No Leads, Lots of Skepticism: Fans Believe Tupac Is Alive

Original: “No leads, lot of skepticism in rapper’s death” · Associated Press, reprinted in the Las Vegas Sun · Robert Macy · May 9, 1997

Eight months after the shooting, the AP took sobering stock: Las Vegas police had no new leads, and tips from the public were heading in an unexpected direction. Instead of clues pointing to the shooter, 80 percent of callers reported that Tupac was still alive.

80 Percent Believe It Was Staged

Lieutenant Wayne Petersen reviewed the tip sheets forwarded to police by Unsolved Mysteries following its March broadcast: “80 percent of them think he’s still alive.” And: “It’s amazing what people will believe.” Viewers, Petersen said, believed Tupac had staged his death. To that, he added a pointed aside: you could see what death had done for his CD sales.

Stonewalling in the Convoy: Witnesses Recognize No One

Otherwise, hundreds of tips and daily new calls yielded nothing useful. Nor did the companions in the convoy provide any help. Two witnesses had hinted they might be able to recognize the shooter, but took investigators no further: bodyguard Frank Alexander looked at photos in an Orange County restaurant and recognized no one. Rapper Malcolm Greenidge (E.D.I. Mean) told Compton police he had never seen the shooter and did not want to look at the photos.

Note on the archived text: A punctuation mark is missing at the end there, and the witness’s name is misspelled as “Greenidge.” Petersen’s quote “hundreds” refers to the tips since the crime overall.

A Years-Long Dead End, and a 2026 Conviction

The report illustrates the dead end in which the case was stuck for years: witnesses from Tupac’s circle who did not want to talk to the police, and police whom that circle mistrusted. On top of that came the “Tupac is alive” theories, which were fed anew with every posthumous album.

The breakthrough did not come from the 1997 tips. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, uncle of Southside Crip Orlando Anderson, described his role to investigators in 2008 and publicly from 2018 onward. In September 2023, he was arrested, and on August 31, 2026, a Las Vegas jury found him guilty of murder (not final, as of October 2026). Sentencing is scheduled for October 13, 2026.