Valentine's Day 2007. The body of model, actress, former U.S. Playmate of the Year, and international celebrity Anna Nicole Smith, dead of an apparent drug overdose, lay in a morgue in South Florida, decomposing at an alarming rate. No one could decide where to bury her.
Enter Judge Larry Seidlin, and twenty-nine lawyers. The six-day trial that followed heard explosive testimony: That Anna Nicole's mother, a lifetime police officer with a nose for foul play, had predicted her death just months before. That Howard K. Stern slept on a couch downstairs while Anna Nicole and Larry Birkhead made love upstairs. That Stern, her lawyer, smuggled a duffle bag full of drugs into the hospital room of a pregnant Anna Nicole while she was under a doctor's care for her drug dependency. Under oath, both Stern and Birkhead claimed to be the father of Anna Nicole's baby daughter, Dannielynn.
Was Anna Nicole Smith murdered? Did she commit suicide? If she died from a drug overdose, was it accidental or intentional? And what about Anna Nicole's son, twenty-year old Daniel, a young man who did not have a drug problem, dead just a few months before from a methadone overdose? Was Daniel murdered? Was his overdose accidental or intentional? It always came back to the drugs.
Judge Larry Seidlin captivated America, and the world, during the six-day trial in which he laid bare the ugly reality of prescription drug abuse among celebrities, and the role enablers play in their addiction, and sometimes their death.
Judge Larry Seidlin is convinced the original investigations into the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and her son Daniel were seriously flawed. He believes that someone committed manslaughter, through reckless conduct, in the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Judge Seidlin believes that reckless conduct also led to the death of her son. He points out the similarities between the drug deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson. In The Killing of Anna Nicole Smith, Judge Seidlin presents damning evidence and explains, for the first time, why he thinks justice eluded Anna Nicole Smith.
About Judge Larry Seidlin
Judge Larry Seidlin earned his Juris Doctorate (J.D.) from the University of Miami School of Law, and interned at the U.S. Attorney's office. He served as a prosecutor in Florida's Broward County State Attorney's Office, and as a legal advisor to the Broward County Sheriff's Department. He was elected the youngest judge in the state of Florida, at age twenty-eight. One of the architects of the newly created Family Court for Broward County, he officiated as its first administrative judge. Now retired, Judge Seidlin is a popular lecturer in many colleges throughout the country and appears as a legal commentator on numerous television shows.