Blonde Ambition (6 page)

   "Unless," as one investigator put it, "Howard knew that Daniel had taken something. Or, more to the point, been given something."

   According to Doctor's Hospital records, a nurse making her rounds noted that at 6:20 a.m. Daniel was attending to his mother's comfort. Subsequently, during the hourly rounds, he was observed to be asleep on multiple nurse visits.

   Shortly after 9:30 a.m., Anna tried to wake Daniel who had moved into the bed with her. Though he appeared sound asleep, he was lifeless. "Howard!" she yelled. "Howard! Daniel's not breathing." Howard jumped out of bed and went to her bedside.

   "I checked Daniel's neck, and I didn't feel anything," he said. "We called the nurses and said it was an emergency."

   At 9:38 a.m., according to hospital records, the nurse was called to room 201, following which physicians on the floor were immediately summoned and straight away initiated CPR. A code blue was called and a team rushed from the emergency room. For twenty-two minutes, resuscitative efforts using Advanced Life Support Protocol continued on the lifeless body of Daniel, without response.

   Though they tried to get Anna to leave the room, she refused. She was hysterical. At some point early in the desperate chaos, Howard called Ben Thompson at the Horizons house and told him, "You need to get to the hospital as quick as you can. It's not good." He also found time to call Ray Martino in California, waking him up, and pleading with him to come to the Bahamas right away.

   Anna moved to the foot of the bed where she grabbed Daniel's leg and kept hugging it. Anna and Daniel often spoke about the Catholic Church, and the Playboy Playmate was known to pray to Mary every day. As doctors tried their last futile efforts, Anna was screaming and praying to Jesus and she was telling Jesus to take her and not take Daniel. It was an awful scene.

   At 10:05 a.m. Daniel Wayne Smith was pronounced dead.

   After the hospital gave up resuscitation efforts, Anna refused to. She screamed "No, no!" and continued trying to revive her dead son.

   "There was an airbag that they were putting air in," Howard later told Larry King. "And she had me doing that and she was pumping on his chest. And I just, you know, I don't know. I'm not a doctor."

   Anna just didn't want to believe that he had died. She wanted to keep going. She insisted they keep trying to bring Daniel back to life. She was screaming so loudly, her desperate cries could be heard down the halls of the hospital.

   When Ben Thompson arrived at the hospital around 10:30 a.m., about an hour after the emergency call came from the room, security was already clamped down. Ben came through the back entrance and when he got off the elevator, a hospital employee told him Daniel was dead. Though hospital security was checking everyone who was coming or going, the hospital room, a potential crime scene, seemed to be unobserved.

   When Ben went into the hospital room, Daniel was in the bed and Anna was in bed with him. There was barely six inches on the bed for her to place her body and Ben was worried because she just had a C-section. She was holding him and hugging him, screaming out his nickname, "Pumpkin! Pumpkin!" She was hysterical.

   "The doctors advised us that we should probably check her out of the hospital because the media was going to be coming," Howard said. "And it was going to . . . make the situation even worse." Bahamian law requires autopsies to be performed on any unexplained death, but she refused to leave her son. Before Daniel's body was transferred to the Rand Lab, Anna had to be sedated.

   But before that, Howard grabbed his camera and said, "Let me get a picture." And he started taking photos of Anna Nicole Smith, lying in a hospital bed cradling her dead son.

   The last set of snapshots was not included in the group of photos capturing Daniel's last hours that was sold to
In Touch
magazine for a reported $600,000 and to
Entertainment Tonight 
for an undisclosed sum. When Howard listed the pictures with a photo service, they were photos of Daniel's arrival, not of his departure.

   "When we heard that the photos were available,"
In Touch
magazine news editor Linda Massarella told CBS's
The Early
Show
, "my immediate reaction was we have to get them. I want to see that. Everybody is going to want to see that."

   Dan Wakeford, the magazine's executive editor, said he secured the photos from Getty Images, but declined to identify the photographer.

   "It's a loving photo just after she gave birth, with Daniel," Massarella said. "It's the family snapshot, it's the last family snapshot."

   Not quite. The very last photographs were actually held back, but I have personally seen one of these pictures and it is quite disturbing.

   It shows a crying Anna Nicole Smith lying on her right side in her hospital bed. Rather than holding her precious threeday-old daughter, she is instead cradling the dead body of her beloved twenty-year-old son. Her right arm, crooked beneath Daniel's head, is still bearing a bracelet adapted with an intravenous tube; her left arm, wearing a red hospital wristband, caresses Daniel's cheek. His face is as stark white as the hospital blanket pulled up about his neck, and a breathing tube protrudes from his mouth. His eyes are partially open.

   The one I saw is a painfully gruesome photo. How anyone could have taken it during a mother's darkest hour is a question that all who've seen it have asked.

Within hours of Daniel's death, Howard overheard Anna tell Ben Thompson, "I probably need to call my momma."

   "Let's wait to call her later," Howard said.

   Virgie Arthur, Anna's mother, like so many other people in Anna's life, had found herself shut out. And Virgie, like so many other people in Anna's life, blamed it on Howard. "He kept all of us from her, not just me," Virgie would tell me shortly after Anna's death. "He kept her whole family away from her. He kept her to himself. People that loved her tried to help her. Those that didn't love her, lived with her and lived off her."

   By the time Anna did finally call her mother's house in Texas several days later, Virgie had already learned from TV news that her grandson was dead. Anna's speech was slurred and Virgie could tell that her daughter was under the influence of drugs. "She was mumbling like a drunk does," Virgie said. "All I got out of it was 'Danny's dead. Momma he's gone he's gone . . . but he's coming back. He's coming back.' And then it sounded. . . . It was like she was in the middle of a sentence and the phone went click. And that's all I got to hear from her."

   It would be the last time Virgie Arthur personally heard from her daughter.

From the moments immediately following Daniel's death, until the day Anna died, she was often in a drug haze, a blurry void somewhere between conscious and unconscious.

   The normally joyous occasion of taking a newborn baby home from the hospital was filled with overwhelming sadness for Anna Nicole Smith, even though she had long hoped for a little girl. Anna's new friends, Immigration Minister Shane Gibson and Theresa Laramore, came to take the three-day-old unnamed baby of the as yet unnamed father, out of the chaos of room 201 after Daniel's death. Anna Nicole's new baby was whisked away quickly out the back door of the hospital to avoid attention. Anna Nicole stayed behind, clinging to the body of Daniel.

   It is a mother's worst nightmare—the birth of one child, the death of another. According to eyewitnesses, it was a terribly emotional, pitiful scene—having her son die in her hospital bed in a foreign country where she had just given birth, and then refusing to let them take his body to the morgue. Anna Nicole was uncontrollable, delirious, and had to be sedated before she would finally let go of Daniel's body.

   When Anna's grasp of reality and on her child had lessened, Daniel's body was taken out of her bed to the morgue for the mandatory autopsy. After Howard gave police his recollection of what had happened since Daniel's arrival, he, Ben, and several others loaded everything into Ben's rented van, and a heavily tranquilized, sobbing Anna was helped to the car. Rather than sealing the room and its contents, police weren't acting like the hospital room was a crime scene, so Howard and Anna were free to remove all their belongings— Anna's clothes, flowers sent to the hospital for her newborn, even Daniel's suitcase and some of Daniel's clothes that medical personnel had stripped from his body in the fruitless attempts to save his life.

   They were also able to remove what numerous friends have described as Howard's "goodie bag." Howard typically carried either a brown Coach bag or a black duffle bag. It was a repository for an assortment of drugs, which, according to employees, friends, and court testimony, he doled out to Anna on an "as-he-thought-she-needed" basis.

   "He was the pharmacist and that was the drugstore," Ben Thompson said. So much so that friends would later find it ironic when Larry King asked Howard K. Stern if Lexapro was an antidepressant, and Howard answered, "I'm not too familiar with how medications work but, yes, it's an anti– depressant."

   Anna's friend Jackie Hatten told me she's witnessed Howard giving Anna a medley of drugs: "Vicodin, Valium, morphine, Demerol, you name it, he had it."

   As they were leaving the hospital, Howard asked Ben to watch over the duffle bag and the camera bag, after he had taken a number of photos of Daniel. "I don't understand why the Bahamian Police didn't lock down that hospital room," Ben said. But they didn't. The bags were free to go.

   "Don't let them out of your sight," Howard said, pointing to the camera bag. "Anna's life is in that bag."

   As they left the hospital that tragic September day, two pills weren't in Howard's "goodie bag"—the two that were found in the bed where Howard had slept. Those two pills were now in a plastic bag and being held by the Bahamian police as possible evidence.

   That morning when Nadine Carey, the nurse on duty at 9:38 a.m., heard "Code Blue" she hurried to room 201 and found the medical team rushing around the bed where Daniel Smith lay lifeless. The medical equipment, life-saving apparatus, and numerous people, including a wailing Anna Nicole, were crowding the room. In order to free up space, Carey pulled the bed nearest the door out and into the hall in order to give doctors better access to try and work their miracles on Daniel's breathless body. When she did, she noticed two white tablets on top of the sheets, one smaller than the other. Following protocol, she gave them to the doctor on duty, the doctor gave them to his supervisor, and then the two pills were passed on to the Bahamian police constable, who put them in a plastic bag and sent them away for testing.

   When Howard recounted the story of that awful morning two weeks later on
Larry King Live
, he pointedly made mention that Daniel had also spent time in that bed. "At first I was going to sleep on the floor in between the two beds," he explained, "and Daniel was in the bed closest to the door. And, Daniel at some point said to me that, you know, he wasn't really that tired, so why didn't I just take the bed and he was going to sit up and watch TV."

   But according to at least three nurses on duty, Daniel was never in that bed. "Only the man was in the bed," they each said. Contrary to Howard's story, the nurses said in their initial statements to police that it was Howard and only Howard who had been in that other hospital bed as each made their rounds that night and early morning. Daniel had been in the chair, then at 5:30 a.m. he had moved into the same bed with his mother. None of the nurses saw Daniel in the bed nearest the door.

   The two pills found in the bed where the nurses saw Howard sleeping were determined to be methadone, a synthetic narcotic used to treat opiate addicts, and Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant. Anna Nicole had prescriptions for both medications. In fact, Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, Anna's Los Angeles based doctor, wrote a prescription for methadone on August 25, 2006, just thirteen days before she gave birth. The prescription, RX#2846735, was written for Michelle Chase, one of Anna Nicole's favorite aliases. Key Pharmacy in the San Fernando Valley had filled the prescription, which was sent to "Vicky Marshall" (sic) at a Harbour Bay Shopping Plaza post office box on East Bay Street in Nassau, Bahamas. Under California law, it's illegal to prescribe a controlled substance to a false name.

   Bahamian Police did find something interesting on Daniel's body that wasn't cleared and packed into Ben Thompson's rented van. They'd found a business card in one of Daniel's pockets. The business card was that of Jack Harding, the private investigator Daniel had met with the month before he died. The man whom Daniel had told how deathly afraid he was of Howard K. Stern. Jack Harding told me, "When I heard that Daniel died, I was shocked but not surprised that Stern could be there and be involved somehow."

   A few weeks after Daniel's death, California private eye Jack Harding got a call from a detective at the Burbank Police Department asking if he had been in the Bahamas investigating for Daniel Smith, and if so, informing him that he was in violation of Bahamian law. Forty-five minutes later the officer, along with four Bahamian police officers and an "official looking" man in a light colored suit showed up at Jack Harding's house and questioned him for an hour in his living room. Harding told me that they asked him, "Why did the boy call you?" and "Why did he have your card?"

   The Drug Enforcement Agency and the California Medical Association have also called asking him about Howard and drugs.

   But the Bahamian police weren't the only surprise visitors the private eye had. In April of 2007, two months after Anna's death, at 8:45 p.m., Jack Harding's three dogs went bolting through his backyard, barking madly. He went to see what the commotion was and caught a man trying to sneak over his fence.