Las Vegas police finally finish reading Keffe D's Tupac memoir

"—and I want to be very clear that nobody on this floor had got past chapter four," said Deputy Chief Rolanda Pike, who runs the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's brand-new Office of Published Confessions. She was standing in a parking garage on Sunday, explaining how a 1996 murder took the better part of thirty years to close, in the tone of a woman describing a brunch reservation that fell through.

Quick recap for anyone who was busy. Duane "Keffe D" Davis, the former Compton gang leader convicted of orchestrating the shooting of Tupac Shakur, was sentenced to 40 years to life this week. Judge Carli Kierny told him you don't get to take a man from his family and just walk away from it. Court watchers are calling the moment "major" and, in one case, "a whole mood."

Here is the part that has insiders spiralling. Davis spent years saying he was in the car. He said it in a memoir. He said it on camera, more than once, to interviewers who nodded politely and asked follow-ups.

Sources close to the situation describe him as the only murder suspect in American history with a press tour. Police, meanwhile, describe the period between 2019 and 2023 as "a reading backlog."

The unit

Which brings us to the real story, and darlings, it is a doozy. The Office of Published Confessions has six detectives, one conference room and a highlighter budget that sources describe as "aggressive." Its mandate is simple. Read everything.

"Every book in the true-crime aisle written by someone who says they were there," Pike told me. "We start with the ones where the author is on the cover. Then we work backwards to the ones with a quote from a podcast on the front."

The six meet on Sundays. Pike says that is the only day the room is free. Nobody has asked what the room is used for the other six days, and sources suggest nobody should.

"We used to wait for a tip. Now we wait for a paperback. It's the same process, honestly, but with a bookmark."

That was Pike again, who is quickly becoming the breakout personality of this entire affair. She told me the department has learned its lesson. She then asked if I had a copy of the memoir she could borrow, because the library's is checked out.

Early results

The first two weeks produced six leads. Insiders confirm they were all the same lead, printed in different fonts. One detective flagged a chapter heading as suspicious. It turned out to be the table of contents.

Still, morale is high. Pike says one of her people finished a whole hardback in a single weekend, "which is a department record, and frankly a personal record for him too."

Asked whether the unit would move on to audiobooks, Pike sighed. "We have a backlog of six. One of our guys gets carsick listening in the vehicle, so he's doing them at his desk, which is where the car was anyway."

The industry reacts

The true-crime world is, sources say, shaken. Brandt Oleander, a crisis publicist who represents three podcasts and a man who narrates them in a hoodie, called the news "an existential threat."

"If the police start reading confessions," he said, "what are we supposed to do? Solve things? That's not the format." He has already pitched a four-part series about the unit, titled Who Read It?, and says the trailer is "very moody."

Streaming insiders expect a bidding war. One executive, speaking on condition that I describe her as "a visionary," said a six-episode order was "basically guaranteed" and that episode six would "just be the sentencing with sad piano."

The grandfather defence

Back in court, the big swing from the defence was that Davis had changed. He'd got out of Compton. He was a grandfather now. Judge Kierny said she had heard variations of that for three years, and it did not move her.

Sources close to the courtroom describe the moment the line failed as "audible." One described it as the sound of a man realising that "I have grandchildren" is a fact and not a motion.

Retired detective Harlan Moss, who worked homicide in another city and now mostly works a boat, was unimpressed by the whole thing. "In my day we didn't read," he told me. "We waited for the suspect to walk into the station."

I put that to Pike. "He did walk in," she said. "On television. Several times. We had it on in the break room."

Developing

Pike says the unit will shut down the moment it catches up on the reading. As of Sunday the six of them are on page 40, collectively, of a book that everyone else finished years ago. She describes the pace as "steady."

As for Shakur, who was 25, sources confirm one detail that nobody in Las Vegas has managed to spin. He remains the only person in this entire story who never got to write the memoir.