Appeals court confirms Anna Nicole Smith to be buried in the Bahamas
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| Published on Thursday, March 1, 2007 |
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MIAMI, USA (AFP): In the latest twist in the legal tangle over the body of ex-Playboy model and billionaire's widow Anna Nicole Smith, a Florida appeals court on Wednesday upheld a ruling that the controversial celebrity be buried in the Bahamas.
"The trial court found that Anna Nicole Smith's last ascertainable wish with respect to the disposition of her remains was that she be buried in the Bahamas," the four judges wrote in their decision.
"This finding is not essentially disputed," the judges said after Smith's estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, appealed the earlier decision before the appeals court in West Palm Beach, insisting her daughter should be buried in her native Texas.
Smith's body has been held in a morgue since the buxom blonde model and reality TV star died at a Florida hotel on February 8 of as yet undisclosed causes. She was 39 years old.
Her boyfriend, Howard K. Stern, insisted Smith had wanted to be buried near her Bahamas home, alongside her son Daniel, who died at the age of 20 in September.
The battle over Smith's body coincided with court cases in Florida, California and the Bahamas over paternity of her five-month-old baby.
Stern, Smith's former boyfriend Larry Birkhead, and actress Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband Frederic von Anhalt all claim to have fathered the baby.
The little girl could eventually inherit a fortune depending on the outcome of a case Smith filed over the estate of the 89-year-old wheelchair-bound oil magnate she had married when she was 26. |
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