Cold cases are often revived decades later because of a new forensic discovery or a fresh lead. The reopening of the Tupac Shakur murder case is different, revived by the suspect’s ill-advised media tour and new calculations from prosecutors.
The defendant, Duane Keith Davis, first gave an account of the fatal drive-by shooting to detectives in 2008 — a dozen years after Mr. Shakur was killed — under an agreement that what he told them during that conversation could not be used to prosecute him. He agreed to speak under the threat of a narcotics prosecution that could have put him in jail for the rest of his life.
In a particular conversation in December 2008 in his lawyer’s office in Los Angeles, Mr. Davis told detectives that he and fellow affiliates in the South Side Compton Crips had pursued Mr. Shakur and his record label boss, Marion Knight, known as Suge, to exact revenge in a continuing gang feud. Mr. Davis told them that his nephew, Orlando Anderson, had opened fire from the white Cadillac they were both riding in.
“While Anderson was shooting, Davis recalls Knight looking directly at Davis,” read a 2009 police report summarizing the interview with Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis acted as a confidential informant in 2009, seeking information from the man who provided him the weapon. But he was unsuccessful, and eventually the inquiry stalled.
At the time, investigators believed that they could not have prosecuted Mr. Davis for what he told them in those meetings.
Then, a book release set off a chain of events that led to Mr. Davis’s prosecution.
Greg Kading, one of the Los Angeles Police Department detectives who interviewed Mr. Davis in 2008 and subsequently left the force, published a book in 2011 called “Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations.” The book made Mr. Davis’s discussions with the police public. Several years later, a documentary film aired part of a recording, which was done surreptitiously, from Mr. Davis’s discussions with police.
Mr. Davis, angered that Mr. Kading was profiting off his story, decided to take his own opportunities.
In 2017, he sat for interviews with a BET docuseries in which he gave a public account of the night Mr. Shakur was shot. When the series aired the next year, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department reopened the case. Long under the impression that they didn’t have enough evidence on Mr. Davis, the police recalibrated after hearing his own admissions.
Then, in 2019, a book by Mr. Davis and a co-author that went into the events of that night in even greater detail was released. He did a media tour, appearing on podcasts that he said he got paid for.
Mr. Davis has said he was under the impression that he had complete immunity from prosecution based on his 2008 and 2009 dealings with law enforcement. But he was mistaken.
His own cascade of statements led the authorities to believe in 2023 that they had enough evidence to prosecute him, and they took the case to a grand jury.
A lawyer for Mr. Davis has unsuccessfully tried to get the book — which Mr. Davis now says is fiction — kept out of the trial. Part of the 2008 interview, once believed to be off-limits through an agreement known as a proffer, will also be admitted as evidence.
“The contents of the proffer have been repeatedly made public by Defendant himself, waiving any protection of the information contained within the proffer,” Judge Carli Kierny, who is presiding over the trial, ruled this month.
