David L. Walden, 51, was a man who came to Honolulu for work and ended up dying in a place that should have felt ordinary: a waterfront parking lot. On April 16, 1994, he was shot to death in the parking lot at 711 North Nimitz Highway. Witnesses described a motorcycle rolling up with two riders; the passenger got off and opened fire, then jumped back on as the driver accelerated away.
Both wore helmets, turning their faces into blanks and the moment into a blur that investigators would replay for decades. 
The killing didn’t happen in a vacuum. Walden was an executive with a Mainland company that supplied and leased the specialized vehicles film and television productions depend on—big rigs, camera trucks, mobile dressing rooms, the unglamorous muscle behind glamorous scenes. That niche business had been simmering with conflict in Hawai‘i, where control of production vehicles meant control of jobs, schedules, and money. Law enforcement authorities later characterized the shooting as the kind of hit that fit the industry’s darker side: fast, targeted, and designed to leave nothing behind but questions. 
In the accounts that followed, the details around why he was there sharpened the sense of motive. Reporting connected Walden’s presence at the waterfront to the logistics of film-truck operations—he was at Pier 24 to take delivery of vehicles tied to a television production, and he was shot while waiting for a business appointment with Teamster movie drivers. It was the kind of meeting where paperwork and keys change hands, where a small delay can cost thousands, and where grudges—if they exist—have the perfect excuse to be near you. 
Investigators did look hard at the people most often named in the orbit of that world. Two figures repeatedly surfaced in public reporting: George Cambra Sr. and Joseph “Joe Boy” Tavares. Authorities questioned them about Walden’s murder, and both denied involvement; later accounts said there was never enough evidence to support allegations against either man. Still, the same names echoed through related federal investigations of violence in the production-truck business, and a federal grand jury heard testimony about the Walden homicide in 1999—yet no murder charges resulted. 
What did lead to arrests and prison time was a separate but intertwined thread: the arson attacks that gutted competitors in the production-truck market. Federal cases established that trucks and equipment owned by competing companies were deliberately burned in 1991, and the prosecutions that followed culminated in convictions and sentences—Tavares was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, while Cambra pleaded guilty and later received a two-year federal sentence, with court records describing his cooperation against Tavares. Those arson convictions didn’t solve Walden’s murder, but they reinforced the backdrop investigators and reporters kept returning to: intimidation, monopoly-seeking, and a film-support industry where threats could spill into real violence. 
As the years passed, the case cycled through renewed attention. A later cold-case review included testing a cigarette butt from the scene, but the DNA matched the victim, not a fleeing gunman. On milestone anniversaries, Walden’s family and police appealed publicly for help, describing leads that still needed corroboration and a story that someone out there might finally complete. But for all the re-examinations, the core fact remained unchanged: the shooters on the motorcycle vanished into Honolulu traffic, and the case has stayed open without any arrest or prosecution for Walden’s killing. 
