Today, Explained - Who shot ya, Tupac?

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

For 27 years there was no arrest in the shooting death of rapper Tupac Shakur. Slate’s Joel Anderson explains how that finally changed. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette with help from Siona Peterous, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I am Joel Anderson. I'm a writer at Slate Magazine and host of the Slow Burn narrative podcast series, including season three, Biggie and Tupac. Joel's the kind of person you reach out to when there's been an arrest in the Tupac Shakur murder case. The only thing is there's never been an arrest in the Tupac Shakur murder case until now. We are here today to announce the arrest of 60-year-old Dwayne Keith Davis, a.k.a. Keefy D. He was charged with murder with use of a deadly weapon, and there's this tremendous breakthrough in an investigation that technically never went cold, but seemed destined to go unresolved in the legal system. Well, I know there's been many people who did not believe that the murder of Tupac Shakur was important to this police department.

I'm here to tell you, that was simply not the case. Big news on a case 27 years old coming up on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page

with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. The first thing I wanted to ask Joel Anderson was how surprised he was a week ago today when he got the news that there'd been an arrest in the Tupac case. Not very, because the guy who was arrested had kind of been implicating himself in Tupac's murder for at least the last five or six years.

So there's either two ways to think about it. One, well, they're just never going to arrest anybody just because they don't think they can make a case. Or that it's inevitable. Like one day somebody's going to be like, hey, this guy's been talking a lot about being there on the night that Tupac got killed. Maybe we should bring him in.

And so it seems that they finally settled on option B. Okay, I want to hear a lot more about how we got there and how this person goes so long without getting arrested, apparently. But let's just take it back to the 90s right now and the climate in which these two titans of rap were murdered. You know, Tupac in 1996 and Biggie, they're two of the biggest stars in America at the time of their death. But Tupac in particular, Tupac was a record-breaking rap artist. His last two full-length albums debuted at number one on the charts. All Eyes on Me, his double CD, even made it to number one on the pop charts. He'd been in a handful of movies, including Poetic Justice with Janet Jackson,

which is, you know, a movie. Not a great one, but it was a movie. No one made a mistake, but anybody make mistakes. And he certainly seemed poised to do even more in that medium. I can act. No one alive, I think, but anybody make mistakes. And he certainly seemed poised to do even more in that medium. I can act. No one alive, I think, has as much life experience to draw from. And for Tupac in particular, calling him controversial

doesn't quite cover it. Because first of all, at the time of his death, he'd not even been out of prison for a year on sexual abuse charges. It's not even about my trial no more. It's just about loud rap music, tattoo-having thugs. He's talking about thug life and all that, trying to... He's definitely guilty.

Anybody with thug life tattooed on their stomach is guilty. What type of reasoning is that? I mean, man, you know, there are a lot of famous rappers that have popped up in the aftermath over the last 27 years, and a lot of guys rappers that have popped up in the aftermath over the last 27 years. And a lot of guys that have stolen his swag, whether it's the tattoos, the bandanas, the nose rings, this sort of like, I don't give a fuck ethos really sort of long outlived him in his career. And so a lot of people have wanted to be Tupac.

But the problem is that not very many people could be him because it was a totally different time and he's a totally different person. I'm tired of waiting for my past to get into society. All I ever wanted to do was make me and everybody around me feel more comfortable about where we were, about the places that we stay. This is our home base. Let's build it up. Let's be happy about where we come from. You know what I'm saying? Instead of trying to assimilate and get a passkey to where they at. At the end of the day, I mean, Tupac was a lot of things to a lot of people. But in 1996, as he's just out of prison, he's released this hot album that's, you know, all over the pop charts.

He seemed newly ascended. He was poised to become, you know, one of America's biggest celebrities. And then what happens on September 7th, 1996 in Las Vegas? Man. So that night, Tupac had been part of a huge Death Row Records entourage at a Mike Tyson fight. Hey, hey, hey, hey, buddy. When Tyson get in the ring, he knock motherfuckers out. Well, that's what Tupac gonna do. I won't deny it.

I'm a straight rider. You don't wanna f*** up me. Got the police barking at me. Ladies, get ready to rumble. Mike Tyson, at the time, was fighting to regain one of his heavyweight belts. He fought kind of a tomato can named Bruce Eldon. So Tupac recorded the song that Tyson walked out to that evening. And he was even supposed to perform later that night at a nightclub owned by Death Row

Records CEO Suge Knight. After the fight is when things go awry. When niggas come against me, I'm gonna knock they punk ass out. If he didn't have anybody to fight, he'll find somebody to fight. One of the guys in Tupac's crew, he was a member of the Bloods' set Mob Pyrou, and they saw a young man named Orlando Anderson while walking through the MGM Grand Hotel in Vegas. That member of the crew, the Blood, told Pac, Isn't that Orlando Anderson?

The crip that stole our boy's death row medallion the other day? Tupac hears this and decides to handle things himself. Tupac says, he did what? I'm gonna go jump on this dude. Ain't nothing but against the party. He rushes over to Orlando Anderson, punches him, and the rest of the death row crew joins in and stomps him out right there in the casino.

You can see it on surveillance video from that night. Like Tupac Shug, they're jumping on him, you know, kicking him and everything else. And then they rush out of the MGM. They regroup at their hotel. They're on their way to this club that was owned by Shug called Club 662. And they're going to perform. And so while all this is going on, Orlando Anderson's licking his wounds. Not only did he get beat up, I mean, he got humiliated in front of everybody by a bunch of bloods.

That is a mortal sin for a crip, right? So he links up with his uncle and a couple of other friends as they're driving around Vegas that night, waiting around to see if they can see Tupac and his entourage. We was just all in the car together. This was the white Cadillac. Yeah. Used to go drink and smoke some weed. In fact, they were getting ready to go to a liquor store

when they heard a couple of women screaming Tupac's name on the street. And they say, oh, shit. That's Tupac. That's Suge Knight. He's hanging out the window like he was in a parade. Tupac. Yeah, he was.

And so they flip around and pull up to them at a red light at an intersection there in Vegas. An arm emerges from the car, 40 caliber gun, and shoots. He leaned over on the window, went down the window, popped. They were throwing them outside. I was popping. You know what I'm saying?

But they was on the other side. Right. And Tupac is shot four times, once in the arm, once in the thigh, twice in the chest. And he goes to the hospital from there, and it was a week later that he dies of his injuries. And it sounds like you know who did this, and I want to ask you how you know. I think I know. I think I know, Sean. I think I know.

Okay. Tell me how this investigation into the killing of Tupac Shakur goes, at least initially. Speaking with people who were there that night, I mean, one of the things that we do know from the Vegas police is that they were just sort of scattered. And they get there, Suge Knight is in his car, in the median, disoriented, shot, injured himself. There's all these other people that are part of the entourage that are like, what the hell just happened? And the police show up and handcuff them and put them there in the median. Now, keep in mind, these are people that are victims of a crime. They have witnessed their friend, their affiliate get gunned down in the street and they're traumatized. And yet the

police have sort of antagonized them. So that didn't do a lot to win over people and make them want to cooperate with the murder investigation. Right. And the police, you know, they were sort of slow. And some of that is because it was a drive-by shooting. I mean, it was really difficult to piece together who shot him, but they didn't do themselves any favor. But they did interview a few people, Orlando Anderson being one of them, and they just couldn't pin the shooting on him. You know, Orlando Anderson says to the police, I was a victim that night. I was attacked. You're interviewing me? Yeah, how dare you interview me and think that I would kill somebody? And so, they didn't get a lot of assistance in those early days.

And there wasn't really a lot of incentive to talk. I mean, keep in mind, in addition to the fact that the police worked as antagonists in this, this is fundamentally street stuff. And street stuff gets handled on the street. And given that, it's understandable why the Vegas Police Department

didn't get a lot of assistance from the people who were there at the time. So they've had all this forensic evidence that they've put in storage for the last 26 years, but it wasn't until recently that people started talking about, maybe I was involved with this, maybe I know what happened, that they started cracking it back open and were able to tie people to Tupac's murder. So how long is it until we have a lead in this case? It's not cold from, you know, 1996 to 2023, is it? No, it's not. And in fact, things start to open up in 2006 when the LAPD decides to look into Biggie's murder in LA. And they assign a guy named Detective Greg Kading. Well, initially,

I was assigned to work on the Biggie case because that was an LA based murder case. And by way of investigating Biggie's murder, we got involved in investigating Tupac's murder. And so he starts looking around trying to get some information. Well, when we were looking at Tupac's murder, we were evaluating two theories. The Suge Knight did it theory or the Southside Crips did it theory. And as we began to kind of go through a process of elimination, we were able to pretty quickly dismiss the Shug Knight theory. And of course, he starts looking into Orlando Anderson's life and all the people that he's associated with. Keefy D was Orlando's uncle.

That is correct. Keefy D was Orlando's uncle. How did you identify these four people in the car? Actually, through the confession of Keefy D himself. And so he interviews Keefie D in 2008. And the way that they were able to do this is that Keefie D was a well-known drug trafficker. He'd already spent some time in prison. They managed to catch him in the act, trying to resuscitate his drug dealing business. And they say, hey, look, we'll make a deal with you. Why don't you tell us what you know about the Biggie murder,

and maybe we'll cut you a break on your drug trafficking case. And he says, we didn't do that one. Which is, which one did you do? And then that's when it all starts to start to come out. Now, that investigation ultimately goes nowhere because at the time, LAPD was being sued by Biggie's family for kind of botching the investigation. They're able to settle the case. And so LAPD says, well, there's no need in doing anything else on this. We might as well shut down the investigation. So the investigation stops in like 2010. And it sort of sits there until 2018 when Keefie D starts giving interviews to hip hop shows talking about his involvement in the Tupac murder.

He's coming up for me and going, got to the light. And he happened to be hanging out the window. So what happens next? I ain't going to go into details like that, you know what I'm saying? But, you know, you got it in a book. So that's around, it's around 2018, 2019, when he starts raising his hand and saying, hey guys, I was actually involved in this, and let me tell you how. Let him buy the book then.

Okay, well I'm just going to read this passage. The shit was on. 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 backseat grabbed the Glock and started busting back. The first shot, skin shook in the head, and I thought that motherfucker was dead. As the rounds continued flying, I ducked down so I wouldn't get hit. Basically, yeah. You'd think closure is coming, but actually, probably not.

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What's going on there? Well, let's go back to 2008 after Keefie D. has spoken with LAPD under a proffer agreement, thinking that it's going to help him in his drug trafficking case. And he's cooperated with police. He's like, all right, I've done what I said I was going to do. You guys are going to cut me a deal. I'm free. So fast forward to 2018, and he's a middle-aged man. He's in his fifties then. And he starts giving a lot of interviews on hip hop YouTube channels about his involvement in this case. It wasn't until 2018 that this case was reinvigorated as additional information came to light related to this homicide, specifically Dwayne Davis's own admissions to his involvement in this homicide investigation that he provided to numerous different media

outlets. And actually in 2019, he releases his own autobiography, his memoir called Compton Street Legend. In that autobiography, he gives detailed explanations about what happened that night, September 7th, 1996, when Tupac was killed. And he says, hey, look, I was there. I was sitting in the passenger seat. My nephew was in the back. I had a couple of friends in the car with me. And this is how it all went down.

So he starts giving all this information away. And people are like, hey, he's kind of confessing to Tupac's murder. I wonder what's going to happen. What takes this arrest so long? Why does this happen seven days ago? There's a lot of competing theories about that. One is that maybe police were just waiting for him to give up enough information so that it would meet the really, you know, tough bar for a conviction. I mean, you know, if they bring this guy before everybody in public and say, hey, look, we've got somebody arrested in the Tupac murder, they want to make sure that they can get a conviction. I mean, you know, if they bring this guy before everybody in public and say, hey, look, we've got somebody arrested in the Tupac murder, they want to make sure that they

can get a conviction. What are the charges they're bringing against Keefie D? So they've charged Keefie D with murder with use of a deadly weapon. This is the indictment we've been waiting almost three decades for. And police said when they brought him in that they never had the necessary evidence to bring the case forward and present it for criminal charges. And so it's evident that everything that Keefe D has been saying since 2018 is the biggest piece of it. This ultimately led to us procuring a search warrant, which was executed at Mr. Davis's residence in Henderson, Nevada. And following the execution of that search warrant, this case was presented to the grand jury, which ultimately led to Davis being indicted on charges of murder. I think just as a note of explanation, because we talked a little bit about his cooperation with

police earlier with LAPD, there are a lot of people that seem to believe that Keefe D. had a really poor understanding of what the legal implications were for this work, that he thought that because he had already cooperated, that he could just kind of say whatever, that he had immunity, that he confused a proffer agreement with immunity. That's not how it works. And in fact, Nevada doesn't have a statute of limitations. Like, they can charge you for murder at any point. So, they just kind of were laying in wait, is what it seems like. And Keefie D incorrectly believed that, hey, I've already told the police what I did, so I'm good now. It has often been said justice delayed is justice denied, but not in this case.

Today, justice will be served in the murder of Tupac Shakur. So is this it, Joel? Is this it after 27 years? Is this the conclusion that Keefie D. Davis pulled the trigger, murdered Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas in September 1996? No. No, there's a lot of things at play here. For one, Keefie D is not thought to have been the gunman in this case. And there's some confusion around that. It's believed to have been one of the people who was riding in the backseat of the car with him on that night in September, 1996. Those two people, Orlando Anderson, his nephew, who he sort of tried to implicate as the guy who did the shooting. Right. And then there's another guy, the DeAndre Smith man that I mentioned earlier.

And one of the witnesses in the grand jury said that it was DeAndre Smith who actually did the shooting himself. So it's unclear why Keefy D is trying to create this sort of confusion. But I would imagine that he's cagey. Like this is a dude who had a couple of drug trafficking organizations. He's not a dumb man. And so he probably understands that if I keep some of these details murky

and people can't quite figure it out, that maybe that's another layer of protection in any criminal proceedings. But you know what? He's also written things in his book that he later disavows in interviews. Like he says in his book, after we murdered Tupac, we went back to our hotel and poured out a 40 for him and drank to him, right?

In an interview that he does, he says, nah, I didn't do that. Like, that's just something you sometimes write to just make things seem, you know, a little more dramatic or whatever. So again, we're not talking about the most trustworthy dude here. And also, there's still not going to be a lot of cooperation among the remaining witnesses, of which there is one. Suge Knight. There was only two people in the car. And Pac-Knight's going to tell the story. I ain't going to tell the story, but I'll tell you this.

I never had nothing bad to say about Orlando because, number one, he wasn't a shooter. Number two, he came to my ear and then told me to let me go and tell the truth. Suge Knight said from prison the other day he told TMZ that he's not going to help. And you are saying that if you're called to testify by either side, you will not comply. You will not testify. Do I have that right? As I said, I wouldn't go. I wouldn't testify.

None of that. Free KPD. He doesn't want KPD toie D to go to prison? Let's get one thing straight, first and foremost. If he had an involvement with anything, if he didn't have any involvement with anything, I wouldn't wish somebody to go to prison on my word as enemy.

He knows Keefie D going back to playing Pop Warner football and comping him, right? So they have this relationship as well. So you can charge a ham sandwich, right? But getting a conviction is going to be something else. And, you know, the one thing that Keefie D has on his side is that he's been sort of sprinkling in a few lies with the truth all along to sort of, you know, confuse the record here. What do the fans, you know, think about the way this is played out?

You know, you made a whole show about this East Coast, West Coast beef between Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. Both are gunned down in the 90s. Neither crime is ever solved. How do fans contend with that? I mean, I think they're handling about as well as they could, right? I think there is some relief at the idea that, well, somebody is going to go through some legal hell, legal peril. You know, somebody will pay some sort of a price for having killed Tupac. But I also think that the fans of Tupac have kind of come to

grips with the idea that I'm just going to have to love him and not think too much about how it all ended. Because if you're a fan of Tupac, I mean, the music is timeless. It'll live forever. The work that he did, the influence he had, you can see all of his sons and daughters in hip hop today, right? And the influence he's had on them. So that is what is going to have to be the thing that carries them not anything that happens in court and I think that's

probably the way Tupac would probably feel about it as well he was dubious about the American criminal justice system and its ability to you know resolve these sorts of things so I think the music and his art are the things that we're just gonna have to take with this going forward. Joel Anderson Slate, also one of the hosts of the Slow Burn podcast. Season three is the one you want to listen to if you want to learn more about Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. Hadi Mawagdi produced our show today. He had help from Siona Petros.

Matthew Collette edited. Laura Bullard fact-checked. And David Herman mixed. The rest of the Today Explained team includes Victoria Chamberlain, Halima Shah, Miles Bryan, Avishai Artsy, Amanda Llewellyn, John Ahrens, Patrick Boyd, Rob Byers, and now Isabel Angel too. Welcome, Isabel. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. My co-host is Noel King.

And we use music by Breakmaster Cylinder when we feel like it. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is part of Vox, which is totally free, thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. Join us at vox.com slash give. We're off Monday for Indigenous Peoples Day, back on Tuesday with more Today Explained. A quick favor before we go.

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