Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery - The Crime Scene: Tupac Murder Suspect Speaks Out

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

New from ABC Audio, "The Crime Scene Weekly" is a new podcast for the true crime-obsessed (and -curious). Each week, "The Crime Scene Weekly" focuses on what everybody's talking about in true crime: what all your favorite shows and podcasts are covering, and what's taking over your TikTok feed. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. In this week's episode, the question of who killed Tupac Shakur has been a mystery for nearly 30 years. Now, the only person ever charged in his murder is speaking out for the first time since his arrest — and changing his story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, I'm Brad Milkey and the host of Start Here, and I'm also the host of a brand new series from ABC Audio called The Crime Scene Weekly. Every week, I'll be sitting down with journalists covering the latest true crime cases making headlines from grisly new crimes to breakthroughs in cases that we can't stop thinking about. We will stay up to speed on all things crime. It's true crime in real time. I really hope you check it out. Keep listening to hear our first episode. And if you like it, you can subscribe to the show by searching the crime scene week. wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes come out every Thursday. Again, it's the Crime Scene Weekly. Here's episode one. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things, comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner, Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney.

A hilarious new comedy, filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, Proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. The question of who killed rap icon Tupac Shakur has been a mystery for nearly 30 years. Well, now, the only person ever charged in his murder is speaking out for the first time since his arrest. Welcome to the crime scene. Every week, we talk about the biggest true crime story of the moment with the ABC.

News reporters who know it best. I'm Brad Milkey. I host ABC's Daily News Podcasts start here. And starting now, I'm bringing you the latest on what's big and what's new in the true crime scene. This week, we're hearing from the man who, for years, put himself at the scene of Tupac's murder and is now changing his story completely. Since his arrest, he had never spoken on camera until he chose to sit down across from ABC's chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin.

And Josh is with us now. Hey, Josh. Brad, how are you? I'm okay. Thanks for being here because this is one of the most infamous murders in rap history, in music history, and it's remained unsolved for nearly three decades. So I guess take me back to the beginning, like the night of September 7, 1996, what happened? Tupac Shakur. He was in Las Vegas. He was in a BMW being driven by Shug Knight, the famous larger than life, rap mogul, the leader of death row records, taking us all back to the 90s. and they had just come from a Mike Tyson fight and Tupac was hanging out the window of the beamer they were driving on the strip you off the strip they had an entourage of cars both

two Pock's security but also they were fans groupies who were following them in their own cars it was a whole scene and remember it's it's Vegas on a fight night so it is loud and big and the world's eyes are on Las Vegas. And then at a red light, shots rang out. Before anyone realizes what it's happened, Shug Knight in the driver's seat of the Beamer is injured. He actually would later say that he thought he was dead or going to be dead. And Tupac Shakur is injured very, very seriously, gravely,

rushed to a hospital, dies later that week. Well, and before we even do that, get into the investigation here. Can we also just take a moment to talk about how big of a deal this was at the time? Because it is tough to overstate the influence of Tupac Shakur in this moment. He had just released his album All Eyes on Me earlier that year. And that has one of his best known songs, California Love. At that time, Tupac Shakur was as big a music act and entertainer as there is. We're talking about Frank Sinatra. For this, That generation, that's what we're talking about.

He was only 25. He had already started appearing in films. He was all over culture. He actually, according to people who know rap music, and by the way, I am not one of those people who know rap music. On the record. But according to people who know rap music, he was in the process of changing the genre, which rap was only coming into its own at that point in the mid-90s.

Think about it. It really had only developed in the inner cities and was below the surface for, through the 80s and then the early 90s, Tupac was larger than life. And yet he's also in the middle of what's becoming this intense East Coast, West Coast rivalry. He's on the West Coast. Well, that's the other thing.

So you have, Tupac is rising to this level of stardom. And the experts were saying that he was about to launch into like super stardom, like Madonna level stardom at that point. And at the same time, you have to go back in time to what's happening in the world of crime and street culture. And that's the stuff I do know. So we're talking about a situation where we have the explosion of the crack wars, the drug wars in the inner cities, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago.

Simultaneously, the explosion of the gang wars, the battling between the Crips and the Bloods, the Red and the Blue. At the same time, you end up having groups of rap artists who are connected to East Coast, record labels and West Coast record labels and they are feuding the record labels are feuding the artists end up getting caught up in the feuding and then you have the gangs that according to law enforcement according to the experts these gangs that are aligned with these individual record labels so the gangs are part of the feuding now very quickly you're looking at me and you're saying wow that's actually a recipe for violence. And the answer is, yes, a lot of money, legitimate money in the music industry.

Then there's illegal money floating around through the drugs that are being peddled by the gangs. Then you have the artists. In the midst of this really, really toxic situation, really dangerous, with a lot of guns floating around, Tupac Shakur is gunned down off Las Vegas Boulevard. Tupac is shot point blank. How did the investigation proceed after that? Right after Tupac has gunned down, the investigation starts and it's aggressive. There's just no question about it. It's not a broad daylight homicide because it's nighttime, but it's basically a public homicide of a high-profile celebrity.

The cops are all over it. You really have two key witnesses here, including Shug Knight, who lived through the attack and was in the driver's seat. it very quickly though becomes obvious to law enforcement that they're going to get no cooperation from anybody that has direct involvement because now we're talking about people who are connected to gangs there's the code of the streets we don't talk to the cops we don't snitch in fact later on brad shug night sat down with ABC news and he was asked about the crimes and homicides and all these various things that he knows about and he was very, very clear that he doesn't get paid to solve homicides. So what happens next? So you have

Tupac has gone down in Vegas. Then a few months later, you have the notorious B.I.G. Biggie Smalls who's gone down in Los Angeles. And so you have the whole culture, the newspapers at the time, radio, TV, everybody's talking about this violent East Coast, West Coast rap war that has broken out. Ultimately, both of these crimes go unsolved into 2000, 2010, 2020, and then finally, something happens, and we don't really at this point know what in 2023, but something has happened. A switch has been flipped somehow in Las Vegas, and they are going to go and search the home of an alleged former member of the Crips who happened to move from L.A. and was now living outside of Vegas in Henderson, Nevada, they were going to search his home. I have to tell you, when I got the

phone call from a source saying that we just searched the home of this guy in connection with Tupac, I'm like, you have got to be kidding me. You're telling me that you did a, first all, what could you possibly be searching for? It's all these years ago. It's 1996. Are you saying that somebody's got a bloody t-shirt or something? What do you? My source says, said, we think it's him. They went ahead. They searched the home of Dwayne Davis a few months later. They ended up arresting him. And he has been in jail awaiting trial ever since. But who is this guy? So Dwayne Davis, he goes by a street named Keefe D. He was a kid who grew up in Compton, California, in Los Angeles. And he disputes that he was ever in the

Crips. So police and prosecutors say that he was not only a member of the Crips, but that he was a quote-unquote shot caller. He was a big deal. He was a leader of the gang. And so if he gave an instruction, that was an instruction that had to be followed. Which he denies, but there were... He denies that he was ever in the Crips. What he doesn't deny is that after having a pretty good athletic career in high school, because of the neighborhood, because of the crime and the gangs and the drugs and all the various cultural and social ills that were so familiar with that time frame in L.A., he falls into the drug trade. and he winds up becoming a pretty well-established high-volume drug dealer in Compton,

and he ultimately does go to prison on drug charges. He admits to that, and he explains it in a way that's very understandable. That was basically there was a lack of a future in that area for him. He actually grew up in Compton, California, and that's where Shug Knight is from, and they ended up being on different sides. In the years since, Shug has been reported to be connected, to the Blood's Street Gang. And Dwayne Davis, Keefe D, who we interviewed,

he's reported to have been connected with the Cripps Street Gang. So Shug and Davis are on opposite sides of the gang wars. Yeah, like there have been various reports over the years. Like the L.A. Times has talked about how Shud Knight hired known blood members. How does Keefe D get wrapped up in the Tupac case? There's a really strange winding road

that brings us to how Keefe D. winds up in jail and charged with Tupac's homicide. The authorities in Los Angeles in the 2000s are getting to the point where they're taking another crack at trying to solve the homicide of notorious BIG, which occurs in Los Angeles after Tupac. They end up building a drug case against Keefe D. In the biggie thing. In the biggie thing. As the story goes, they end up getting him cornered on the drug charges and they give him an out. If you cooperate with us, we will give you a sort of get out of jail free car, kind of an immunity kind of deal. There are a lot of particulars and there's a lot of fighting over what actually went into this

negotiation. But that's the rough outline of it, that there was this offer of immunity in return for information. So it seems like then according to police, Kee-D made his admissions as part of what's known as a proffer agreement, right? So you can't be prosecuted for what you say. What do he tell the cops then? Like what, what is the information? He basically told the cops, I don't know anything about Biggie, but I know about Tupac. I can give you info on the Tupac hit in Las Vegas. So that's 2008. In 2009, the Las Vegas police are given access to Keefe D to Dway to Dwayne Davis on the basis of the discussion from 2008. He says to us that he thinks he has immunity. So whatever he says can't be used against him. When he meets with Las Vegas police in 2009, he basically repeats

the same story. And what does he say? Davis basically says that there was a car that he was in. He's sitting in the front passenger side. There's a driver, and then there are two people behind him in the backseat in that car. They had come from the MGM. After the Tyson fight, there was some sort of a fight between patrons at the casino. Tupac somehow was involved in this fight. On the other side was Orlando Anderson.

Orlando Anderson was reported to be a member of the Crips. Tupac was allegedly, according to law enforcement, he was with members of the Bloods. So that's where the gang thing, you know, circles back into this story. He's in this car with Kee-Feedee-D after the fight, and they want payback. So they go looking for Tupac. they end up finding him coincidentally on this road off the strip where he ends up stopping at this light and they find him because there are so many groupies and fans who are following the car being driven by Shug Knight with Tupac hanging out the window. They find him, they see him. So according to Kee-Feedee-D,

car that he's in with Orlando in the backseat, pulls up alongside the car and shots ring out. The prosecutor ultimately charge that because he was the quote unquote shot caller, he called the shot. The gun was handed to the back seat. The gun is then fired because the car with Shug and Tupac needed to be fired upon in an act of revenge for the earlier fight. Well, and Orlando Anderson had denied being the shooter, but now he can't even speak for himself because he died two years after that shootout. This does allegedly place Kee-D. at the scene of the crime, though, right? And Kifidi-D is apparently telling this to prosecutors. And that's not even the only time he speaks about this, right?

Like he's been on record about this several times. Right. So Kifi-D puts himself on record with authorities twice, 2008, 2009. Then additionally, over the course of time from 2009 to 2023, he repeats this story several times. In one now famous clip in a documentary about death row records, he puts himself in the car and he talks about how this shooting went down, but he doesn't want to actually say who the trigger man was. He says he's going to keep that for the code of the streets. In another interview, he does actually give more information. He ultimately releases a memoir where he's one of the co-authors, a memoir of his life. And he talks about this. And this is in 2019, right? So he's implicating himself in writing then. Right. And so after the arrest and as we're trying to investigate the investigation, and we spent a long time doing this, going back and forth to Las Vegas, to Los Angeles, interviewing all these various people who are directly involved, we were trying to figure out, first of all, why didn't they charge him back in 2009? If he confessed then, it seems kind of like law and order that the first thing you do is go arrest the guy, right? So we wanted to find out what was going on with that. But he subsequently gives these additional accounts confirming his account originally that he was there in the car so Vegas police it turns out in all those years they were following this case Vegas police knew about the confession obviously that was made

they believed that Kee-D was somebody they could charge for this crime that he wasn't necessarily the trigger man but he had this role as the shot caller in the car and so they spent all of these years trailing him, figuratively, what did he say? Where did he say it? Where are the breadcrumbs? Can we place him here? Can we get confirmations there? I was like, why don't you just charge him? But they want confirmation. They want something stronger than just one guy saying one thing. Exactly. They were concerned that if they arrested him then and proceeded with just his confession, if the confession for whatever reason got thrown out of court, they'd have no case. So their strategy was, let's wait, let's watch, let's build the case using the map that he was creating for detectives.

And that's what they did. And it went year after year after year until finally, Las Vegas police, the Homicide Bureau, and prosecutors came to an agreement, aha, we have enough. We have a solid case. Even if we lose the confession, we think we can get a conviction. Let's charge it. And we're going to take a quick pause right here, but we will be back with Josh Margolin right after the break. We have a downed spacecraft.

Tuesday, August 12th, the premiere of FX's Alien Earth. This ship collected specimens from other worlds. Invasive species. Creditor. From creator Noah Hawley and executive producer Ridley Scott. If we don't lock them down, Don't lead too late. What did you do?

FX's Alien Earth, premieres August 12th on FX and Hulu. In March 2017, police in Ketchikan, Alaska, got a worried call. And I haven't heard some of them, so I'm getting worried. It was about a beloved surgeon, one of just two in town, named Eric Garcia. When police officers arrived to check on the doctor, they found him dead on a couch. Is it a suicide? But is it a murder? What is it? From ABC Audio and 2020, cold-blooded mystery in Alaska is out now.

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Stream on Hulu and Disney Plus. And so that leads us to when they raid his home in what, 2023. So when police come to raid a home with a search warrant, in many ways, that's basically a press conference. That's a public act. They're kind of announcing to the world what they're up to. So they had most of their case locked down, at least the case that they believed they could proceed. with. There were a couple of eyes they wanted to dot, T's they wanted to cross. They did want to see if he had any guns in the home. And if any of those guns might match ballistics for the shooting,

that would be icing on the cake. But yes, so that brings them to the raid. And then soon after the raid, they proceed with the arrest. So he gets arrested in 2023. He's not spoken to anybody on camera, Josh, until you. So like what happened here? We have been wanting to be able to interview him since he was arrested. It was clear almost from the get-go that they were going to use his own words against him. He was going to be his own worst enemy. The key witness for the prosecution

was going to be the guy charged himself. So we obviously wanted to find out, hey, man, why did you say all this stuff? They're going to hang you for it. We had not been able to get access. You know, look, lawyers, they don't want their clients talking before trial. I certainly don't want them talking to news organizations because they're worried, you know, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

Well, anything you say can and will be used against you. So they don't want any of that happening. But finally, Kee-D. said that he would meet with us and we got special permission to have an in-person interview, not just a Zoom. We were going to be able to interview him one-on-one sitting in the same room. So we went to Las Vegas with our cameras all ready to go. At the appointed time, the corrections officers escorted him into the room. Okay. We're good for him.

Come on, in. Good morning. I'm Josh Marbleau from ABC News. What happened? So we sit down with him. We spend about an hour with him. He talks about a whole range of things. Importantly, Brad, he tells us that he didn't do it, that he is innocent.

He says that he was not even in life. Vegas at the time that Tupac was killed. Wait, but he said he, then what is that dude? What's the story he told everyone? And we got into a lot of stuff. Let me first say this. We spent a lot of time talking with him, everything from his history in Compton, to the fact that even though he says that he didn't kill Tupac and wasn't part of the killing

of Tupac, that Tupac's killing has actually caused a huge problem for his life ever since it happened, which, I mean, look, if he's innocent and he's sitting in jail for a crime, he didn't commit. That's bad. But we went through it and he had a lot of answers. I'm innocent. I ain't killed nobody and I'm being held against my will. I'm supposed to be out there and enjoying my twilight and enjoying life with my kids. How does he explain the memoir, the interviews, like he has said in public, yeah, I was there on the night. He explains him in different ways.

He goes back and he says first the confessions that he gave to law enforcement. he thought that he had an immunity deal that he is free and clear from any of that stuff being entered and used against him there was like this proffer where like you tell us what you know he thinks he's saying that with immunity so he can't be charged for it later anyway 100% that's what he's saying so then the question is why would you lie if you're being interviewed by police and nothing can be used against you he says that there was this drug case that had been built against him And it was not only against him, but there were dozens of other possible defendants. And so he told the lie because there was no penalty for lying.

He just lied to save people from going to jail. They're going to arrest 48 people. It would have been selfish of me to let everybody go down because of me. That's his first explanation about why he told the story confessing. Okay. But he didn't just tell it to law enforcement. Well, right. And then he says the reason why he repeated it in interviews down the road, he says he told that story for money.

It was basically entertainment. People wanted to hear the story. So he told the story he says in terms of the memoir, he says not only did he not participate in writing it, he didn't actually read it. A guy wrote that book. A lot of this game in details of my life. Told him I played football with sure. You know what I'm saying? That's all I told him.

This is interesting to me because we've talked to the past about prosecutors holding the words of people in the music world against them. And the artist will say like, oh, that's just my public persona. It doesn't mean it's the truth. Usually, in that case, we're talking about songs and lyrics. This is a memoir that Keefee-D presented as nonfiction, right? And now he's changing his story. Does he say what he thinks happened then? Like, does he point the finger at anyone?

He points the finger at somebody that we have interviewed a guy named Reggie Wright, Jr., who is a former Compton police officer, who ultimately had worked for Shug Knight doing some security. Reggie is well aware that Kee-D. has tried to point the finger at him in the past, and he has a pretty detailed explanation about why that's not accurate and how he feels about that. He's very disturbed by it, he says. And Reggie actually spoke to ABC News last year, and he denied this.

He said, I didn't have anything to do with that. It was one of the worst days of my life when I heard that had happened. But, I mean, back to Keefe D, how does he respond to that? Keefee D's got a pretty elaborate type of response. He first says he was not even in Las Vegas the time he was home in Los Angeles. He says that there are dozens of witnesses who can corroborate his alibi. He also talks about how he's assured that even though he doesn't like the way that law enforcement works in Las Vegas, that his original confessions

to law enforcement are covered by immunity and that even if he gets convicted in Las Vegas, he's confident the appeals courts will ultimately reverse any kind of conviction because immunity is immunity is immunity. Yeah, I was going to say, what's next then for Kee-Feedee-D legally? So there's a bunch of different things in the legal system that he's facing. First off, Kee-Feed-D was involved in a jailhouse fight and he has since been charged with battery. Oftentimes, a jailhouse fight really won't go to trial.

They plead it out. It's kind of secondary, certainly somebody who's facing murder charges. A small jailhouse battery accusation is kind of minor. In this case, prosecutors are pushing for either a plea where he admits to it or they want to convict him at trial. And prosecutors have the strategy in mind that if they can use the jailhouse fight to show that Keefe D is a violent guy, that helps build their case. once you convict him of something violent, now that's public record that he's done something violent. He could do other things that are violent.

Exactly, because just the part of the defense so far has been that even though Keefey might have had drug and other kinds of crimes in his history as a young man that is an older man, he's no longer a threat to the community. So what prosecutors want to do is they want to show that a guy who's over 60 and has survived cancer, that he's still a threat because he's still violent. So that's the goal.

So he's going to face trial on that. count in April, 2025. That's the first thing. Second thing is that the judge has set a tentative trial date for February 26 on the Tupac Homicide. Originally, the Tupac Homicide was supposed to go to trial this year, first half of this year, but the judge, you know, acknowledging the vast amount of evidence, the fact that we're talking about a lot of old files, older people, some complexities, obviously a lot of people that are connected to the case are no longer alive. The judge gave them a delay until February 2026. And so we're fully expecting that's what the future holds. KVD has tried to get out of jail, to get bailed out, and to await trial from home.

The judge has been reluctant to go along with that. She's taken issue with the bail packages, quote unquote, it's what they call them the money that would be supporting the bail. So she's made him sit in jail. That's another thing that he has taken issue with and he raised in our interview. And so at the end of all this, it's been nearly three decades. You've got one guy in jail awaiting the first trial that we've seen in this murder. What does the legacy of this murder in this particular case end up being? It's a little bit hard to say, first off, I cover crime and I still am stunned and unpleasantly surprised that it took so long for law enforcement to be able to make an arrest in this kind of a case.

I mean, it is a different time. You didn't have the ubiquity of traffic cameras and cell phone cameras and all that. In 1996 is a whole different era when it comes to technology. So you didn't have all of that. You didn't have people on Twitter immediately saying, hey, this person just got shot on the street.

But if we were to take this back in time, let's say God forbid that Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin had been shot and killed on the streets of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, I have to think that those cases, might have been solved more quickly. Right, to which cops in Las Vegas and in L.A. have repeatedly said, like, we have had real issues to confront here. We've had the code of the streets.

We've had this sort of code of silence. And yet, like you said, so many questions throughout all of this. Josh Margolin, our chief investigative reporter, thank you so much. Thanks, Brad. Now, let's quickly hit up the other big stories in the world of true crime this week. First up, in Waterbury, Connecticut, you might have heard of this. A woman has been arrested for holding

her stepson in captivity at their home for over 20 years. The male victim was discovered when police responded to a report of an active fire at a residence. Well, the victim told first responders that he had intentionally set that fire, saying, I want my freedom. He further alleged he had been held captive by his stepmom since he was approximately 11 years old. Police said he had been forced to endure prolonged abuse, starvation, severe neglect, and inhumane treatment. In Winnipeg, Canada, authorities announced recently that after an exhaustive search, the remains of 39-year-old Morgan Harris had been recovered from a landfill. You might remember that last year, Jeremy Skibbetsky was charged, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of four indigenous women,

but not all the bodies had been found. Despite the pressure that local indigenous groups have continued to place on law enforcement, Morgan Harris is just the second victim whose remains have been located. Lastly, down in St. Petersburg, Florida, a couple has been charged with a kidnapping and murder of 16-year-old Miranda Corset, who was reported missing on February 24th. Investigators believe this couple, 35-year-old Stephen Gress and 37-year-old Michelle Brandis, first met Corset on a social media platform on Valentine's Day. Police alleged she stayed at their home for a few days and then was killed sometime between the 20th and 24th after some sort of dispute broke out between the three of them.

On March 8th, Michelle Brandis turned herself and her partner over to the police. They didn't have to go far to find Gress, who was already in jail on the unrelated charges of drug possession and threatening brandis with the harpoon. Both suspects have been charged with first-degree murder, and so far there have been no pleas, no statements by either defendant. All right, that'll do it for our very first episode of The Crime Scene. Thank you so much for being with us. The Crime Scene Weekly is a production of ABC Audio, produced by Nora Richie and Meg Fierro. Our supervising producer is Susie Lou. Mixing by Mig Fierro.

Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Tara Gimble, Madeline Wood, Josh Margolin, and Sasha Peznik. Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Laura Mayer is our executive producer. I'm Brad Milkey. I'll see you next time at the crime scene. The top stories, biggest headlines, entertainment buzz, and viral moments. You give us less than 10 minutes and we'll give you what you need to know.

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