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Death of Anna Nicole Smith: Mother
blames drugs
Anna Nicole Smith, 39, famous for
her looks and her marriage to an
ageing billionaire, was found dead at
the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and
Casino in Florida on Friday.
BY A CORRESPONDENT
February 12, 2007Vergie Arthur, Anna
Nicole Smith’s mother, said in a
television interview on Saturday that
drugs had probably claimed her
daughter’s life, as they had her
grandson, who died of an overdose of
drugs five months ago.
“I think she had too many drugs, just
like Danny,” said Vergie Arthur, a
former deputy sheriff. “I tried to
warn her about drugs and the people
that she hung around with. She didn’t
listen.”
“She was too drugged up,” Vergie
Arthur told Good Morning America. “By
the last interview I saw of her, she
was so wasted.”
Friends of Anna Nicole Smith, a
one-time topless dancer whose life
took off in the early 1990s first as a
Playboy playmate and then as the
striking young wife of an 89-year-old
Texan oil tycoon – who died the year
after their marriage – said Anna
Nicole Smith had been suffering from a
fever in recent days and was depressed
about the death of her son.
Daniel Smith, the 20-year-old son Anna
Nicole Smith had in her first marriage
to a cook when she was 18, died in his
mother’s hospital room in the Bahamas
in September 2006, days after she had
given birth to a girl, who was later
called Dannielynn in Daniel’s honour.
A postmortem showed that Daniel died
after mixing methadone, the treatment
for heroin addiction, and
anti-depressants.
Police have carried out eight bags of
evidence from Anna Nicole’s hotel room
in Florida and say they were looking
at CCTV footage from the premises to
gain clues about her final hours.
The deputy police chief of Seminole
confirmed on Saturday that there was
nothing to suggest foul play.
Even as a postmortem examination began
to establish the cause of the death of
the former model and
reality-television personality,
lawyers arrived at a courtroom in Los
Angeles to dispute her baby’s
paternity.
An ex-boyfriend, Larry Birkhead,
claims that he is the father of
Dannielynn, who is currently being
looked after by the Bahamian
Immigration Minister, a friend of Anna
Nicole Smith’s. Birkhead’s lawyer,
Debra Opri, has asked for a DNA sample
to be taken from Anna Nicole Smith’s
body to help his case.
But lawyers for Howard K Stern, Anna
Nicole Smith’s most recent partner,
who was in the hotel when she died,
have questioned the need for a sample.
“There’s no question about her being
the mother,” said James Neavitt,
Stern’s attorney. “So what’s the
purpose of the DNA testing? Why do
they need her DNA?”
Protracted lawsuits were aplenty in
Anna Nicole Smith’s complex life.
Her marriage to J Howard Marshall II,
owner of Great Northern Oil Company,
which lasted a year before his death
in 1995, had triggered a dispute over
the destination of his $1.6 billion
fortune. Anna Nicole’s legal battle
with Marshal’s family over the estate
reached the US Supreme Court in 2006
and now appears certain to continue
after both have died.
Anna Nicole Smith was also sued the
day before her death when she was
named in a class-action lawsuit
against TrimSpa, a weight-loss
supplement manufacturer, for whom she
was a spokeswoman. The company had to
pay out $1.5 million in compensation
in January 2006 for making
unsubstantiated claims about its
products.
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