Biggie Smalls’ still-unsolved killing keeps surfacing in a courtroom where no one is charged with it. Why?

A Trial About One Murder Keeps Pulling in Another

Activelifezero.com – Closing arguments are set to arrive Monday in the high-profile prosecution of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who stands accused of orchestrating the September 1996 drive-by shooting that killed rapper Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. Yet the name that has refused to stay out of the courtroom is not Shakur’s. It is Christopher Wallace — Biggie Smalls, The Notorious B.I.G. — whose own unsolved killing four months later has threaded itself through nearly every witness account, every investigative timeline, and every piece of paperwork in the case.

Less than two weeks of testimony have unfolded, and within the first hour of opening statements, prosecutors had already invoked Wallace’s name. Two witnesses called to the stand were originally assigned to investigate the Biggie Smalls shooting, not the Shakur case. Davis himself, in a 2019 memoir, wrote that he was in the vicinity when both men were gunned down. The overlap is not incidental; it is structural.

The Day the Two Murders Collided

On March 9, 1997, Wallace sat in his car at a red light outside the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, having just left a music-industry party. Shots rang out. He died. Six months earlier, Shakur had been shot outside a Las Vegas nightclub after an NBA game, and the hip-hop world had already been convulsed by what many called a manufactured East-West rivalry. Wallace, asked about the feud on San Francisco radio station KYLD just days before his own death, had grown visibly weary of the spectacle:

“I’m just getting over – you know what I’m saying – this whole situation with this East Coast-West Coast thing, you know?”

He added that he wanted to “squash it,” calling the rivalry “game over.” Four days later, the rivalry claimed him anyway.

LAPD Lt. Anthony Alba, speaking at the scene’s aftermath, acknowledged the obvious question: whether two former friends, both gangster-rap stars, had been killed by the same hand. “Given the fact that they were both gangster rap artists, naturally our people will be contacting the Las Vegas authorities to see if there was any connection in the two,” Alba said. Nearly three decades later, that question remains officially unanswered, though the Davis trial has laid bare just how entangled the two investigations became.

A Lawsuit That Unlocked a Locked Case

The Wallace investigation sat dormant at the LAPD for close to a decade. What jolted it back to life was not a new witness or a new piece of physical evidence. It was a 2002 federal lawsuit filed by Wallace’s family against the city of Los Angeles. The suit alleged that police officers — including one with ties to Death Row Records, Shakur’s label — had been responsible for the drive-by and that the department had deliberately failed to pursue leads in order to shield its own personnel. The LAPD denied every allegation.

Still, the pressure of litigation forced the department to act. In 2006, then-Chief William Bratton assembled a task force specifically tasked with finding Wallace’s killer. The interviews that task force conducted, driven by the need to answer the family’s lawsuit, produced an unexpected byproduct: a break in the long-stalled Tupac Shakur investigation. The family ultimately agreed to dismiss the suit, but only after a court order required the city to pay $1.1 million in legal fees and costs.

The irony of the trial’s present posture is sharp. Less than two weeks after opening statements concluded, a judge declared a mistrial after discovering that a critical transcript — one alleging the involvement of an LAPD officer — had been concealed in the lead detective’s desk. The very institutional opacity the Wallace family sued over in 2002 reasserted itself inside the Shakur courtroom.

How a Hunch Became a Defendant

Daryn Dupree, an LAPD detective who participated in the task-force interviews, testified during the trial’s first week that Davis was flagged by investigators working the Biggie Smalls case on little more than instinct. “Everybody was a suspect at that time,” Dupree said. One of the scarce leads in the Wallace killing involved eyewitness reports that shots originated from a Chevrolet Impala. Davis was known to drive one.

He was also known, in the neighborhood, for something else. “We knew that Mr. Davis was the man with all the money in their ‘hood,” Dupree testified. After officers caught Davis in possession of a gallon of PCP and a kilogram of cocaine, the detective said the department gained leverage to extract information. Davis had already cooperated with the FBI on two prior occasions — in 1998 and again in 1999 — seeking leniency in separate matters, and on both occasions he stated that he and his crew had nothing to do with the murders of Shakur or Wallace.

When Dupree and other LAPD investigators sat down with Davis in 2008, the defendant acknowledged being at the same Petersen Automotive Museum party where Wallace had been before getting shot. Beyond that, Dupree testified, Davis claimed ignorance of the shooting itself. “He said, ‘No, we didn’t have anything to do with that one,'” Dupree recalled.

Why the Connection Matters Now

The trial’s architecture — a Shakur prosecution that cannot proceed without repeatedly invoking the Wallace investigation — underscores a broader truth about American homicide cases involving celebrity figures: when two high-profile killings occur in rapid succession and share cultural context, the investigative record becomes a single, tangled document even if no single perpetrator is ever formally charged for both. Wallace’s murder remains officially open. No one has been convicted of it. And yet his name, his car, his last known location, and the detectives who once sat across from him in a 2008 interview room have all become load-bearing elements in a courtroom trying to resolve a different death.

Whether closing arguments on Monday will produce a verdict that clarifies the Shakur killing, or whether the mistrial pattern will repeat, the Wallace thread will remain woven into the record. Thirty years after two friends were gunned down within months of each other, the question Alba posed in 1997 — whether the two deaths share a single author — has never been answered by a jury. It has only been asked, again and again, in different rooms, by different people, with different stakes.