Former Compton Drug Kingpin Confesses Connection to Tupac Shakur Murder
“I’m the only one alive who can really tell you the story about the Tupac killing.”
One of the most enduring mysteries in the modern history of crime is the murder of Tupac Shakur. Ever since the rap legend was killed by a shooter in a mysterious white Cadillac on the night of Sept. 7, 1996, the truth has been wrapped in layers of rumor, police corruption, and the no-snitching code of the streets.
A former Compton drug kingpin turned rapper named Keffe D (Duane Keith Davis) is dying of cancer. He wants to come clean, he says, and he may have done it in an interview for the upcoming USA documentary, Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. But he hasn’t ripped the veil off the mystery so much as he’s opened a slit to give us a peek.
There are good reasons to take Keffe D seriously, and one of them is this: Prior to the murder, Suge Knight and Tupac mixed it up Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.
Anderson, who was naturally a prime suspect for years, was also Keffe D’s nephew, who has been dead for years.
In the documentary D says he “was a Compton kingpin, drug dealer,” and he is “the only one alive who can really tell you story about the Tupac killing.”
He goes on to say that people have been after him for two decades. “I’m coming out now because I have cancer,” he says, “And I have nothing else to lose. All I care about now is the truth.”
Billboard reports in more detail about the rapper’s revelations, some of which he made on BET’s Death Row Chronicles.
Keffe D said he and his nephew (all South Side Crips) had been searching for Tupac when they saw him, then:
“All the chicks was like ‘Tupac’, and he was like, ‘Hey’, like a celebrity, like he was in a parade,” Davis says in the Chronicles episode that first aired in February. “If he wouldn’t even have been out the window we would have never have seen him.” Anderson, who was killed in a shootout at a Compton carwash in May 1998, was detained by Los Angeles police in Compton a month after the shooting in an unrelated investigation but never charged in the Shakur murder.
Davis claims he was in the front passenger seat of the car, while his cousin, [Orlando] Anderson, was in the backseat of the vehicle carrying two other Southside Crips gang members. “Going to keep it for the code of the streets,” he says in Chronicles. “It just came from the backseat, bro.” In previous interviews with police Davis has claimed Anderson was the shooter; before his death, Anderson denied being the triggerman.
That “code of the streets” is set in stone, but it seems pretty clear from D’s statement about being “the only one alive” that the killer is dead. Like his nephew.
Is an arrest around the corner? One Vegas TV station reports there is, despite police denials. Everyone will damn sure hear about it when—if—it happens.