How 'Unsolved Mysteries' Restaged Tupac's Murder

Original: “Behind the scenes of ‘Unsolved’ Shakur mystery” · Las Vegas Sun · Cathy Scott · March 14, 1997

In February 1997, a TV crew from Burbank traveled to Las Vegas. They rented a black BMW and a white Cadillac to restage the September 7, 1996, shooting at the intersection of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. The NBC program Unsolved Mysteries was covering the Tupac murder case. Cathy Scott, police reporter for the Las Vegas Sun and from the beginning the key local journalist on the case, accompanied the shoot and described her impressions in the first person on March 14, 1997.

A Second Attempt Without the Police

Initially, the production had shelved its plans because America’s Most Wanted had been faster. Now, Unsolved Mysteries took a fresh run at it. The crew interviewed Scott for two and a half hours, along with two of Tupac’s friends. The Metro Police homicide division declined an interview: publicity would not help solve the case.

Parallels After March 9

The timing made the broadcast on the evening of March 14, 1997, explosive. Five days earlier, on March 9, 1997, The Notorious B.I.G. had been shot dead in Los Angeles. In her article, Scott lists the parallels: both rappers died after a big night out in the passenger seat from gunfire coming from a passing car. Both were traveling with their label heads-Tupac with Suge Knight, Biggie with Sean “Puffy” Combs.

On the show, host Robert Stack posed the questions that would follow the case for years: “Why were Tupac’s trusted bodyguards unarmed? Why did the killer seem to target only Shakur?”—why Tupac’s bodyguards were unarmed, and why the shooter apparently targeted only him.

250 Calls and a Belated Conviction

A follow-up article in the Sun noted more than 250 calls after the broadcast, but no breakthrough followed. In September 1997, Scott published her book The Killing of Tupac Shakur.

Almost 30 years later, Stack’s questions have been partly answered. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the uncle of Southside Crip Orlando Anderson, told investigators in a confidential interview in 2008-and from 2018 on also publicly, in the BET documentary Death Row Chronicles and in his book Compton Street Legend (2019)—that he was sitting in the white Cadillac.

He was arrested in September 2023 and found guilty of murder in Las Vegas on August 31, 2026 (not final; sentencing set for October 13, 2026, as of October 2026). The prosecution saw him as the organizer who procured the weapon; who pulled the trigger was left open. A connection to the murder of Biggie, about which the show speculated, has to this day not been established in court.