Greg Kading, the former Los Angeles police detective who led a task force investigating Tupac Shakur’s unsolved 1996 murder, said the conviction of Duane “Keffe D” Davis felt like “vindication” after nearly three decades.
Jurors deliberated for three hours before returning a guilty verdict on the first-degree murder charge in the 1996 drive-by shooting of Shakur. Kading told Rolling Stone in his first interview since the verdict: “It’s a prosecuted case with a conviction, and so there’s justice. It sets history straight.”
Davis, a former Compton gang leader, was arrested in 2023 and has been in custody since. In a 2008 surreptitiously recorded interview with investigators, Davis described riding in a car with his nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson and others when they spotted Shakur in a black BMW driven by Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996. Davis said he passed a loaded .40-caliber Glock to the back seat before Anderson opened fire.
Kading published a book titled Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations in 2010 after leaving the LAPD, revealing details of Davis’s confession. The defense argued Kading was a “disgraced” officer who had improperly obtained investigative files, but prosecutors countered that he had simply written a book as a private citizen, similar to other retired officers with high-profile cases.
Davis’s sentencing is scheduled for October 13. Kading said he has no regrets about his role in the investigation. “If I didn’t go public with the case, Keffe D never talks,” he said. “And if he never talks, we never get a prosecution.”
Source: Rolling Stone
