Murder Rap

He was supposed to solve the murder of The Notorious B.I.G., and kept running into Tupac along the way. Greg Kading spent 22 years as a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, latterly in robbery-homicide. In the 2000s he led a joint task force of local and federal agencies. He retired in 2010 and self-published his book a year later.

A self-published book

The theory: revenge for the brawl

Kading describes his task force’s work and leans heavily on statements Duane “Keffe D” Davis gave to investigators. His core theory on Tupac: Davis’s nephew Orlando Anderson fired the shots, using a gun Davis had supplied. The motive, he argues, was revenge for the beating at the MGM Grand a few hours earlier.

Kading goes further and claims that people in the music business were behind both murders. He names Sean Combs and Suge Knight. When the book came out, Combs dismissed this as “pure fiction,” and relatives of the victims also disputed it. Neither Combs nor Knight was ever charged in Tupac’s killing.

The core holds up

Murder Rap is an investigator’s account with its own agenda: grounded in police work, but partisan and contested in its more sweeping conclusions. Its core has nonetheless held up. When Davis was charged in 2023, Kading’s earlier investigation was seen as one building block of the case. In August 2026 a Las Vegas jury found Davis guilty of murder; like Kading, prosecutors framed the killing as an act of revenge. The verdict is not final, and Davis has said he will appeal (as of October 2026).

The counterpart from Davis’s own point of view: Compton Street Legend. On the night itself: the 1996 shooting.