Blonde Ambition (18 page)

question: Chief, are you guys going to be releasing that 911 call?

tiger: The call that came into our office, we're not going to release at this time.

question: Doctor, is it possible for someone to have died from an overdose if you do not find any pills in her stomach?

perper: It's possible. As I said at this point, we do not—I don't have any information one way or another which I can reliably relate to you. That's what I explained. Usually, we don't do this kind of press conference, but because I wanted to prevent rumor from spreading and particularly rumors which are incorrect. I wanted to make you know what our findings are and that additional findings will come as the tests will come in.

question: Doctor, based on the body temperature at the hospital, could she have been dead for hours before?

perper: No. And the reason is that according to our information at the time when the medics came to the scene, the body was warm and there were no indications that a long time occurred since the body was found.

question: Do you know what the funeral plans are? Where the body is going?

perper: Not yet. But that's information which is . . .

perper: Well it's hard to say because if we start from the very test, which was started until we ended, we started about 9:30 and we just finished, so approximately six hours.

question: And also will the body be held here for the 10 days until the court hearing?

perper: We always comply with court orders and we try to be cooperative with the family. If we are going to be asked, we will do that for them.

question: You mentioned that she had been sick for several days with the stomach flu. Was there anything else unusual that had happened in those days leading up to this? And also did she spend the day in bed or was she up and about?

perper: My understand—one of the things which I mentioned that I'm going to do and I did not do yet is not just review the medical records but to speak with the witnesses who took care of her. So this is a legitimate question, which I'm going to ask.

question: You mentioned no pills in the stomach, but could she have had some sort of liquid and/or inhaled something that could have caused it?

perper: Well, we are going to check those possibilities because we are going to test the stomach content and as with an inhalant, we are going to test the lungs for any inhalants.

question: There was prescribed medication?

perper: Right.

question: Was it in her name or someone else's name?

perper: I did not see it myself. I cannot answer the question.

unidentified male: Chief Tiger, do you want to know whether or not she was prescribed the medications that were in her room?

tiger: We'll find that out through our investigation. It's still ongoing.

question: Chief, what was in those bags you removed yesterday? Those bags you took out yesterday? What was in those bags?

tiger: Evidence from the scene.

question: Why did she have a private nurse?

tiger: We're not ready to discuss that right now.

question: Chief, why did she have a private nurse with her?

perper: As I explained to you, there is additional information which has to be elicited from the people

who took care of her. There was a nurse apparently also in the room or close to her. I'm going to question this nurse as to what happened.

question: Hasn't he questioned the nurse? Hasn't he already or the police department? The question is, why did she have a private nurse?

perper: But I'm going to question. There are two types of questioning. There is medical questioning and non-medical questioning. The police did its own non-medical questioning. I'll do the medical one and I'm going to ask all of the proper questions and this is the . . .

question: Would you characterize the amount of drugs that were found in her room as excessive for one person?

perper: I didn't make this determination. I don't know, I didn't look at the fact—and the fact is that people sometimes have medication, which they have for a long time and they don't take them.

question: Large amount?

perper: This is something which, again, has to be determined, yes. The problem is not how many medications are in the bottles. The problem or the significant thing is how many medications are in her body. Whatever is in the bottle, it's irrelevant. But what is in her body is very significant.

question: From what you've seen of the types of those pills in combination, could it have been lethal?

perper: I—if you—have a combination of any drugs in the body, if you have five bottles of drugs, you are going to take everything in the bottle, you'll get in trouble. It's not a legitimate question.

question: Doctor Perper, do you know why a doctor visited Anna earlier this week?

perper: I do not know because I did not review yet the medical records. Part of the investigation, part of the information which has to be obtained in order to solve the puzzle is exactly her medical condition, the kind of procedure which she had, the kind of medication that she took, how much she was prescribed . . . .

question: But you will be reviewing the medical records?

perper: Absolutely.

question: How many different medications were found in the body?

perper: I cannot give you a list now. Something to review. There were a number of them.

question: Doctor, one more question please.

official: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.

question: Where is Howard Stern?

   Though he was accommodating to the reporters' inquiries, Dr. Perper acknowledged that there were a lot of unanswered questions. The toxicology report would take weeks, and reporters were made even more anxious by the inconclusive assessments thus far. Reporters immediately drew comparisons to the privately commissioned autopsy on the body of Anna's son Daniel—less than 120 days prior in the Bahamas— which revealed a lethal combination of methadone and two anti-depressants.

   Reporters wondered right away if Anna's death was more than an eerie parallel. In fact, Anna had been taking a medley of prescription medication for years and had severe and highly publicized drug combination problems before. One

1995 incident put her in a wheelchair on the grounds of the Betty Ford Clinic, leaving her spokesperson to explain that "Ms. Smith is convalescing in a private location" after a previous hospitalization that was described as resulting from "an adverse reaction to two prescription medications."

   But numerous friends and boyfriends over the years have expressed their concerns. Though Peter Nygard said he never actually saw Anna take drugs, he started seeing packages being sent to her in the mail with prescriptions in them. He questioned her and wouldn't give her the packages. "She would get pissed off at me when she found out I wasn't passing along her prescriptions," Peter told me. "And we'd always fight about it."

   "You can't do this," she'd whine. "I need my drugs."

   But sadly, by February 8, 2007, Anna's body had become a over-medicated depository of an unbelievably astonishing quantity of drugs.

   According to Reuters, more than 1,800 pills and a bottle of the powerful sedative "chloral hydrate" had been prescribed by Anna's psychiatrist, Dr. Eroshevich, in the five weeks before Anna Nicole Smith met her untimely death. Of all the drugs Dr. Eroshevich prescribed, eight of them, including the chloral hydrate, had prescriptions written to Howard K. Stern, two of them were prescribed to Alex Katz, and one of the drugs found in the room, potassium chloride, was prescribed by Dr. Khris to herself. The Federal Drug Enforcement Agency and the Medical Board of California have been investigating Dr. Khris and Dr. Sandeep Kapoor for misconduct relating to Anna Nicole Smith's over-medication. Dr. Kapoor is the Los Angeles doctor who prescribed her methadone while she was pregnant.

   Eventually, Dr. Perper said of all the medications found in Anna's system, none of the drugs found in her body were in lethal levels on their own. However, he said the "combination" of so many of them led to a toxic, and, ultimately, lethal effect. The chloral hydrate, the same sleeping medication that, ironically and coincidentally, contributed to the 1962 death of Anna's idol Marilyn Monroe, most likely "tipped the balance" and led to a combined medication overdose for Smith as well.

   Chloral hydrate was one of the first sleeping medications out there. It acts as a depressant on the central nervous system. Popular in the 1930s, it was also called "knockout drops." If you put some in an alcoholic drink it became known as a "Mickey Finn."

   Dr. Michael Baden, an internationally renowned forensic expert and former chief medical examiner of New York City, told Fox News that the normal dosage for chloral hydrate would be around 500 milligrams a day; yet Anna was taking more than 5,000 milligrams a day for the last 37 days of her life. Dr. Baden has also pointed out that the drug Soma (Carisoprodol), a muscle relaxant that Anna Nicole was taking, has a recommended daily dosage of four pills a day. Anna was taking twenty a day. You may remember that a Carisoprodol tablet was found in the hospital room bed where Howard K. Stern had slept the night Daniel arrived. Anna Nicole was also continuing to take methadone. The medical examiner's report says it wasn't found in her blood and urine, but it was found in her bile, which "is an indication that the methadone had not been administered for at least two to three days before death."

   Since at the time of their deaths both Anna and her son had methadone in their system, Baden feels the Drug Enforcement Agency should be interested. "They [the DEA] are very strict on how that can be prescribed," Baden said. "And I think that whoever then took the drug, the chloral hydrate, and gave it to Anna Nicole that she died from, could also be in some trouble, civil and criminal."

   The day of Dr. Perper's press conference, the Center for Disease Control released a report that said unintentional fatal drug overdoses are the second-leading cause of accidental death, just after car wrecks. The rate of fatal drug overdoses nearly doubled from 1999 to 2004, from 11,155 to 19,833. CDC researchers say they believe sedatives and prescription painkillers were the chief cause of the increase.

   In commenting about Anna's case specifically, Dr. Baden noted, "If any of the drugs in her system were illegally obtained, the person who gave them to her could be held responsible."

• • •

After Dr. Perper's news conference ended, I lingered to talk further with the man who had just examined Anna Nicole inside and out. He and I connected over our Slovakian background—he's Romanian and I'm Polish—and we talked about his time in Romania, of his family and his life. Then, I asked for a tour of the autopsy room where he had just completed the examination of Anna Nicole Smith's body. He took me into the huge, sterile room not far from his first-floor office. His colleagues had just finished the procedure on Anna Nicole and were, in fact, still cleaning up. I saw scalpels, saws, and stainless steel gurneys—reminiscent of the set on TV's
CSI
. They had just cut into the body of this beautiful 39-year-old woman.

   Anna Nicole Smith's body—her vehicle to fame and misfortune—at death was, according to Dr. Perper, that of a "welldeveloped, well-nourished" woman. She was five feet, eleven inches in length and weighed 178 pounds.

   According to his autopsy, "The scalp hair is blonde and measures up to five inches in length in the frontal area and up to 19 inches in length in the back and on top of her head. There are multiple blonde hair extensions including several pink strands attached to the natural hair, which shows light brown roots."

   The world famous blonde actually had brown hair.

   Anna Nicole's famous breasts were, as most of us realized, as unnatural as her blonde hair. She had breast implants, each containing 700ml of clear fluid. A $14,000 gift from her husband J. Howard Marshall, she had wanted them big. Really big. Long rumored to be the work of a famous Texas plastic surgeon, her 42DD breasts caused her a lot of back pain. Friends say this is the pain that started her taking prescription medications. Dr. Perper noted—as did several boyfriends I interviewed—that her left nipple was disfigured, almost to the point of mutilation, ironic for a woman whose naked body earned her the title of
Playboy
's Playmate of the Year.

   Anna's body, much like her persona, was quite colorful. She had numerous tattoos, including a pair of red lips on her abdomen, two cherries on her right hip, and a Playboy Bunny on her left. Laying across her lower back, Dr. Perper noted a mermaid on a flower bed with a pair of lips beneath it. Covering a cluster of small scars on her right leg and ankle was an icon medley—Christ's head, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Holy Bible, the naked torso of a woman, the smiling face of Marilyn Monroe, a heart, shooting flames, and a cross. But perhaps the strangest tattoos—the words "Daniel" and "Papas," the names of her son and her octogenarian husband—were intricately and painfully placed above her pelvic bone. "The two people she cared about and truly loved," Jackie Hatten said.

   She had piercings both above and below her belly button and her "buttocks have inconspicuous small scars, bilaterally." Anna Nicole, national spokesperson for TrimSpa, had liposuction. According to friend Jackie Hatten, she had five liposuction procedures. At least two of them occurred between the time when an overweight Anna Nicole Smith joined TrimSpa, to when she appeared on TV newly slender and sleek. Jackie says she accompanied her to a private outpatient clinic in Newport Beach, California, where Anna had liposuction. Following the procedure, Anna laid in bed for a month wrapped in a girdle and towels, to help her sagging skin recover from liposuction, and, Jackie says, Anna was drinking . . . Slimfast.