A gunman opened fire, striking Shakur four times. The 25-year-old rapper died six days later.
Davis is not accused of firing the fatal shots. Under Nevada law, prosecutors can charge him with murder if they prove he participated in the crime even if he did not pull the trigger.
For years, however, Davis publicly placed himself inside the story.
Police said that after his 2023 arrest, Davis had long been a suspect, but investigators lacked sufficient evidence to charge him until his public statements revived the case. Davis said in interviews and his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” that he was riding in the Cadillac’s front passenger seat and handed a gun to one of the two men behind him. Those statements may now become some of the most consequential words Davis ever said.
Bond, director and producer of the docuseries “Tupac: Cover-Up,” believes they also expose a vulnerability in the prosecution’s case. He has spent years examining police records, witness accounts and grand jury material surrounding Shakur’s death. His involvement began through his friendship with Frank Alexander, Shakur’s bodyguard on the night of the shooting and later godfather to Bond’s son.
“I was introduced to the world of Pac through Frank Alexander,” Bond said. “Frank Alexander was Tupac’s bodyguard the night that he was killed and a witness to the shooting.”
Bond said he has spent about 19 years revisiting the case through documentaries, books, and other projects, often thinking he had exhausted the subject only to find another question.
“Every time I do a book or a movie I say, ‘OK, that’s it. I’m done. That’s all there is to say about it,’” Bond said. “Then two years later I’m back in it again.”
His latest work challenges parts of the narrative surrounding Davis that has persisted for years. Bond does not say Davis’ statements are meaningless. He believes Davis created huge problems for himself by repeatedly discussing the killing.
“He’s his own worst enemy,” Bond said.
But Bond argues there is a difference between an incriminating story and independently proving that story.
“If you’ve heard the story and know what it has been for the last 25 years, you know Orlando Anderson, the car, and the gun,” Bond said.
Even the vehicle’s description, he said, has not always been consistent.
“Some witnesses said it was a white Lincoln,” Bond said. “There’s even confusion among witnesses about what the car was.”
No murder weapon has been recovered. The three other men authorities say were inside the Cadillac with Davis have died. Neither Davis nor police have said who fired the gun at Shakur.
That makes Davis’ previous statements particularly important.
Bond said a confession becomes more powerful when investigators can corroborate it with information or physical evidence known only to someone involved.
“When a police officer, a detective, gets a confession, they still look for evidence to support that confession,” said Bond, who questions how much of that corroboration prosecutors can produce here.
‘Facts Matter’
Davis’ memoir could become another point of contention.
Bond noted that “Compton Street Legend” was written with Yusuf Jah, raising questions the defense should explore about which passages came directly from Davis.
“Having written a book with another person, I can tell you firsthand it is very murky to try to figure out exactly who said what in the book,” Bond said.
Bond said investigators only recently interviewed Davis’ co-author about the division of authorship, a claim that could not be independently confirmed for this story.
He said members of Davis’ defense team have consulted him because of the vast material accumulated since Shakur was killed. He said he is not paid by the defense and helps attorneys navigate years of records, witnesses, and competing theories.
“You have to think about it in terms of basically expediency,” Bond said. “An attorney gets a client like Keffe D, you have a 30-year backlog of information.”
He compared his role to guiding someone through unfamiliar and potentially dangerous terrain.
“My job is kind of like I’m one of those river guides where I show you where the rocks are in the river, and you kind of navigate around them,” Bond said. “This is going nowhere. This is something you might want to think about.”
He said his purpose is to keep information organized and place individual pieces of evidence alongside the larger record.
“Facts matter,” Bond said. “There is just such a volume of that.”
The trial could also revive another theory that has followed Shakur’s killing for years: allegations that Sean “Diddy” Combs offered money to have Shakur and Knight killed. Combs has denied involvement in Shakur’s murder and has never been charged in connection with it.
Bond said his research has not persuaded him that evidence establishes such a plot.
“There’s no evidence,” he said.
Even if someone made a threatening or inflammatory statement, Bond said, proving that a person ordered and facilitated a murder requires something more.
“Saying a thing and acting on a thing are two completely different things,” Bond said.
For prosecutors, however, the case does not require proving every theory that has accumulated around Shakur’s death.
Their task is narrower.
They must convince jurors that Davis knowingly participated in the plot that ended with bullets tearing into Knight’s BMW on Sept. 7, 1996.
For the defense, the passage of time may be both an advantage and an obstacle. Memories have faded. Witnesses have died. Physical evidence that might once have confirmed or contradicted accounts is gone or was never recovered.
And Davis spent years talking.
His statements helped transform a cold case into an active murder prosecution. Police said the investigation regained momentum in 2018 because of his public descriptions of his role.
Now jurors will have to determine whether those words amount to credible admissions of participation in murder or whether prosecutors can sufficiently corroborate a story Davis repeated for years.
Bond does not believe jurors will necessarily hear a dramatic new revelation about who killed Shakur.
“They’re not going to learn anything new as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “They took his book and literally read his book on the stand into the record. They read it into the record, and that’s the best they got. He said it.”
Bond Says There’s More to Investigate
Bond also disputes the assumption that the accepted revenge theory is the only scenario investigators should have examined.
He has questioned whether former Los Angeles police officer Kevin Gaines, who died in 1997, warranted greater scrutiny because of his connections to Knight’s estranged wife and because Bond says records he has reviewed place Gaines in Las Vegas around the time of Shakur’s shooting.
That is Bond’s theory, not an allegation established by prosecutors or the court, and Davis is the only person currently on trial for Shakur’s killing.
Bond said his purpose in raising alternatives is not to declare that he has solved the murder. Instead, he said, investigators, journalists and the public should distinguish established facts from theories repeated so frequently that they eventually begin to sound like facts.
For nearly three decades, Shakur’s murder has generated documentaries, books, interviews, purported confessions and countless theories.
This time, the questions will be asked inside a courtroom.
And after 30 years of people telling the world what they believe happened on that Las Vegas street, a jury will finally be asked to decide what prosecutors can prove happened.
Bond said the case should be approached with the principle that has guided his own years of research.
“Question everything,” he said. “Question everything.”
