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A Florida judge has ordered the former companion of Anna Nicole Smith, who died suddenly this month, to appear in court on Tuesday when a three-way legal battle over her estate, the fate of her body and the custody of her five-month-old daughter is due to resume.
Howard K Stern remained in seclusion last week in the couple's mansion in the Bahamas following Ms Smith's death on 8 February.
He was absent from the first three days of proceedings being held to untangle the problems surrounding probate and the model's estate.
In death as in life, the affairs of Ms Smith are a mess.
On Friday, Judge Larry Seidlin released a 2001 will which named Mr Stern executor but left everything to Ms Smith's son, Daniel, and no one else.
But Daniel died at the age of 20, just days after Ms Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn, last September.
While Mr Stern is listed as the father on the girl's birth certificate, another man, photographer Larry Birkhead, is claiming paternity.
Judge Seidlin on Friday granted permission for Ms Smith's body to be embalmed after allowing for new DNA samples that Mr Birkhead believes will prove his paternity.
Mr Stern, meanwhile, is in combat with Ms Smith's mother, Virgie Arthur, over the site of her burial.
He insists that she should be interred in the Bahamas beside the grave of her son, but Ms Arthur wants her to be buried in her native Texas.
The highest stakes surround the custody of Dannielynn.
She could one day inherit a fortune if hundreds of millions of dollars are awarded posthumously to her mother from the estate of Howard Marshall, the oil billionaire whom Ms Smith married in 1994, and who died within 14 months of the marriage.
- INDEPENDENT
