Explosive new details have emerged in the long-unsolved murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, with court documents revealing that Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the man charged in the 1996 killing, claims that music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs offered him $1 million to kill Tupac and his associate, Suge Knight. The accusations, which have surfaced in court documents related to Davis’s murder indictment, have ignited a firestorm of speculation and re-opened one of hip-hop’s most enduring mysteries.
According to police transcripts and court filings, Davis told authorities that Diddy, then the head of Bad Boy Records, had a private conversation with him in a Los Angeles deli. During the meeting, Diddy allegedly offered the hefty sum to Davis to “take care of” the two men, calling them “a couple of problems.” The alleged hit was carried out just hours after Tupac and Knight were involved in a physical altercation with Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, at a Mike Tyson boxing match in Las Vegas. The timing of the drive-by shooting, which occurred on the same night as the fight, lends a new layer of detail to the decades-old case.
Davis, who has long been known to investigators as a key figure in the murder, was arrested in 2023 and charged with one count of murder with a deadly weapon. He is the only person ever charged in the case and the last living suspect from the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired. In his 2019 tell-all memoir and subsequent interviews, Davis admitted that he was in the car but claimed he was not the shooter. His public accounts, in which he implicated himself and others, led Las Vegas police to reopen the case and ultimately secure his indictment.
While Diddy has consistently denied any and all allegations of his involvement, calling the claims a “desperate cash grab” from individuals facing legal trouble, his name has appeared more than 70 times in the court documents. According to the Associated Press, prosecutors have cited Davis’s claims in their motion to keep him in jail without bail. Though Diddy has not been charged in connection with the murder, the surfacing of his name in a formal court case puts him at the center of a criminal investigation that has been cold for nearly three decades. The case is a major test for the Las Vegas District Attorney’s office, as it relies heavily on Davis’s own testimony and book to prove its case.
