Blonde Ambition (5 page)

   Daniel, tall and slender, was wearing a shirt over his t-shirt, as well as jeans and a baseball cap. They didn't eat, but during their hour and a half chat over coffee and tea, Daniel kept looking out the window, around the restaurant, and admitted he was very worried someone was following him. He told Harding that he didn't want anyone to know that he was meeting with him, not even Ray with whom he was staying.

   He told Harding about a dream he had had the night before in which he saw his mom in a coffin. "She was looking grey," Daniel said, his eyes welling with tears. "He was clearly upset," Harding told me. "He was so emotional and disturbed by this dream. I could not dismiss it."

   He told Harding he wanted him to investigate what Howard K. Stern was doing to his mom and people around her. Daniel said, "Every time I call the Bahamas' house, Howard hangs up on me." He also felt Howard had ordered others on Anna's staff to do the same, preventing Daniel from talking to her. "Howard also keeps feeding my mom drugs," he continued, "mind-bending drugs. He has total control over her like a, like a . . ."

   "Svengali?" Harding asked.

   "Yeah," Daniel said. "That's it! He's a Svengali. Howard does not want me around because I want to get my mom off the drugs and away from him . . . to save her." He explained that ever since Howard had come into their lives, he had purposely kept his mother "out of it all the time." Harding said Ray Martino had told him before that Anna had cleaned up for a while, but had gone "off the deep end with drugs" when she hooked up with Howard.

   Daniel also told the private investigator that Howard was having people "lay his mom"—pimping her for sex. Daniel didn't elaborate further to Harding. However, Jackie Hatten, Daniel's godmother, told me Daniel confided in her that "he'd seen Howard give his mom uppers and downers and then guys would come to the house, talk to Howard and go in his mom's bedroom and close the door." According to Jackie, Daniel called it the "Millionaire's Club," a reference to an episode on Anna's E! Entertainment Television reality show, in which she had gone out on arranged dates with super wealthy men. Unlike the show, however, Daniel told Jackie that the men he saw, at least fifty of them in a year, would go into his mom's bedroom for hours. Then, from his vantage point hiding behind the door in his bedroom, he'd see the guys coming out adjusting their clothes and discretely palming Howard money on the way out the door. Daniel said he'd then see his mom being "all drugged out and groggy" in her bedroom.

   "Daniel definitely didn't want to say anything bad about his mom," Harding said. "He was very protective and loved his mom." And, according to Jackie and other friends of Anna's, though her sexual proclivities were wild and well known, she was adamantly against prostitution. Jackie said she and Daniel firmly believed Anna had no idea Howard was getting paid on the side. "When Anna was not sober, she was easy to take advantage of. My friend Anna was Howard Stern's cash cow. Howard was taking advantage of Anna in every way, up until, and including, her death."

   Daniel also told Jack Harding that he saw Howard give his mom drugs. "He gave everyone drugs," he told the P.I., "including me." He added that he had gotten himself off the drugs and was now clean. Harding noted that Daniel's eyes were clear that night. He was absolutely coherent, he did not slur his words or appear to be on drugs in any way.

   Daniel told Harding that the reason he wanted to go join the military was that he could learn to be a strong fighter, to "be a man and take my mom away from Howard." Then, Daniel's voice turned low, like he was scared someone was listening. "I am deathly afraid of him and very scared for my mother. Howard hates me and keeps me away from her. That's how he treats all my mom's friends. He's made her a prisoner. I want to get my mom out of there."

   Daniel said he wanted Harding to gather all this information against Howard in case Howard came after him physically and so Daniel could use the evidence versus Howard in a court of law. He said he feared what Howard would do to him, and knew that Howard did not like him because he had stood up to him a few times. "It's clear Howard wants me out of the picture," Daniel said. "So he can have complete control of my mom and all the money coming into her hands." In a will that was drafted in 2001, Daniel was listed as the sole heir to Anna's estate, which eventually could reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars if she was victorious in her court battles with the estate of her late billionaire husband, J. Howard Marshall.

   Jack Harding told Daniel he'd take his case, but he would have to go to the Bahamas to investigate. He then told Daniel about his rates. "I normally charge three hundred dollars an hour," he said. "But it would be much more if I have to travel to a place like the Bahamas. You'd have to pay the hourly rate, plus travel, hotel, rental car, and food." He'd have to spend thousands of dollars because he would probably have to be in the Bahamas for several days up to several weeks to question and do surveillance on people, especially on Howard K. Stern.

   The costs, of course, were well beyond what Daniel had imagined. "I don't have any money now," Daniel confessed, "since I am not getting any money coming in, but I am hoping to get some soon and maybe we can start now." He asked Harding if he'd work immediately and get paid later, but Harding explained that he's been in the business for over thirty years and for a project like this he'd need some money up front.

   Daniel was very upset, but understood.

   "So, the last time I saw Daniel," Harding remembered, "was when he walked out the door of the restaurant."

   A month later, Daniel would be dead. Bahamian Police would find Jack Harding's business card in Daniel's pocket, in the clothes he was wearing when he took his last breath.

For most of his life, Daniel Smith was at his mother's side when she needed him. So at 10:25 p.m. on September 9, 2006, two days after she had given birth to his sister, Daniel arrived in Nassau on American Eagle flight 5005.

   Anna had called and told him, "You have a baby sister!" and asked him to come down. Daniel hadn't been feeling well the day he was supposed to fly from Los Angeles to the Bahamas. He told Ray Martino he had a stomachache. But he wanted to see his mother. It had been months since he'd seen her—one of the longest periods of times they had spent apart— and they had always had a very close relationship.

   Anna's brother, Donnie Hogan, said Anna adored Daniel, and had big hopes for her son. "She told me her best success was Daniel," Donnie said. "She was always holding and hugging him. Nothing was more important to her than Daniel.

   "I remember when Daniel was six or seven and we were at her ranch in Tomball [Texas]. Daniel was leaning on a fence, missing his front teeth, and told everyone, 'I'll be a big actor one day,' and Anna said, 'Whatever he'll be, he's going to be a star.'"

   Daniel loved to laugh and to make people laugh. When Daniel was around eight years old, Donnie, Daniel, and Anna were in a car, stopped at a light. There was a homeless man with signs sitting on the corner, and Daniel rolled down the window and asked, "Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?" mimicking a popular commercial on at the time. They all laughed, but Anna quickly told him that those men were less fortunate than he was and that it was not the right thing to do.

   Anna's good friend, Jackie Hatten, used to pick Daniel up from school when he was younger. She says Daniel rarely cursed and always respected his mom, doing whatever she asked, even the laundry. Daniel was intelligent, sweet, and, like many young men, loved video games like Mortal Combat and movies, especially Ben Stiller's
Zoolander
, about a dimwitted male model whose "spiky black hair" and patented model pose, "Blue Steel," made him the envy of the fashion world.

   Around the time of Anna's move to the Bahamas, stress and depression led to Daniel losing weight—twenty to thirty pounds—and breaking up with a woman he was dating. On July 17, the day before Anna flew to the Bahamas from South Carolina, Daniel was shaking and his heart was racing. He was depressed to the point of breakdown. Ray Martino took him to St. Joseph's Medical Center in Burbank and Daniel was admitted. He spent four days undergoing a battery of tests, including tests for drugs. Doctors found nothing remarkable.

   Daniel told a close family friend that he was depressed and very worried about his mom. Soon after he left the hospital, one of his mother's many doctors, Sandeep Kapoor—the man who wrote her prescriptions for methadone—wrote Daniel a prescription for Lexapro, one of the two antidepressants found in his system when he died. These two drugs were in lethal combination with another drug found in his system . . . methadone, a prescription of which his mother had received less than a month before.

• • •

Jackie Hatten spoke to Daniel a couple of months before he died. According to Jackie, Daniel was scared of Howard and all the drugs he kept giving to Anna. He asked Jackie if she would go to the Bahamas with him, saying he was scared to be alone with Howard there. Jackie told him that Howard didn't like her very much and would probably be really mad if she came along. Still, she warned him not to go alone.

   Daniel was under intense stress and told her he wanted to go down to the Bahamas to "save" his mother. He told Jackie, as he would later also tell private investigator Jack Harding, that Howard wouldn't let him talk to his mother and that Howard had cut off communications between them.

   But Howard claimed communications were just fine. He painted the relationship with Daniel much rosier than Daniel had described it to others. "Daniel to me was a great friend, a brother," Howard K. Stern would tell Larry King on September 26, just two weeks after Daniel's death. "I loved Daniel . . . part of me just wishes I would wake up and this whole thing has been an elaborate nightmare."

   Perhaps it was the other part of him that caused Daniel so much angst.

• • •

Though Howard suggested during that TV interview that Daniel intended to move to the Bahamas "to stay with his mom and go to school here," even Howard's own friends told me that Daniel never planned to stay there. His plan was to visit for a short while, one to three weeks maximum. Daniel didn't like the Bahamas because he couldn't stand the heat.

   The night before he left, while Ray Martino helped him pack, Daniel asked Ray if he'd go with him, but Ray said he couldn't because of work. Daniel admitted that he was very nervous to go. Ray thought it was just because Daniel didn't like to fly.

   The morning of his flight Ray took him to the Burbank Airport and bought him French toast for breakfast. Before he boarded the flight—from Burbank to Fort Worth, then to Miami for a quick flight to the Bahamas—Jack Harding says Ray told him he gave Daniel "a couple of Valiums" for his nerves.

   "Don't leave me down there," Daniel said.

   "I won't," Ray promised.

   Daniel boarded the plane.

• • •

At 10:30 p.m. Howard picked Daniel up in Nassau and drove him to Doctor's Hospital where two days prior his mother had had a C-section delivery. Around 11 p.m. they arrived at the hospital—a modern facility with 72 beds on Collins Avenue in Nassau—and Daniel rushed into room 201 and gave his mother a big hug. Anna introduced Daniel to the baby and handed the little bundle to him, saying to the as-yet-unnamed baby, "Here's your brother, Daniel."

   "Look at her, Momma," he said, his eyes filled with excitement. "She's looking at me!" Daniel was in great spirits. He played with the baby's fingers and held her like she was his own. He was happy, lively, and completely alert.

   Ben Thompson, a former boyfriend of Anna's and the man who owned the Horizons house where she was living, was in the room visiting Anna and her newborn when Daniel got there. He told me that Daniel was "thrilled to death" to be with Anna and to meet his little sister.

   Howard pulled out his camera and took pictures as Daniel and Anna reunited and as Daniel proudly rocked his new baby sister in his arms. "It was great," Howard later said. "It was like one of the best nights that I've ever remembered. I mean Anna was so content. She had her son and her new baby girl, and I was there and it was great."

A little after midnight, Ben Thompson left the room so that Anna and Daniel could spend some quality time with each other, and Ben could get some sleep. Shortly after he left, Anna, Daniel, and Howard decided they were hungry. In the Bahamas there isn't much open late at night, so Howard made a food run to a 24-hour mini-mart inside a nearby Esso gas station. He bought chips, soft drinks, and fried chicken strips, Anna and Daniel's favorite. (Ironic, considering Anna had gotten pregnant with Daniel when she was seventeen-years-old and working as a waitress at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken in Mexia, Texas.)

   When Howard returned with the food, they sat around Anna's bed and ate, a late-night celebratory party. There were two hospital beds and a large armchair in her room, and Anna was in the bed closest to the window. The other bed Howard offered to Daniel, but Daniel said he wasn't really that tired and said Howard could take it. The seemingly healthy twenty-yearold was going to stay up and watch some television. Daniel settled into the armchair; Howard took the other bed.

   Since Anna had a C-section just two days before, she was still quite weak and needed help getting to the bathroom, and, according to Howard, Daniel helped her to the bathroom "many times throughout the night."

   "At one point Daniel said to me, 'how come I'm so tired?'" Howard recounted on
Larry King Live
. "And, in hindsight, I wish that I had seen that as some sort of a signal and seen that something wasn't right."

   Several investigators have indicated to me that the statement was peculiar. Why would Howard have seen a young man being tired in the middle of the night after a day's travel from the opposite side of the continent as "a signal?" Why would that have indicated "something wasn't right?"