The killing of gangsta rap superstar Tupac Shakur in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas in September 1996 has never been solved, leading to a swirl of wild conspiracy theories to develop in the absence of a conviction.
Suge Knight, Shakur’s boss at Death Row Records, who was in the car alongside him on the night he was mortally wounded in a hail of gunfire, is just one of several people who have been blamed for the assassination.
Rival rapper Notorious BIG, who was himself gunned down a matter of months later in LA, has meanwhile been accused of providing the murder weapon and commissioning a $1m Mafia-style hit on the man who bragged about sleeping with his wife on the infamous diss track “Hit ‘Em Up”.
As was the case with Elvis Presley, some of Shakur’s many fans refuse to accept he is really dead and prefer to believe instead he is living out his life in witness protection or hiding in Cuba away from the spotlight.
Now, 27 years on, we might finally see a solution to the notorious cold case after the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) unexpectedly executed a search warrant on a property in Henderson, a city 15 miles southeast of the gambling paradise, promising to reopen the mystery and perhaps provide answers.
Arguably the most plausible explanation we currently have as to the identity of the mystery gunman who took Shakur’s life comes from the work of Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Chuck Philips, who spent a year researching the murder for his September 2002 article “Who Killed Tupac Shakur?”
In it, Philips alleged that the most likely suspect in the killing was Orlando Tive “Baby Lane” Anderson, a member of the infamous Los Angeles gang the South Side Compton Crips, who was himself shot dead in a seemingly unrelated gangland shooting less than two years after Tupac.
On the last night of Shakur’s life, the rapper and his entourage had visited Las Vegas to attend the world heavyweight championship boxing bout between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.
After congratulating Tyson on his victory, the men had left the venue via the MGM Grand Hotel’s lobby, where one of Knight’s bodyguards, who belonged to rival LA gang the Bloods, spotted Anderson and pointed him out to the group, alleging that he was the person responsible for mugging Death Row employee Trevon Lane at Lakewood mall earlier that summer, stealing his company medallion as a calculated insult.
Shakur and four minders duly attacked Anderson in an assault caught on the resort’s CCTV, after which the rapper set out with Knight en route to the fashionable Club 662 night spot, in what would prove to be his final ride.
Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur in April 1996— (Shutterstock)
Philips believed the subsequent shooting of Tupac was orchestrated by the Crips as revenge for the beating Anderson had received, with Anderson himself firing the fatal shots from the window of a rented white Cadillac that had pulled up beside Knight’s black BMW sedan as it idled at traffic lights.
Las Vegas homicide lieutenant Larry Spinosa subsequently told the media that Anderson was not a suspect, the LVMPD seemingly discounting the possibility of his involvement because the killing had occurred so soon after he had been violently assaulted. He was eventually interviewed once by officers but was not charged.
Back in Compton a month after the Shakur assassination, Anderson was arrested along with 21 other alleged Crips members as part of a wider investigation into their activities, but was again not charged and would later say that he was a fan of Tupac’s records, denying any involvement in the murder.
Anderson would subsequently be shot in another gang face-off and confined to a wheelchair before dying at Martin Luther King Jr Community Hospital in Willowbrook, aged just 23, on 29 May 1998 after being fatally shot in the chest during a row at a carwash with two other men, both of whom were also killed in the incident.
According to The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the house on Maple Shade Street in Henderson raided by police on Monday belongs to 58-year-old Paula Clemons – the wife of Duane “Keefe D” Davis.
Keefe D, 60, himself a former Crips gang member, is Anderson’s uncle and has previously claimed to have been present at Tupac’s murder and seen his nephew pull the trigger, saying as much in the Netflix documentary Unsolved: The Tupac and Biggie Murders (2018) and his book Compton Street Legend (2019).
