Autopsy photo: police close their probe without result

Original: “Metro closes probe into leaked Shakur photo” · Las Vegas Sun · Ed Koch · October 24, 1997 (often listed as August 24, 1997)

The National Enquirer had offered $100,000 for a picture of Tupac Shakur’s body. When an autopsy photo actually turned up in Cathy Scott’s book The Killing of Tupac Shakur, Las Vegas police feared that someone in the department or the coroner’s office might have sold it. After a month and a half, Metro Police closed their internal investigation without a result.

Nine interviews, no charges

Nine police and coroner’s office employees were questioned. All of them denied slipping the author a photo. No one was charged. Cathy Scott declined to comment and referred questions to her publisher.

Undersheriff Richard Winget explained the suspicion: if an employee had used county equipment to take a picture and then sold it, that would have been embezzlement. Investigators also made a side discovery. Two detectives had taken Polaroids of Tupac at the morgue for a police training manual. Those pictures were pulled from the manual and destroyed, and the officers were cleared.

Both the coroner’s office and the police stressed that the photo in the book was not an official one. Neither, however, denies that the photo is genuine.

The publisher doesn’t care about the source

Publisher Anthony Curtis of Huntington Press stuck to his line: “I don’t think people care whether the photo came from Pluto.” The photo, he said, was meant to stop the rumors that Tupac was still alive. All 25,000 copies of the first printing had shipped, and a second printing of the same size was about to start. The book was already the publisher’s biggest seller.

An open question and a wrong date

Who leaked the photo has never been made public. The sums the tabloids were offering show plainly what a business pictures of Tupac’s body had become. Contrary to Curtis’s hopes, the photo did not put an end to the “Tupac is alive” theories.

This Las Vegas Sun article is often listed under August 24, 1997. That cannot be right: the book was officially released on September 8, 1997, and the article says the investigation took a month and a half. The paper’s archive dates it October 24, 1997 (Ed Koch, published 10:59 a.m. Pacific time). Undersheriff Winget spoke on Thursday, October 23.