Curse of the Dead

In an interview with Fox News' Van Susteren, Tasma Brighthaupt said she found it odd that after encountering Stern at a Hard Rock Hotel elevator on the afternoon of Anna Nicole's death, he told her he was coming down to make a phone call — except that he didn't make a call; he boarded the elevator again and went back to the room with the Brighthaupts. Tasma also found it strange that he would leave Anna Nicole rather than stay till she awoke.

She never explicitly accused Stern of murder, but Tasma told Van Susteren, "A lot of things are bothering me. I have a lot of suspicions."

Former MSNBC talk-show host Rita Cosby can expect to be called upon to produce evidence supporting the most explosive allegations in her book Blonde Ambition. The tawdry text, which went straight to the New York Times bestsellers list when it debuted last month, says that Stern and Birkhead were lovers and that they struck a deal whereby Birkhead would not challenge Stern's control of the Anna Nicole Smith estate in exchange for Stern's not challenging Birkhead's custody of Dannielynn and letting him live in Anna Nicole's Studio City, California, home, where Birkhead remains today.

It remains to be seen whether O'Quinn will be able to call witnesses who can corroborate two other pieces of circumstantial evidence he made public last February: that Stern had asked to see Anna Nicole's will a few days before she died and that there were several life insurance policies that named Stern as the beneficiary. These allegations appear to be the fruits of the investigation conducted by O'Quinn's in-house P.I., Don Clark.

O'Quinn's attorney, Klein, refused to discuss those questions in advance of the trial. Clark also declined to elaborate on his findings.

Stern's attorney, Lin Wood, calls the allegation of life insurance policies "absolute, total, unadulterated fiction." He asserts that a faxed request for a copy of the will has a misprinted date and that the matter was clarified in Seidlin's courtroom, in O'Quinn's presence. On this point, Wood says, "we're prepared to prove actual malice, which is to say Mr. O'Quinn had knowledge of the falsity of his allegation when he uttered the statement."

The lack of a motive is the single glaring weakness in a murder case against Stern. If he was, as O'Quinn has alleged in public remarks, a "Rasputin type guy" who had ingratiated himself with a wealthy heiress, enjoying an opulent lifestyle only through that association, why would he kill the golden goose?

Anna Nicole Smith's will named Stern as its executor — a job worth no more than several million, which pales next to the nearly half-billion dollars owed to Anna Nicole's one surviving heir: Dannielynn.

Stern's motive, then, would seem to depend entirely on proving that Stern had reason to expect that Birkhead, as father to Dannielynn, would share the girl's fortune with Stern.

Cosby's book offers no on-the-record sources who can back the claim of such a deal.

The charge of a love affair between Stern and Birkhead comes from two sources — a nanny who claims to have seen Anna Nicole watching a sex video made by the two men, and Jackie Hatten, a former friend of Anna Nicole's who claimed to have accidentally walked in on Birkhead and Stern while they were having sex.

Stern's high-priced attorney is already champing at the bit for the chance to discredit these claims. "Jackie Hatten has not had contact with Anna Nicole Smith since 2002," Wood says. "And besides her trip to the Bahamas after the death of Daniel, she has never been in the same Zip Code as Howard Stern or Larry Birkhead at the same time."

For Wood, the best defense against claims harmful to Stern's reputation might be a good offense. To that end, he will demand records and ask witnesses under oath about whether they were paid in exchange for their quotes about Stern. "At least one witness in the Bahamas has received money in exchange for her statements about Mr. Stern," Wood says. Such transactions, he says, will "go to the credibility of the witness."

A parallel defamation suit that Wood says he plans to file against Cosby for Blonde Ambition may help Wood more closely examine potential conflicts in her reporting on Stern.

Stern's lawyer, who has already filed a preliminary witness list in his case against O'Quinn, can count on favorable testimony from Eric Gibson (AKA King Eric), a musician from the Bahamas who was friends with the couple and who was visiting on the day of Anna Nicole's death, along with his wife, Gelene. The pair has maintained that Anna Nicole controlled Stern, not vice versa.