Anna Nicole Smith gave birth to a daughter, Danylynn Hope, in Nassau, Bahamas, on September 7, 2006. She was 38 years old. Three days later, her 20-year-old son, Daniel, flew in from Los Angeles to meet his new sister. He sat at her bedside and held the baby.
By morning, he could not be woken. Daniel Wayne Smith was pronounced dead at age 20, with the cause ruled an accidental lethal combination of methadone, Zoloft, and Lexapro. Anna Nicole was still recovering from the delivery in the same hospital when she was told her son was gone. She never recovered from it—not emotionally, not psychologically, in any way that mattered.
Five months later, on February 8, 2007, she collapsed at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. She was pronounced dead at 2:49 p. m. at age 39.
Nine prescription drugs were in her system, and the death was ruled an accidental overdose. Her daughter was five months old. She was born Vicky Lynn Hogan on November 28, 1967, in Mexia, Texas, a small town southeast of Dallas. Her father, Donald Hogan, left when she was an infant, and her mother, Vergie Arthur, worked as a deputy sheriff and was largely absent.
Vicki was raised in significant part by an aunt, struggled in school, and dropped out at 16 without a diploma. Working at Jim’s Chicken Shack in Mexia, she met a cook named Billy Wayne Smith when she was 17 and he was 16. They married on April 4, 1985, and on January 22, 1986, she gave birth to Daniel. The marriage ended, with the divorce finalized by 1993.
Needing a way out and without a degree or career, she began dancing at strip clubs in Houston. Her looks quickly drew attention, and in 1992 she appeared in her first Playboy centerfold. By 1993, she was named Playmate of the Year. She had chosen a new name by then: Anna Nicole Smith.
In 1991, while working as a dancer, she met J. Howard Marshall II, an 86-year-old Texas oil billionaire with a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions. The tabloid narrative was simple: a young, beautiful woman had attached herself to a very old, very rich man for his money. People who observed them together noted that Marshall was genuinely devoted to her, and Anna Nicole maintained in interviews that she loved him.
They married on June 27, 1994, in Houston. She was 26. He was 89. Fourteen months later, on August 4, 1995, Marshall died at age 90.
His estate was estimated at $1. 6 billion, and Anna Nicole was not in his will. The legal battle that followed consumed the next decade of her life. She filed a claim in Texas probate court arguing that Marshall had promised her a substantial inheritance and that his son, E.
Pierce Marshall, had deliberately excluded her. The case moved through Texas courts, federal bankruptcy proceedings, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and eventually reached the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in Marshall v. Marshall in February 2006. The Supreme Court’s ruling in May 2006 was procedurally favorable to Anna Nicole, holding that federal courts had jurisdiction to hear her claim.
It was not a ruling on the merits. E. Pierce Marshall died in June 2006 while the case was still unresolved. Anna Nicole died in February 2007.
The litigation continued between their estates for years afterward. She never received a dollar. After a decade of legal battle, the woman who argued that her husband had promised her a share of his fortune died without receiving it. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, her public life continued as a complicated spectacle.
She struggled publicly with her weight, gaining and losing significant amounts across the years in a cycle the tabloid press covered relentlessly. In 2003, she became a spokesperson for Trim Spa and underwent a dramatic weight loss. In 2002, E! Entertainment Television launched The Anna Nicole Show, a reality program that followed her daily life.
The show revealed a woman who was frequently incoherent, emotionally volatile, and apparently heavily medicated, stumbling through days that the production treated as comedy. She was not performing instability. She was living it. The show ran for two seasons before being cancelled in 2004.
Howard K. Stern had been her attorney for years before becoming her companion. He managed her legal and personal affairs simultaneously, a dual role that created an obvious conflict of interest that few around her seemed motivated to address. His presence would become central to the criminal proceedings after her death.
Daniel Wayne Smith was not a footnote in his mother’s story. He was the center of it. From his birth in 1986 until his death in 2006, he was the constant in Anna Nicole’s life. She said in an interview that the best present he ever gave her was a plaque he made that said, “I love you, Mom.
Your son forever. ”
People who knew them described an unusually close bond, the kind that happens when a very young mother raises a child essentially alone. He knew her before the Playboy spreads, before the reality show, before the Supreme Court case. Howard K.
Stern said after her death that Anna and Daniel were inseparable and that Daniel was without question the most important person in Anna’s life. Daniel struggled. A family friend named Ford Shelley, testifying at the inquest into Daniel’s death, described him as a gifted but anguished young man who wanted to break free, who loved his mother but didn’t want to be known primarily as her son. In 2006, he worked alongside his mother on the film Illegal Aliens.
He was on multiple anti-depressants. On September 7, 2006, Anna Nicole gave birth to Danylynn in Nassau. Daniel flew from Los Angeles and arrived late on September 9. He met his sister and embraced his mother.
By all accounts, it was a moment of genuine happiness. A hospital worker later recalled seeing Daniel still awake at around 9:30 that night. In the morning, he could not be woken. A private autopsy determined the cause of death: an accidental lethal combination of methadone, Zoloft, and Lexapro.
In 2008, a jury concluded it was an accidental drug overdose. No criminal charges were ever filed in connection with his death. Anna Nicole was in the same hospital when she was told her son was dead. Howard K.
Stern later said she was absolutely devastated. In the five months between Daniel’s death and her own, she did not disappear into privacy. Her legal battles continued, and the paternity dispute over Danylynn consumed enormous energy and media coverage. On September 28, 2006, 18 days after Daniel’s death, Anna Nicole and Howard K.
Stern held a commitment ceremony on a boat in the Bahamas. Stern announced on camera that he was the father of Danylynn. The ceremony was widely covered and widely criticized by observers who saw it as a performance orchestrated by Stern. On October 19, 2006, Daniel was buried in the Bahamas.
Anna Nicole had fought to have him buried near where she was living. Photographs show a woman hollowed out by grief. On October 31, 2006, she was hospitalized in Nassau with pneumonia and a collapsed lung. Her lawyers described it as stress-related.
She spent her remaining months in the Bahamas and then Florida, fighting the paternity case, fighting to keep Danylynn, fighting to keep moving through days that had become almost unlivable. The prescription drug use that had been a feature of her life for years intensified. She was being prescribed medications by multiple physicians. Nine drugs were found in her system at death.
Howard K. Stern and two physicians, Dr. Christine Eroshevich and Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, were eventually charged in California with conspiracy to provide controlled substances to Anna Nicole.
The charges were about a pattern of prescribing and supplying medications that the prosecution argued contributed to her death. In 2010, all three were acquitted on the most serious charges, though Stern and Dr. Eroshevich were convicted of lesser charges that were later overturned on appeal. On February 8, 2007, Anna Nicole was staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida.
She had been unwell for several days, running a high fever and suffering flu-like symptoms. Her nurse and her bodyguard were attending her, and Howard K. Stern was with her. At around 1:38 p.
m. , her bodyguard found her unresponsive in her bed. Paramedics performed CPR, and she was transported to Memorial Regional Hospital. At 2:49 p.
m. , Anna Nicole Smith was pronounced dead. She was 39 years old. Danylynn was five months old.
The Broward County Medical Examiner, Dr. Joshua Perper, conducted the autopsy. His finding was acute combined drug intoxication. Nine prescription drugs were found in her system, including chloral hydrate at a level nearly three times the therapeutic dose, along with Valium, Ativan, Benadryl, methadone, and other medications.
The death was ruled accidental. She was buried on March 2, 2007, in Nassau, Bahamas, next to her son, Daniel. She had wanted to be buried near him, and in death that wish was honored. Danylynn Hope Marshall Stern was born on September 7, 2006.
From the moment of her birth, her existence was the subject of a legal and media battle that reduced a newborn child to a prize in a dispute between competing adult interests. The question of who her father was was not resolved until April 10, 2007, two months after her mother’s death, when DNA testing confirmed that Larry Birkhead, an entertainment photographer who had been in a relationship with Anna Nicole, was Danylynn’s biological father. Howard K. Stern, who had publicly claimed paternity, relinquished any custody claim following the DNA results.
Larry Birkhead took custody of his daughter. He was 34 years old, with no particular preparation for single fatherhood, no co-parent, no support structure. He had only the fact that she was his and his willingness to show up for her. By all available accounts, he has done exactly that.
Danylynn, who uses her father’s surname, has grown up largely outside the public eye, raised by Larry in Louisville, Kentucky, away from Hollywood and the entertainment industry that consumed her mother. He has taken her to the Kentucky Derby, which her mother had attended in 2004, and photographs of the two of them there have become, for many people, the most hopeful images in the entire story. In 2012, at age six, Danylynn appeared in a Guess Kids campaign, the same modeling company her mother had worked with at the beginning of her career. Larry has said the decision was Danylynn’s own, that she wanted to do it and was proud of her mother’s connection to the brand.
Danylynn is now 18 years old. She has spoken in limited public appearances about her mother with warmth and without apparent bitterness. In 2023, she gave a brief interview in which she said she was proud of her mother, that she missed her, and that she felt connected to her through photographs and through the people who had known her. She has the most important thing her mother never had: a parent who stayed.
Anna Nicole Smith grew up in documented circumstances of poverty and absence, without a father, without financial security, without educational opportunity. She used the only resource she had—her body and her beauty—to build a life different from the one she was born into. She was prescribed medications by physicians who should have known better. She was surrounded in her final years by people whose interests were not always aligned with her well-being.
She had never processed, with any professional support, the accumulated grief of her life: the absent father, the teenage marriage, the poverty, the decade-long legal battle, the exposure of her body and private life, the reality show that turned her worst moments into entertainment, and then Daniel. She lasted five months after Daniel died. That fact tells you what his loss meant to her. Anna Nicole Smith had two children.
One died at 20 years old in a Bahamian hospital room three days after meeting his sister. The other is now 18 years old, growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, with her father, healthy and by every available indication happy. Danylynn Birkhead survived because her father made a different choice. Larry Birkhead, who had no preparation for single fatherhood and no road map for raising the daughter of one of the most sensationalized celebrities in American history, decided that her ordinary life was worth more than her extraordinary origin story.
He gave her the one thing her mother never consistently had: safety. The kind that comes not from money or fame or legal victories, but from a parent who shows up every single day and makes the same quiet choice over and over to put the child first. She was Vicky Lynn Hogan, a girl from Texas who loved her son and named her daughter Hope. Her son is buried in Nassau, Bahamas.
She is buried beside him. She wanted that. She said so.