Curse of the Dead

On February 19, MSNBC's Rita Cosby caught O'Quinn and Virgie on their way into the courthouse. She asked O'Quinn about a report that Stern had requested a chance to see Anna Nicole's will in early February.

"Real fascinating, isn't it?" O'Quinn said. "Why did he need to read that will unless he knew she was going to die?"

O'Quinn was even more direct on February 21, speaking to Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, who remarked how it seemed that Virgie "doesn't have much fondness for Howard K. Stern" — to which O'Quinn replied, "She believes Howard K. Stern murdered her daughter."

In a March 15 appearance on Van Susteren's program, O'Quinn broadened his accusations to include the drug-overdose death of Daniel Smith. O'Quinn said that his client "has a granddaughter [Dan­nielynn] who's still in the hands of the man who all arrows are pointing to as having killed her daughter and her grandson."

As for Stern's alleged motive, in a March 27 interview, O'Quinn told Van Susteren that Daniel wanted to "investigate Stern, and he went to his mother to get the money, and Stern learned of that, and he decided he needed to get rid of Daniel."

These statements form the evidence in Stern's defamation suit against O'Quinn. To win his case, Stern must prove that the charges are false and — since Stern would likely meet the legal standard for a public figure — that O'Quinn knew his statements were false when he spoke. Because the statements suggest that Stern is a murderer, the case against O'Quinn will, in effect, be an evaluation of the murder case against Stern.

"The burden of proof is on the plaintiff in a libel case," Wood says. "Mr. Stern is prepared to prove by credible evidence that he had no involvement in the deaths of Anna Nicole and Daniel Smith."

In that sense, it would seem that by attracting a lawsuit from Stern, O'Quinn performed the ultimate service to his client, Arthur, whose own public remarks suggest she wanted nothing so much as the chance to investigate Stern's dealings with her daughter.

But that doesn't mean that O'Quinn, for all his famed ingenuity, hoped to get sued. "I don't think anyone wants to walk into a lawsuit," says O'Quinn's attorney, Klein. "John was facing a situation where Virgie was being slandered in the press by the Howard Stern media machine, and John felt that Virgie's opinion needed to be aired."

Still, it's a serendipitous turn of events for Arthur, who can now watch as one of the nation's foremost attorneys investigates the man who she thinks murdered her daughter. And it won't cost her a dime.

In the weeks after Anna Nicole Smith's February 8 death in a Seminole Hard Rock Hotel suite, Broward County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua Perper had to rule on the cause. Though it was soon evident that Anna Nicole had died from a lethal combination of drugs, Perper had to also consider the evidence gathered by Seminole Police Department investigators, who had interviewed witnesses and sifted through the material in the hotel suite. Since this was not a natural death, Perper would have to choose among accidental death, suicide, and murder.

The national tabloid media added another variable to Perper's calculation, which he acknowledged in the opening remarks of the news release that contained his ruling, when Perper congratulated his research team for "operating under intense public and media scrutiny."

A homicide ruling would have amplified the intensity of that scrutiny not just for Perper's team but for the police and prosecutors who would have had to build the case. By the time he issued his ruling, on March 26, Broward County had already played host to a media circus for more than six weeks.

According to Perper's report, the sheer volume of chloral hydrate, a prescription-strength sleep medicine found in Anna Nicole's body, suggested only two scenarios: that she was force-fed or that she voluntarily ingested it. And since Perper found "no oral trauma to suggest force-feeding," she must have taken the medicine voluntarily.

Perper eliminated suicide based on witness statements that she was in "good spirits," and the finding that Anna Nicole might have been able to survive the excessive doses of chloral hydrate had she not also had the flu and ingested a slew of pain and anxiety medication.

Not that there wasn't also evidence suggesting suicide. Perper conceded that Anna Nicole had made remarks about wanting to die not long after son Daniel's death in September 2006. She nearly drowned in a pool in the Bahamas around that time — an episode that looked suspiciously like a botched suicide. And Anna Nicole had made past statements that "she wished to die in the same fashion as her idol, Marilyn Monroe," who used chloral hydrate to commit suicide. For Perper, this evidence was not as persuasive as that which supported his final ruling: that Anna Nicole died by accident.

His explanation failed to placate the tabloid media and its consumers if only because the media had conducted a much more theatrical investigation in a venue less hostile to speculation than the one in which Perper toils.