Anna Nicole Smith's Legal Afterlife

Wha

t's the latest on the afterlife of Anna Nicole Smith? The woman, who was legally Vickie Lynn Hogan Marshall, wrote a will back in 2001, leaving her estate to her son Daniel and arranging for her lawyer Howard K. Stern to be the will's executor. As tabloid history now has it, Daniel, 20, pre-deceased his mother by five months and, since the will is confused regarding future children, the document is meaningless. A probate court judge will have to declare that Smith's five-month-old girl Danielynn is indeed her intestate heir. But that decision might have to come from a court in Smith's place of legal residence. That place itself will be contested (she was trying to win residency in the Bahamas when she died). Then that probate court will have to appoint an administrator of Smith's estate, the guardian of the potential multimillion-dollar baby. Who will it be? Stern, who was Smith's lover as well as lawyer? Smith's estranged mother, Virgie Arthur? Or some other personage with the right DNA?

Those ornate proceedings may take months. They will, nevertheless, be warm-up acts: they will not decide who gets the potential windfall nor the size of the estate. The main legal event will take place in the hushed environs of San Francisco's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the repository of a stack of legal briefs awaiting the guardian to Anna Nicole's tiny heir. "Right now, I don't have a client," Kent Richland, Smith's appellate lawyer, told TIME. It was Richland who gave new life to Anna Nicole's quest for her late billionaire husband's fortune with a victory before the U.S. Supreme Court. So far, not one of the known potential guardians has contacted him.

The case of Marshall v. Marshall (that is, Smith, aka Vickie Marshall, and E. Pierce Marshall, the son of Anna Nicole's late octogenarian first husband J. Howard Marshall) is itself a bizarre legal labyrinth. Indeed, it is a battle between two corpses: E. Pierce Marshall died unexpectedly of an infection in June 2006. His heirs are carrying on the fight. The bottom line, says Joanna Grossman, a Hofstra University law professor and FindLaw.com columnist: "Both sides were being greedy."

The odyssey began soon after the death of J. Howard Marshall in 1995. Smith took her stepson E. Pierce Marshall to court in a rancorous attempt to win the half of $1.8 billion estate she believed she was entitled to. (So rancorous, in fact, that at one point, Smith accused E. Pierce of attempting to kill his own father.) The trial pitted a pouting, flirty, girly Anna Nicole against a pit bull of a Texas lawyer, former Houston prosecutor Rusty Hardin. During tough cross-examination he pressed her so hard that the former exotic dancer blurted out, "Screw you, Rusty!" In 1996, a Texas jury found Smith had no claim to the estate.

Then, in a separate development in 1996, Smith filed for bankruptcy in California to avoid paying a $850,000 judgment in a lawsuit brought by a nanny of her son Daniel. (The woman had sued for $2 million, alleging that Anna Nicole had sexually assaulted her). E. Pierce Marshall, who was planning to sue his ex-stepmother for defamation, quickly lodged a claim with the same California bankruptcy court to make sure Smith would not be exempted from paying him damages in the event she lost that potential defamation suit. "That opened the door for Anna Nicole," Grossman said. Smith counterclaimed in court that Pierce Marshall had "tortiously interfered" with her assertion to a share of his father's billion dollar fortune. Smith found a sympathetic ear to her legal arguments in California. In 2000, the bankruptcy judge ruled that E. Pierce Marshall had interfered with her claim and she was due $447 million from his father's estate. Marshall took the case to federal court where U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter reduced the award to $88 million.

A good portion of Carter's 79-page opinion reads like a paperback novel. "In her own way, Vickie loved J. Howard," the judge wrote. Carter found her credible, but a poor communicator. "Her illiteracy is striking. Examples are too numerous to chronicle but include writing '25.00' meaning $2,500 and '4500,00' meaning $4,500 — she testified that she has trouble with zeros," the judge wrote. As for her late husband, Judge Carter was "not impressed with the character of a man who had the finest private school and legal education and who consciously avoided the very taxes that millions of American families comply with every year." He also had harsh words for J.Howard's son Pierce, finding that he and an attorney had presented false documents, suborned perjury and deceived his aging father "all with the intent of denying Vickie the gift that J. Howard intended to make to her."

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, however, threw out Carter's judgment, saying federal courts could not have jurisdiction over the case. At which point, Smith took her argument to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in a unanimous decision in May 2006, said she could pursue the case in Federal courts. And so the case sits in San Francisco.

Two issues remain to be decided by the Ninth Circuit. One: To settle whether or not E. Pierce Marshall interfered with Anna Nicole's claim against her husband's estate, as the district court ruled. Two: To uphold the Texas jury verdict rejecting her claims stand or take Judge Carter's side and allow her to inherit $88 million. It took two months to update court filings following Pierce Marshall's death in 2006, Hardin said. Updating them after Anna Nicole's death may take just as long — and that will be after the long deliberations over an administrator. Richland also wants to file additional briefs with the Ninth Circuit. Then there could be oral arguments, even a further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. By then, little Danielynn may well be able to read the legal briefs for herself.