Curse of the Dead

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.

Even before Anna Nicole's death — in fact, it started after Daniel's death — the tabloid media cast Howard K. Stern in the role of villain. The Los Angeles lawyer who handled Anna Nicole's modeling contracts had somehow managed to turn their professional relationship personal, around 2002. In seemingly every public photograph that had Anna Nicole at its center, Stern filled the margin. That included the scene in the Bahamas hospital room where a heavily sedated Anna Nicole would give birth to a daughter only to lose her son Daniel to an overdose of methadone. Media reports placed Stern in the room, fueling speculation that he provided the drugs to 20-year-old Daniel.

In the weeks to follow, Virgie Arthur went public with her conviction that Stern had a role in Daniel's death — and that if she wasn't careful, Anna Nicole "may be next." So when Anna Nicole died, it seemed to fulfill that prophecy. And in the weeks after her death, Stern's beady eyes and lurching gait suffered by comparison with Virgie Arthur's distraught demeanor and the earnest, sun-kissed mien of Larry Birkhead, Anna Nicole's other boyfriend.

The lawsuit by Stern against O'Quinn will provide the chance to see how much of these suspicions was warranted. Since the main characters, as well as the cast of ancillary characters, have already marched before national talk-show cameras and contributed to unauthorized biographies, followers of the case are unusually equipped to anticipate the testimony that will be given at trial.

Attorneys for O'Quinn can draw from a deep pool of witnesses who suspect Stern of having a role in Anna Nicole Smith's death, starting with O'Quinn's own client, Virgie Arthur, who can be expected to repeat her previous claims about Stern using drugs to control Anna Nicole and separate her from her family.

In establishing potential culpability for the death of Daniel Smith, California-based private investigator Jack Harding may be a key. Last March, Harding told CNN's Nancy Grace that he received a visit from Daniel about a month before Daniel's death in the Bahamas in which Daniel expressed concern about Stern's "control" over his mother.

"He told me that Stern had given orders to the staff that any time that he would call to hang up on him," Harding said of Daniel. "And the boy was frightened to death of Stern, according to what he told me."

Daniel planned to come back with money, Harding said, but never did. Bahamian police found Harding's business card in Smith's pocket when he died.

A list of witnesses who were to testify at the April inquest into Daniel's death reportedly includes two nannies to Dannielynn who claim to have heard Anna Nicole accuse Stern of killing Daniel.

That inquest, in the Bahamas, in which Anna Nicole was to be a lead witness, stalled when Stern's attorneys objected to the jury selection. The coroner, Roger Gomez, has since been dismissed from the case by the Bahamian Supreme Court due to his speaking about it to the media. Now, 13 months have passed since Daniel's death, and there is still no official ruling about the cause.

Though Stern and Birkhead have become cordial since the paternity battle over Dannielynn ended, there's no taking back statements Birkhead made in February about Stern enabling Anna Nicole's drug abuse. "We had a couple of clashes in the hospital room [during Anna Nicole's pregnancy] because she and Mr. Stern brought in a duffle bag," he said during testimony in Seidlin's courtroom, "and when there wasn't enough [pain killer] administered through the drips that she was on, they were taking [drugs] out of the bag... thwarting the efforts by the hospital to get her off the medications."

Ford Shelley, son-in-law of the man who owned the house in the Bahamas where Anna Nicole was living, told Bahamian police that on the day of Daniel's death, he saw Stern rifle through Daniel's pants pockets, finding two white tablets that he then flushed down the toilet.

Tasma Brighthaupt, whose husband, Maurice "Big Mo" Brighthaupt, was a bodyguard for Anna Nicole, will also be a crucial witness in the question of whether Stern ought to be a suspect in Anna Nicole's death. Tasma was one of two women who discovered Anna Nicole dead.