For many years, it seemed that the murder of Tupac Shakur, in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip in 1996, might never result in a suspect’s arrest, let alone a conviction. The police had theories about the assailants but lacked evidence. The white Cadillac that carried the shooter was never recovered. Neither was the gun. As the years passed, “Who shot Tupac?” became shorthand for an unsolvable mystery. But on Monday — a week shy of 30 years since the shooting — a jury in Las Vegas convicted a former member of the South Side Compton Crips of orchestrating a crime that turned Mr. Shakur into a pop cultural martyr and changed the trajectory of hip-hop. The guilty verdict, which could send the defendant, Duane Keith Davis, 63, to prison for life, was a moment of catharsis for many of those who knew Mr. Shakur. Some members of the rapper’s family released a statement saying they were “elated and relieved.”“It does feel like a little justice,” said Paul Stewart, a music producer who worked closely with Mr. Shakur on the soundtrack to “Poetic Justice,” the film that gave the rapper one of his first starring roles. “Maybe late, but it’s a little justice for Pac’s family and for the memory of one of our great icons of American music history."

For others who were close to Mr. Shakur, though, a long-delayed verdict did not bring the closure they desired. In a trial that relied largely on Mr. Davis’s own account of the shooting — shared in a memoir as well as in interviews with police officers and documentary filmmakers — there were no revelations in evidence, there was no proverbial smoking gun. Both of the men in the Cadillac who have been accused over the years of pulling the trigger are dead. “My appetite for justice has not been fed,” William Garland, Mr. Shakur’s father, said on Tuesday in a brief phone interview. Mr. Garland, who was absent for most of Mr. Shakur’s life and lost a legal dispute with the rapper’s mother over his estate after his death, followed the trial closely. He criticized the prosecution on social media, saying it lacked key evidence and relied too heavily on the words of a defendant with a reputation of being unreliable. “This information has been out there for years and years — why now?” Mr. Garland said. As the law enforcement investigation into Mr. Shakur’s death ground to a standstill, conspiracy theorists and true-crime documentarians picked up the mantle. But the answer to “Who shot Tupac?” is still not universally agreed upon. Mr. Davis has previously identified the shooter as his nephew Orlando Anderson, a fellow member of the Crips who, amid a gang feud, was publicly beaten by Mr. Shakur and his entourage of Bloods the night of the shooting. But other accounts suggest it was Deandrae Smith, another passenger in the white Cadillac. Mr. Anderson was killed in a gang-related shooting in 1998, and Mr. Smith died in 2004 of natural causes. The only man alive who would know as much as Mr. Davis about the moment when shots rang out on Sept. 7, 1996, is Marion Knight, the record label impresario known as Suge. He was in the driver’s seat beside Mr. Shakur. But Mr. Knight, who is in prison for a fatal hit-and-run in 2015, never had an appetite for talking to the police about that night. Some who were close to Mr. Shakur surrendered to the uncertainty long ago. “Only God knows what really happened — we can only speculate,” said Anthony Criss, the lead rapper of the hip-hop group Naughty by Nature, who was close with Mr. Shakur. Though he said he believed it was a rightful conviction, he did not necessarily feel relief, viewing the trial as having forced Mr. Shakur’s family and friends to relive the pain they have felt over his death.