[AlexDatig]

February 10, 2007

Autopsy Gives No Fast Clues to Smith’s Death

By JAMES BARRON

As a medical examiner on one coast conducted an autopsy and a judge on another coast ordered her body preserved for 10 days, Anna Nicole Smith monopolized the gaudy, gossipy celebrity stage yesterday as she had tried to do in life.

The medical examiner in Broward County, Fla., called her death “sudden, unexpected and unexplained,” but said more tests were needed to determine the cause. Ms. Smith, 39, a former Playboy model who became a pop-culture punch line in the 1990s after she married an octogenarian tycoon, was found dead Thursday in a hotel suite in Hollywood, Fla.

Yesterday was a day of almost nonstop coverage by cable television networks, and a day when a third man said he could have fathered Ms. Smith’s 5-month-old daughter, not either of the two men already fighting over paternity.

It was a day when the police chief whose officers were dispatched to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino put to rest a rumor that had swirled in the scramble for details on Ms. Smith’s final days — that her companion, Howard K. Stern, was flushing away drugs when paramedics arrived.

The chief, Charlie Tiger of the Seminole Police Department — which had jurisdiction because the hotel is on Indian land — said, “None of our officers who arrived on scene saw anything like that.”

The medical examiner said only prescription drugs were found in the room.

And it was a day when even Ms. Smith’s hardscrabble childhood underwent revision. “She didn’t come from a small town, as she said she did,” her mother, Virgie Arthur, said on “Good Morning America.”

Ms. Smith had claimed the small town of Mexia, Tex., about 80 miles south of Dallas, as her birthplace. Ms. Arthur said she once asked Ms. Smith why she had reinvented her biography: “You’re born in Houston, a middle-class family. Why do you tell that story?”

“She said, ‘Mom, nobody wants to read books or see people on TV concerning, you know, middle-class girl found a rich millionaire and married him. There’s not a story in that,’ ” Ms. Arthur recalled. “She said, ‘The story is I come from rags to riches, and so that’s what I’m going to tell.’ ”

Ms. Arthur said Ms. Smith told her, “ ‘Mom, if my name is out there in the news, good or bad, doesn’t matter, good or bad, I make money, so I’m going to do whatever it takes.’ ”

Ms. Arthur blamed drugs for her daughter’s death. “I think she had too many drugs, just like Danny,” she said, referring to Ms. Smith’s 20-year-old son, who died last fall while visiting Ms. Smith and her newborn daughter in the hospital in the Bahamas, “and I tried to warn her about drugs and the people that she hung around, and she didn’t listen.”

In California, the judge in the paternity case over Ms. Smith’s daughter, Dannielynn, denied a request for immediate DNA samples from Ms. Smith’s body. The judge, Robert Schneider of Los Angeles County Superior Court, also turned down a request for custody from Larry Birkhead, an ex-boyfriend who is contesting Mr. Stern’s paternity.

The judge ordered that Ms. Smith’s body not be disposed of until Feb. 20, when he scheduled a hearing to decide the paternity claims. He could order DNA samples then.

Mr. Stern is listed on the girl’s birth certificate as the father. But yet another man said yesterday that he might be the father. Prince Frederick von Anhalt, 59, who is married to the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, 90, told The Associated Press that he and Ms. Smith had had an affair since the mid-1990s.

“If you go back from September,” when Ms. Smith gave birth, Prince Frederick said, “she wasn’t with one of those guys; she was with me.”

He told The A.P. that he met Ms. Smith when she approached him and Ms. Gabor at the Plaza Hotel in New York. He said this was during Ms. Smith’s 14-month marriage to the Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, who died in 1995 at 90.

In Florida, officials provided some details about the scene in Ms. Smith’s hotel room when paramedics arrived. Chief Tiger said there was no evidence of a crime. And the Broward County medical examiner, Dr. Joshua Perper, said he had ruled out blows to her body or asphyxiation as possible causes of death.

He said that more tests would have to be done to establish why Ms. Smith died.

Dr. Perper said that she had apparently been sick for several days with flulike symptoms. But he said the autopsy had shown only “subtle findings” in her heart and gastrointestinal tract. He said she had a bruise on her back from a minor fall in the bathroom several days ago.

He said there were medications but no illegal ones in her room, and no pills in her stomach. He said the authorities had compiled a long list of prescription drugs she was taking.

Jessica Seubert and Lisa Muñoz contributed reporting.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company