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I had the privilege of sitting down with the brilliant and gracious Broward County Medical Examiner, quizzing him for Entertainment Tonight and The Insider, minutes after he delivered his press conference autopsy report. Forgive the repeat questions, but his answers are riveting…Art
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After tagging along this week with Judge Larry Seidlin, who riveted TV viewers around the country while brokering the burial of Anna Nicole Smith live six weeks ago, I can report “Judge Larry” can’t go anywhere without fans swamping him for hugs, kisses, handshakes, autographs and questions like, “so when are you gonna get your own TV show so we can watch you again?”
“How’d I do?” he laughs, answering their questions with his own.
“I watched every minute, and you made all the right calls,” said a construction supervisor who approached him to volunteer his two cents. “I saw what you were trying to do. You got ‘em all to walk out holding hands.”
“Your wife couldn’t believe you were watching me and not Monday Night Football with a beer in your hand,” quipped the judge. “Did she think you were crazy?”
“Yeah, but I was drinking a beer watching you,” said the fan.
“I like beer, too,” said the judge, “but I rarely drink more than one.”
Howard, Larry and Virgie may no longer be arm in arm as they emerged after mediation by Judge Larry, but the colorful judge did manage to broker a truce so Anna Nicole could be buried next to her son, Daniel–and his Bronx-cabbie style probing and cajoling elicted not only details about her voracious drug use and enabling by friends, but revealed cracks in her relationship with her mother and financial motives of all parties.
Nowadays, whether Judge Seidlin is fetching fresh bagels Sunday mornings on 17th Street in Fort Lauderdale for wife, Belinda, and daughter, Dax, 6, or ordering Chicago-style pizza, Greek salad and rolls soaked in garlic oil from Villa Rose, a hole in the wall near the Hardrock Hotel, he’s swamped by locals and tourists who want to talk about the Anna Nicole case, a televised trial that made “Judge Larry” not only more famous in his own Broward County backyard (the youngest judge ever elected at 28), but maybe the most famous judge in the world. Walk around with Seidlin, as I did earlier this week, you’ll be awed by the universal affection he enjoys at the grassroots level: shopowners, waiters, little old ladies, retirees from blue collar ‘hoods to magnates in posh Boca Raton.
“AND IN THE END, THE LOVE YOU TAKE, IS THE LOVE YOU MAKE”—THE BEATLES
It was past midnight when I glanced up from a barstool in the smoke-filled lobby of the Seminole Hardrock Hotel and caught the Beatles’ lyric etched above the entrance where paramedics six weeks earlier had rushed Anna Nicole Smith out on a gurney, the always-looking-for love, love-starved little girl who took very little with her, leaving behind a namesake who will be searching for a mother’s love for the rest of her life…
“The love you take is the love you make.”
I kept thinking, Anna was deader than Elvis when she rolled under those words to the ambulance that would take her to the ER and etch her forever into pop culture history, a woman famous for being famous, dying like so many hard rockers — immortalized, idolized, symbolized, serialized, dramatized, laid, relayed and parlayed and, perhaps one day, marketed in these halls and on the walls of her last heartbreak hotel.
Even though she didn’t sing or play anything, she was taking dance lessons in her final days. Not that it has anything to do with how or why should died, but it did give the medical examiner a clue… she didn’t mean to kill herself–that she had plans to dance, romance, even marry Howard K. Stern, and, maybe, have another baby.
In the elevator, I asked a 60-something tourist, a retired college professsor, if she’d been following it, and, she asked me, how could she miss it? Paramedics had almost knocked her down, she said, racing by with the dead celebrity. She’d actually spied Anna Nicole under the sheet, she told me, but didn’t know she was dead until she watched the news later, a media obsession that’s obscured and eclipsed other contemporary human tragedies, but the public can’t get enough, as her celebrity ratings in death, sadly, soars beyond any she ever got in life.
How fitting I’d be sitting in front of a garish slot machine called, what else, WHEEL OF FORTUNE, feeding it ten dollar bills, then slapping the button, not caring whether I got cherrys or other tropical fruits, trying hard to lose fast so I’d have an excuse to get to bed, grab a few hours sleep before the autopsy presser and my interview with Broward Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua Perper for ET; WHEEL OF FORTUNE was spewing tacky calliope music that reverberated about the lobby, mixing with stale second hand smoke stealing into my lungs and smelling up my clothes. I felt desperate, but I was trapped!
As hard as I tried to lose,…I KEPT WINNING!
It took 20 minutes of intermittent jackpots, before vultures started circling, smelling doom, clucking how the WHEEL would bury me; I remember hitting $5.50, my grubstake dwindling; then it was gone, and I bolted, abdicating to a crowd of cigar-chomping, made-for-Trimpsa, polyester gamblers, rolling the dice with their lives, too. Read the rest of this entry »
When Broward Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua Perper examined Anna Nicole Smith’s heart before making his autopsy findings public, he told me in an exclusive interview that it appeared normal in size and weight, but there were “subtle discolorations” that suggested an infection…a medical mystery until he finally cracked it with lab work, exhaustive interviews with friends, doctors and family, the help of the Seminole Police Department–and information gleaned from Anna Nicole’s two laptop computers and external hard drive made available by Howard K. Stern.
The finding: she died of an accidental overdose, a toxic combo of prescription drugs, but the primary killer–the sleeping aid chloral hydrate (the same drug that killed her idol, Marylin Monroe), given to help her sleep after her son, Daniel, died. Only Anna, like so many unwitting addicts, failed to take it as doctors’ ordered — by the teaspoon — and swigged directly from the bottle, then slipped into dreamland forever; the only consolation to family and friends, she didn’t suffer, Dr. Perper said.
No homicide, no suicide, a tragic miscalculation by someone who Dr. Perper told me was so impaired from all the prescription drugs, and weakened from a raging fever, she was found sitting naked in her suite’s empty bathtub, dazed and confused the day before she died. Stern was the last one to see her alive, and among others, had urged her to go to the hospital, but she refused. He also wanted to wake her up, but others said, no, let her sleep, so they left her in the room with the nurse.
Oh, and he said there was no evidence Stern had done anything wrong, no criminal charges pending, case closed–despite on-going screams and accusations. I asked Perper what he’d say to those accusers who blame Stern and others, and he told me that they are dead wrong, that Anna was responsible for her own death, that she didn’t want to or mean to die, that she was excited about the future, another baby, planned to marry Stern, and more. He can’t speak to the “ethics,” he said, just the medical facts and the law. Do we believe him? Well, if we can’t trust the most trustworthy figure in the case, who can we trust?
“Why didn’t Anna Nicole go to the emergency room as Howard K. Stern and others urged her to do?” CNN’s Nancy Grace asked me Monday night on her show.
She was a stubborn woman who called the shots and signed the checks, and if she said no, there was no dissuading her, her lawyers and friends tell me. In the past, everytime she sashayed or was transported to an emergency room, her condition was all over the news, and she recoiled from the invasion of privacy she brought on herself as an over-the-top sex bomb. Safer to stay away from hospitals, and self-medicate, no matter how sick she got. That was her gut instinct, attorney Lily Ann Sanchez told me, a former federal prosecutor retained by Howard K. Stern to cooperate with Broward Medical Examiner Dr. Perper in furnishing any records or information he needed to solve the medical mystery of how and why she died.
An accidental overdose did her in, he declared, and I was invited on Nancy’s CNN Headline News show with Dr. Perper the day he unveiled what killed the tragic beauty. Bottom line, it was mixing drugs–a toxic cocktail of nine 9 prescriptions including one that had killed her sex goddess idol, Marylin Monroe; the powerful sleeping aid, chloral hydrate. But truly, what killed her was refusing to ask for and accept medical help when she needed it. She didn’t have to die when she did, Dr. Perper conceded, but it was no one’s fault, nor suicide. Nor was there any evidence of foul play, he and the Seminole Police concluded, and no criminal charges would be brought against Howard K. Stern, or anyone else, as we reported here the day before Dr. Perper made his official announcement.
Weakened from a raging fever brought down by antiobiotics, he said Anna Nicole’s initial infection was caused by a needle she used to inject human growth hormone (HGH), vitamin B-12 and immunoglobulin hitting an abscess in her buttocks, and spreading lethal bacteria.
At one point, she was found lying naked in an emtpy bathtub in her suite at the Hardrock, then lead back to bed…That, Dr. Perper told me was a glaring symptom of her diminished judgment that often happens when people mix drugs like Anna Nicole did–9 different meds for anxiety, depression and assorted angst, including chloral hydrate she swigged straight from the bottle rather than measuring out her doctor’s prescribed dosage. She’d taken methadone for pain, but it was only found in her bile, not her stomach.
When Dr. Joshua Perper tells us what killed Anna Nicole Smith Monday, sources tell us Howard K. Stern will be cleared of any criminal wrongdoing and may be in a position to sue those who have been calling him a murderer–for slander.
With the tabloid world aswirl with reports she died from a raging fever caused by an infection, along with heavy doses of sleeping medication, sources close to the investigation tell me the probe never turned up any criminal actions by Stern. Had he been a suspect, you can bet he’d be in jail BEFORE a press conference, and last I checked, he was walking and breathing like a free man. In fact, his lawyers plan to issue a statement Monday afternoon.
TMZ.com reported she had an infection in her leg from a dirty needle when she was 8 months pregnant…hardly a smoking gun, or a smoking needle. The photo that is making the rounds shows Anna, eight months pregnant, with an infection on her leg, TMZ reported. According to the website, sources said it was it was caused by a shot of something using an unsterilized needle.
Dr. Perper tells me he’s been talking with Anna’s friends, Stern and others to determine her clinical history, and along with tests he’s run, will unveil his findings at 10:30 am EST. Tabloids are reporting she died from a raging infection and an overdose of sleeping medication. Watch our report Monday night on Entertainment Tonight. Howard K. Stern’s lawyers tell me they they are cautiously optimistic.
When the smoke clears, we hear they may be talking with a very big gun media attorney who has gone to bat for highly vilified public figures, won settlements for libel and slander and forced the media, by his mere presence and track record, to play nice(r) with people Under Suspicion, but not charged with a crime. Could be a caution flag on the track if he saddles up; then it will be High Noon for Texas, Don Pirtle, et al. If this boy joins Howard’s out-gunned gunslingers, Virgie’s tumbleweed team of trash-talking longhorns may be soon headed for charm school.
On March 14, TMZ.com reported a Miami Herald “scoop” that Florida police were working with homicide prosecutors—a story you read on The Bald Truth THREE WEEKS EARLIER…when we reported exclusively about a letter we’d obtained written by prosecutors in the state attorney’s office asking that Anna Nicole’s laptops be turned over to Florida police so harddrives and e-mails could be searched for a possible trail of drugs she was suspected of taking–and that may have lead to her death.
Much has been made of those computers since we broke the story, but we were also first to report the investigators’ frustration and internal debate over how to legally look at Anna Nicole’s hard drives when, despite Seminole police investigators working with Bahahian police, they could find no probable cause to convince a judge she’d been murdered. (In fact, Broward Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua Perper told me he found no similarities between how Anna Nicole died and the overdose death of her son, Daniel, which surely shocks conspiracy buffs.)
As for investigators, all they could do was stare at the laptops and hard drive and fume about the legal curve ball Anna pal Ford Shelley had put them in by snatching the property from the Bahamas house she’d bought from his father in law, G. Ben Thompson. Ford says Anna wanted him to grab them for safe-keeping if anything ever happened to her, but after theft charges were filed in the Bahamas, he turned them over to S.C. authorities, who handed them over to Seminole police investigators after prosecutors with Broward’s 17th Judicial Circuit dispatched a request we have in our files.
At the time, sources close to the case told me prosecutors were concerned even kindergarten-trained criminal lawyers could argue successfully that any evidence found on her computers should be tossed out of court if it were discovered wtihout a search warrant. Not to mention the broken chain of custody and possible contamination. Remember Johnny Cochran’s top gun OJ attack on the LAPD–the “three C’s”–corruption, contamination and conspiracy. If Shelley was truly intent on uncovering good evidence of some Howard K. Stern murder plot he and others have been trumpeting, he sure created a conundrum for the cops, and a prosecutors’ nightmare. Here was a potential treasure trove of potential clues into how she may have died, and his alleged theft of the property created a legal nightmare, not to mention possible liability for him. That’s why his crack Myrtle Beach criminal lawyer, Tommy Brittain, advised him to turn it all over to the Horry County Sheriff’s Department. Not everything he took was turned over, though. The clown video and other property Howard K. Stern reported Shelley stole from Horizons wound up on Greta’s FOX News and trickled out elsewhere. Investigators never got a chance to examine it first, and therein lies just one of the problems. As for the computers, cops’ hands were procedurally tied: they could look, but without a search warrant, they could not touch. Read the rest of this entry »
If you copy and paste this ET link on your web browser, you’ll see part of my exclusive sit down with Dr. Joshua Perper last week on Entertainment Tonight about Monday’s anticipated autopsy report:
http://www.etonline.com/complete/annanicolesmith/index.html#
One surprising note: he told me he doesn’t think there’s a connection between the cause of death of Daniel — who died of a toxic mix of anti-depressants and methadone — and his mother, whose demise details, have been closely held by the Broward County Medical Examiner.
Does that mean Tuesday’s coronor’s inquest into Daniel’s death in the Bahmas, with 40 odd witnessess set to testify in front of a mini-jury of 7 people, will be a tabloid let-down? Is Dr. Perper subtly trashing tabloid perp walk dreams by hinting he knows something we won’t until Monday? He says many will be surprised with his answer to the $475 million dollar question–how did Anna die? Sources tell us he’s going to pop a host of rumor balloons and explain how he proved them wrong…He’s a class act who has become a modern day Mr. Wizard, doing more to popularize forensics than CSI. Don’t be surprised if his Anna Nicole press conference ratings rivals the highly-rated CBS show.
Tabloids Scream, Guilty!
Fans Say, Bust Him or Shut Up!
Monday Morning, we’ll likely learn that the tragic beauty died the way most addicts do–too many drugs, too much alcohol and an excess of pain she couldn’t kill… a curvaceous cover girl who rarely covered up, who streaked like a comet, then crashed and burned before her time.
Nothing new here, except Monday morning will be showtime, when Broward County Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua Perper and Seminole Police Chief Charlie Tiger tell us what the autopsy-investigation reveal. Why am I hearing echoes of something a DEA agent once told me, “Art, cocaine is God’s way of saying, you’ve got too much money…’” And too many people who may want to get at it.
We bring this up after spying a Howard K. Stern fansite. REALLY! There is one, shouting in the desert, and gave us a nice mention. And raised the alleged media bum rap Howard has been getting before even going down. Check out their headline…
An Honest Reporter Is Found in Hollyweird
March 22nd, 2007 by QV
QV writes: “One of our readers left a link to http://www.artharris.com. When I arrived at the website, I was pleasantly surprised to see an honest and factual article about our Anna Nicole case. Read the rest of this entry »
These are a few backstage snapshots from Judge Larry Seidlin’s famous Body Heat trial…me with Larry Birkhead ex-attorney Debra Opri, the pit bull of the proceedings, Court TV’s brilliant Jean Kasaras…always pithy, always “on.”
FOX News Superstar Greta Van Susteren scooped the world with the disturbing Anna Nicole clown video: shot by Howard K. Stern, there was the soon to be dead Playboy centerfold and reaility TV star, all whacked out and nowhere to go.
California lawyer Ron Rale gets a little hairspray before going on the Larry King Show from CNN’s Miami Bureau with attorney Krista Barth. We crossed paths after my guest spot on Nancy Grace; I took a pass on the hairspray.
Grounded in the law: Judge Larry Seidlin, smiling before and after the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his ruling to hand over the body of Anna Nicole Smith to the guardian ad litum, and allow her to be buried next to her son in the Bahamas.
Copyright 2008 Art Harris • Web Design by Southern Web Group
