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Anna Nicole Smith's Body Embalmed

POSTED: Monday, February 19, 2007

The body of former Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith was embalmed Saturday under a court order issued a day earlier.

Two embalmers finished the job at about noon, according to Joshua Perper, Broward County's chief medical examiner. They promised not to discuss, write about, photograph or draw the body.

Perper said Smith's body "will be ready for viewing with no problem."

Attorneys for photographer Larry Birkhead, who claims he's the father of Smith's baby girl, had fought to delay the embalming until an additional DNA sample was taken from her body Thursday.

The body remains at the medical examiner's facility, awaiting developments in a Fort Lauderdale courthouse. Smith's estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, and her companion, Howard K. Stern, resume their battle Tuesday over where the body should be buried.

Arthur has been present during much of the legal wrangling, but Stern has been inauspiciously absent, though he was ordered to attend Tuesday's hearing.

Stern said he wants to bury the body in the Bahamas next to Smith's son, 20-year-old Daniel Smith, who died Sept. 10, 2006, from a lethal combination of drugs, but Arthur wants her daughter's body to be buried in her home state of Texas.

Attorneys for Arthur claim she is Smith's next of kin and therefore has the right to her body over Stern, who claims to be the executor of her will.

"They say he's an executor," said Stephen Tunstall, an attorney representing Arthur. "(But) you are not an executor or personal representative until a court appoints you, and the way you do that, your honor, is you present a will."

Smith's will, dated July 2001, was made public Friday.

The will said the estate should be held in trust for her late son. It does not say where Smith wanted to be buried, but it names Stern as her executor.

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