This post was originally published on this site.
Keefe D once told the FBI he had no idea who killed Tupac Shakur, and pointed agents toward the Compton Police Department instead.
Those same 1998 notes became trial evidence Wednesday, when former FBI agent Wade Lee took the stand in Duane Davis’ murder trial.
Lee signed the original 1998 interview report alongside fellow agent Todd Holliday, and he testified Wednesday as the trial’s third day of witnesses began.
He told jurors he investigated Davis for drug trafficking and gang activity in the late 1990s, not for Shakur’s murder.
Davis was already a person of interest in the case even then, according to Lee’s testimony.
According to Lee and the interview notes, Davis said Suge Knight, and Tupac attacked his nephew Orlando Anderson in September of 1996 in Las Vegas over an earlier mall incident.
Davis also told agents he never had a problem with Suge Knight or his associates before that fight.
That 1998 account never named Anderson as the man who pulled the trigger on Shakur.
When agents pressed Davis to speculate about the shooter, he blamed Compton Police officers working for Reggie Wright Jr. and Suge Knight instead.
That sworn statement to the FBI contradicted Davis’ own retelling of the story in a 2008 interview with a different set of investigators.
In that interview, Davis said Anderson, seated in the back of a white Cadillac, fired the fatal shots while Davis sat up front.
Anderson’s name became attached to the killing well before that admission, but he was never charged and always denied any role.
He died in an unrelated Compton shooting in May 1998, according to AllHipHop’s earlier coverage of the case.
Davis repeated the Anderson account in his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” describing how he passed a gun into the back seat that night.
In the memoir, Davis wrote that the beating “gave us the ultimate green light to do something.”
A Nevada grand jury indicted Davis on one count of murder with a deadly weapon in September 2023.
Judge Carli Kierny later ruled that both the memoir and Davis’ recorded police statements could be used as evidence at trial, and she has said Davis’ own book, not new physical evidence, is what pushed prosecutors back into the decades-old case.
Prosecutors leaned on that shift in Davis’ own story during opening statements Monday, calling the 1996 killing an act of revenge.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors Davis did not pull the trigger himself, but planned the retaliation and armed the shooter.
Defense attorney Michael Sanft called the prosecution’s version of events fiction during his own opening statement Monday.
Sanft told jurors no one corroborates the state’s case and asked what facts prosecutors actually have after 30 years.
Davis rejected a plea deal that would have offered him 10 to 25 years before the trial began.
He has since pointed to his age and health, including cancer treatment and heart stents, as reasons he should not be behind bars.
Testimony is expected to continue for weeks as prosecutors work through a witness list of more than 30 names, with jurors now weighing FBI notes that contradict the very book that put Davis on trial.
