Judge Passes the Buck

Feb. 22, 2007 — -- The circus continues. Anna Nicole Smith's body still has no resting place.

A blubbering Judge Larry Seidlin essentially passed the buck this afternoon by awarding custody of Anna Nicole Smith's 5-month-old daughter to her court-appointed guardian, Richard Milstein, who can decide where the former Playboy Playmate should be buried.

That decision essentially bypassed the chief players in the circus-like trial, Smith's attorney and lover Howard K. Stern, one-time beau Larry Birkhead and Smith's mother Virgie Arthur. While Stern wanted Smith laid to rest in the Bahamas, Arthur preferred to have her daughter buried in her native Texas.

Choking up in front of a rapt courtroom, Seidlin said, "I want her to be buried with her son in the Bahamas. I want them to be together."

The dispute over the final resting place for Smith, who died on Feb. 8 in a Florida hotel, is just one of several surrounding the late model. While Stern is listed as the father of Dannielynn on the girl's birth certificate, Birkhead claims that she's his daughter and demanding DNA tests.

The trial was punctuated by several dramatic moments such as Judge Seidlin's lengthy rant that Stern was "maybe an enabler" in Smith's overuse of prescription drugs, which he said ruined her relationships with her mother and Birkhead.

"We have Stern. Is he a bad guy or is he a fellow that has some form of a love for her? We don't know," Seidlin said. "Whatever relationship he had with her, he would be called maybe an enabler."

Earlier, Birkhead testified earlier that he tried getting Smith into rehab after visiting her home in the Bahamas and seeing her overuse of medicine.

"They kept bringing more and more drugs in the house," Birkhead said. Smith responded by telling him that she needed the prescriptions to live and telling him, "I'm not a drug addict and quit calling me one."

The Associated Press contributed to this story.