Verdict in rap star’s death prompted by memoir
Crime sometimes pays with fame
Publicly confessing (or nearly so) to a cold-blooded murder in a book or documentary is a notorious limelight that some people can’t resist. Even if it gets them locked up or doomed to live in public infamy, a Northeastern University expert said.
That was the deal with the verdict in the cold-case slaying of rap superstar Tupac Shakur, said David Herlihy, a Northeastern University teaching professor at the College of Arts, Media and Design, and an entertainment lawyer who has followed high-profile crimes.
In Shakur’s case, Duane “Keefe D” Davis, 63, was convicted on Monday in the 1996 murder of the popular rap artist based largely on confessions he made in his true-crime memoir, “Compton Street Legend.” The killing had remained unresolved for decades.
And there have been other cases where murder defendants have seemingly implicated themselves in crimes they say they didn’t commit.
In such cases they either write books or participate in documentaries that only whip up more suspicion around them that lead to either trials or a life of added suspicion, all for what Herlihy says is a desire for publicity.
O.J. Simpson, the late American football player and media personality, also wrote what many observers believed to be a damning confession in a book he co-authored called “If I did it: Confessions of the killer.” Simpson was acquitted in a criminal trial in the death of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman 1995, but two years later was found liable for the murders in a civil suit brought by the families of the victims. Simpson insisted he was innocent.
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In the HBO documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” Herlihy said, where the words Durst said while filming led to a new trial and conviction.
“Some killers just can’t help themselves,” Herlihy said. “It’s like a narcissism, wanting to be in the public eye. They can’t keep their mouths shut.”
In the Shakur case, prosecutors relied heavily on Davis’s 2019 memoir, in which he wrote he and some associates were hunting for Shakur, 25, to seek revenge for a brawl earlier in the night, prosecutors said. Davis wrote in his book that he was in the white Cadillac that rolled up next to Shakur’s black BMW, and he handed the gun to a man in the back seat with instructions to kill.
Nevada law allows for police to charge someone with murder if they participated in the crime, even if they didn’t pull the trigger.
Defense attorneys argued that Davis co-wrote the book for money, and that he exaggerated and even made up parts of the story to make his story more sensational.
Herlihy said that was the same contention Simpson made for his book, which was billed as a hypothetical look at the slaying of Brown and Goldman in 1994.
“It was still a bizarre need to play this out in public and all but say ‘I did it’ “ Herlihy said. “If he was really innocent, you think he’d be grieving for his murdered ex-wife.”
There was a great public outcry over the book, which was temporarily pulled from publication until the Brown family sued for the proceeds. Simpson, ended up serving time for his involvement in the robbery of a sports memorabilia collector in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2007. He was convicted a year later and went on to serve nine years behind bars. He died in 2024 following his release on parole three years earlier.
Durst, a millionaire and heir to the estate of prominent New York real estate magnate Seymour Durst, was investigated for several high-profile crimes, including the unsolved disappearance of his first wife in 1982, and the 2000 killing of his longtime friend Susan Berman. Durst was also tried and acquitted in the 2003 murder of a neighbor.
“But for some reason he participated in a documentary about his life,” Herlihy said.
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During the filming of an HBO program in 2015, Durst was caught off camera stating “there it is, you’re caught,” followed by “what the hell did I do, I killed them all.”
Those words helped lead to a new trial in Berman’s death, for which Durst was convicted in 2021. He died in 2022 before he could face a trial over the disappearance of his missing wife.
Herlihy said that Durst, like the others, could have “just kept his mouth shut.” Instead, something drove them to seek “fame out of all this,” he added.
