FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Anna Nicole Smith will be buried in the Bahamas beside her son, the court-appointed guardian of her infant daughter decided Thursday, but Smith's mother is appealing the decision.
The judge presiding over the Smith burial hearing ruled Thursday that Smith's remains should be given to the court-appointed guardian ad litem representing her 5-month-old daughter, Dannielynn.
Broward County Circuit Court Judge Larry Seidlin said the guardian, attorney Richard Milstein, had to consult with Smith's estranged mother Virgie Arthur, her companion Howard K. Stern and her ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead when he made his decision about where Smith would be buried. Birkhead and Stern both claim they are Dannielynn's father.
Arthur is appealing the decision, her attorney told FOX News.
A paternity hearing was scheduled for 10 a.m. EST Friday, also in Florida but under a different judge.
Click here for FOXNews.com's Anna Nicole Smith center.
To announce that Smith would be buried in the Bahamas, Stern, Arthur and Birkhead emerged arm-in-arm in a symbol of solidarity.
"I'm very grateful that Anna Nicole's wishes are going to be carried out. She's going to be going back to the Bahamas with her son. I'm very happy with the decision," Stern said.
"We all understand that we all loved Anna and we wanted to come together to lay her to rest," Birkhead said.
"I loved her with all my heart," Arthur said.
Earlier, the judge expressed his wish that Smith be buried next to her late son Daniel in the Bahamas.
"I want her to be buried with her son in the Bahamas. I want them to be together," he said, weeping while he explained his decision.
Smith's mother had fought for Smith to be buried in her native Texas.
"I have suffered for this, I have struggled with this, I have shed tears for your little girl," Seidlin said to Arthur about 15 minutes before he handed down his decision.
When the judge announced his recommendation that Smith be buried with her son, Stern and Arthur sobbed along with Seidlin.
"This is not a happy moment," Seidlin said, his voice cracking. "She's going to be with her son. She's going to have her son next to her." He said the medical examiner in the case, Dr. Joshua Perper, would accompany Smith's body to its place of burial.
"Dr. Perper said he would help. He said he would fly to the Bahamas. Work out the details with the mother and the two gentlemen here," said the judge.
Referring to the condition of her body, Seidlin said the flame of Smith's beauty was quickly going out. He also urged all the possible fathers of Smith's infant daughter to get a paternity test.
"I hope to God here that you two guys will give the kid the right shot," Seidlin said, weeping.
He then relinquished jurisdiction for the paternity and custody issues in the case to another judge.
"You're done with me," he said. "I'm prepared to handle any other tasks, but I've completed all my tasks in this case. Godspeed."
More Testimony
A series of final witnesses were called on Thursday, including the former Playboy Playmate's first husband Billy Smith — the father of Smith's son Daniel — who testified by telephone.
Billy Smith, whom Smith married when she was 17, said he wished Daniel were buried in Texas, but he didn't have the money to exhume him. Billy Smith added that he wanted Daniel buried next to his mother.
Daniel died in September at age 20 of a lethal drug combination.
The court also heard from Ford Shelley, the son-in-law of a man purported to have been one of Smith's lovers.
Shelley has also been accused of breaking into Smith's home in the Bahamas, which he says belongs to his father-in-law, G. Ben Thompson.
When Shelley did enter the home after Smith died, he took a home video in which Smith is 8 months pregnant wearing clown makeup, talking in a little-girl voice to a doll in a baby carriage and acting impaired.
The video — apparently taken by Stern, who can be heard asking Smith questions — was shown to the court.
Shelley said Smith told him that Dannielynn was Birkhead's baby, and that she went to the Bahamas to escape paternity issues.
He also said Smith threatened to sue his father-in-law for DNA and child support, but he had had a vasectomy.
Birkhead took the witness stand for the second straight day Thursday, testifying more about how he pleaded with Smith to stop her excessive use of prescription medication while she was pregnant.
The hearing recessed Thursday after one attorney almost fainted because of a diabetic reaction to low blood sugar.
Birkhead testified that Smith — who was 39 when she died Feb. 8 of as-yet unknown causes — came close to death many times.
Birkhead also told the court that Smith's most recent companion, Stern, repeatedly interfered in their relationship when the couple's problems mounted in May 2006, ignored Birkhead's concerns about Smith's drug use and harassed Birkhead to deny that he was the father of the baby Smith was carrying.
"At times, I took her medicine," Birkhead testified. "I was told by Mr. Stern to give it back to her because she needed it to live. In addition to that, I told her over and over, 'Don't. Something's going to happen to you. Something's going to happen.'" Birkhead's voice broke, and he put his head in his hands.
Birkhead, a photographer, also said that after he and Smith went their separate ways, Stern called him repeatedly during jobs he was on to tell him to deny that he was the baby's father, and posted nasty things about him on Smith's Web site.
Until then, Birkhead testified he often said "No comment" when asked whether he was the father.
"I finally agreed [to deny paternity] just to get him off my back," Birkhead testified. "Then he was saying Anna Nicole wanted me out of her life and said I just wanted my 15 minutes of fame."
Birkhead also admitted that he did sell photographs showing Smith and him together to prove they'd been romantically involved.
"I told Howard and Anna it wasn't fair for him to be saying that. She said, 'You're not the star. I'm the star,'" said Birkhead. "So I released photos to establish the relationship, and as a result of those photos, I have been compensated and will be compensated."
He said he didn't know offhand how much he was being paid for the pictures, but he said he could get that information to the court.
One of Stern's lawyers also showed Birkhead a series of e-mails he allegedly wrote to Smith after their relationship was ending in which he sounded angry and said things like Smith was heading to "the fire pits of hell."
He confirmed that he'd written most of them, but said he didn't remember writing the note that mentioned hell.
Seidlin had originally set a self-imposed Friday morning deadline to issue a ruling in the case.
He said he had no time to waste, since Perper warned again that a decision needed to be made soon before Smith's body became too decomposed for a public viewing.
"I got a gun to my head," Seidlin said Wednesday.
A recess was called for lunch Thursday after one of Arthur's attorneys, John O'Quinn, apparently had a brief diabetic episode because of low blood sugar, and participants ran over him in alarm. He was given something to drink and Seidlin called for a lunch break.
Asked whether he'd object to releasing Smith's body to her mother, Birkhead said on the stand that he wouldn't.
After Birkhead stepped down from the stand, Houston police officer Troy Hollier, a former bodyguard of Smith's, testified as a witness for Stern's case. He said Smith had expressed negative feelings about her home state of Texas.
The last time he saw Smith, said Hollier, was right after Daniel's funeral in the Bahamas. He said he was talking to her by the swimming pool at her Bahamas residence.
"She said, 'Troy, if anything should happen to me, I want to be with Daniel,'" Hollier testified.
He also said he'd never seen Smith use prescription medication or any other drugs and he didn't see her taking pills in the period around Daniel's funeral.
The judge got angry at Hollier's claims that though he knew Smith well, he'd never seen her use drugs — since everyone else had testified that she had been on medication — and asked that he step down from the witness stand.
"Something doesn't add up here," Seidlin said. "I'm not buying it."
On Wednesday, Arthur testified that her last conversation with her daughter about her burial came more than 10 years ago, when Smith said she wanted to be interred near her idol Marilyn Monroe, whose body is in a Los Angeles crypt.
"Wherever the stars are buried, that's where she wanted to be buried," Arthur said. Birkhead testified he had had a similar conversation with his ex-girlfriend in recent years.
Even Stern has acknowledged that Stern had hoped to be buried near Monroe, though he said she settled on a Bahamian site after her son died last year and the details of the California plot could not be worked out.
The Florida hearing was just a morsel of the legal battle surrounding Smith. At issue in a separate matter is who fathered and should get custody of Dannielynn, who could inherit millions of dollars from Smith's estate.
Smith married Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II in 1994 when he was 89 and she was 26 and she had been fighting his family over his estimated $500 million fortune since his death in 1995.
Click here for FOXNews.com's Anna Nicole Smith center.
FOX News' Catherine Donaldson-Evans and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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