When you don’t have a lot of experience with the criminal justice system, like me, you wonder why it’s taking a while to investigate and prosecute suspicious deaths, like Anna Nicole and her son Daniel. There must be a lot of evidence to put together and angles to explore. Hell, it’s hard to even keep track of the news on this case.

A private investigator, who claims he spoke to “a worried” Daniel Smith a few months before his untimely death, says he thinks that Daniel and Anna were the victims of foul play and that their deaths were defintely not accidental. He says someone better watch over baby Dannielynn or she could be next:

A private investigator who says he talked with a worried Daniel Smith months before his death, believes that the 20-year-old and his famous mother, Anna Nicole Smith, did not die of natural causes. “My evaluation showed me foul play,” Jack Harding tells In Touch. “An ex-CIA agent on the case right now agrees with me.” He also believes that as Anna Nicole’s sole heir, her daughter 6-month-old Dannielynn could be in danger, too. “The daughter will have a trace of drugs in her because of her mom’s drug use during pregnancy,” says Jack. “It would be easy for someone to give her drugs.”

[From In Touch Weekly website, no permalink available]

We recently covered a story that claimed that Daniel had ten times the amount of methadone in his system than was reported on the Bahamian toxicology studies performed by the coroner’s office. The numbers were said to be fudged in an attempt to make it seem like he died of an unforeseen drug interaction, not an abnormally high dose of medication that he could hardly have taken without the intent of killing himself.

If that is true, and if this PI’s account is to be believed, Daniel must have been concerned about Howard K. Stern’s involvement in his mother’s life and/or had worries about his own safety as Anna’s heir.In Touch says they’ll cover more of the story in the upcoming print edition, and I’m interested to hear what Daniel told this guy. It certainly seems like creepy lawyer Stern is hiding something, especially considering that he disappeared right around the time that Anna died in her hotel room.

Cops are currently pouring over the data on Anna’s laptop computer. Like Daniel, she also seemed to fear for her safety, and told a friend, the son of the guy who owned her squatter mansion in the Bahamas, to seize her laptop computer and personal effects “if anything happens to me and Howard is not around.” Either she meant watch out for Howard, or that she wanted her things saved in case Howard couldn’t do it himself. Regardless the guy grabbed her stuff after she died and turned it over to the police.

The coroner’s office was about to announce its findings on Anna’s postmortem examination two weeks ago, but decided to wait and see what new evidence the cops had and if that might warrant further exploration.

Now Howard K Stern has submitted baby Dannielynn for DNA testing by court order, and everyone expects Larry Birkhead to be declared the father. I hope the handover goes smoothly and that Dannielynn is fine. Birkhead’s lawyer recently dropped him as a client after complaining that he was in cohoots with Stern, so maybe they’ve worked out some sort of agreement for custody, which bodes well for Dannielynn’s safety.

There are a lot of twists and turns in this case, and although you can’t pin it all on Howard yet there is so much circumstantial evidence that points to foul play.