Feb. 10, 2007

A New Anna Twist: Frozen Sperm?

N.Y. Tabloid Reports Anna Nicole's Half-Sister Wrote That She Saved Late Husband's Sperm

  • Anna Nicole Smith and her son, Daniel, pass the casket of J. Howard Marshall during a memorial service in Houston Aug. 5, 1995.

    Anna Nicole Smith and her son, Daniel, pass the casket of J. Howard Marshall during a memorial service in Houston Aug. 5, 1995.  (AP/Houston Chronicle, Castleberry)

(CBS)  Just when you thought it could not get any more bizarre, there is another twist in the Anna Nicole Smith story: a New York tabloid is reporting the possibility that Smith used frozen sperm of her late millionaire husband, J. Howard Marshall, to become pregnant.

In a story carrying the headline "Ice Pop Shock," the New York Daily News reports it has exclusively obtained a book manuscript written by Smith's half-sister, Donna Hogan. In "Train Wreck," Hogan claims Smith had "hinted to the family" that the father of her baby girl, Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern, might be Marshall, according to the Daily News.

The newspaper also reports that Hogan speculated that it could be "her trump card in her fight to get the old man's estate."

Howard K. Stern, Smith's companion at the time of her death, is named on Dannielynn's birth certificate as the baby's father. But others who have claimed possible paternity are ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead, 34, and Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, 59, who claimed he had a 10-year secret affair with Smith.

A judge on Friday refused to order an emergency DNA test on Smith's body as part of a paternity suit involving her infant daughter, but he ordered that the body be preserved until a hearing in 10 days, attorneys said.

Investigators in Florida disclosed that they found prescription medicines but no illegal drugs in Smith's hotel room, and said more tests will be necessary to determine the cause of her death.

The autopsy found no pills in her stomach, but officials were awaiting the results of toxicological tests that would indicate whether she had taken drugs, said Dr. Joshua Perper, the Broward County medical examiner.

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