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money coming in, but I am hoping to get some soon and maybe we can start now." He asked Harding if he'd work immediately and get paid later, but Harding explained that he's been in the business for over thirty years and for a project like this he'd need some money up front.
       Daniel was very upset, but understood.
       "So, the last time I saw Daniel," Harding remembered, "was when he walked out the door of the restaurant."
       A month later, Daniel would be dead. Bahamian Police would find Jack Harding's business card in Daniel's pocket, in the clothes he was wearing when he took his last breath.

    Saturday, September 9, 2006

    For most of his life, Daniel Smith was at his mother's side when she needed him. So at 10:25 p.m. on September 9, 2006, two days after she had given birth to his sister, Daniel arrived in Nassau on American Eagle flight 5005.
       Anna had called and told him, "You have a baby sister!" and asked him to come down. Daniel hadn't been feeling well the day he was supposed to fly from Los Angeles to the Bahamas. He told Ray Martino he had a stomachache. But he wanted to see his mother. It had been months since he'd seen her—one of the longest periods of times they had spent apart— and they had always had a very close relationship.
       Anna's brother, Donnie Hogan, said Anna adored Daniel, and had big hopes for her son. "She told me her best success was Daniel," Donnie said. "She was always holding and hugging him. Nothing was more important to her than Daniel.
       "I remember when Daniel was six or seven and we were at her ranch in Tomball [Texas]. Daniel was leaning on a fence, missing his front teeth, and told everyone, 'I'll be a big actor one day,' and Anna said, 'Whatever he'll be, he's going to be a star.'"
       Daniel loved to laugh and to make people laugh. When Daniel was around eight years old, Donnie, Daniel, and Anna were in a car, stopped at a light. There was a homeless man with signs sitting on the corner, and Daniel rolled down the window and asked, "Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?" mimicking a popular commercial on at the time. They all laughed, but Anna quickly told him that those men were less fortunate than he was and that it was not the right thing to do.
       Anna's good friend, Jackie Hatten, used to pick Daniel up from school when he was younger. She says Daniel rarely cursed and always respected his mom, doing whatever she asked, even the laundry. Daniel was intelligent, sweet, and, like many young men, loved video games like Mortal Combat and movies, especially Ben Stiller's Zoolander , about a dimwitted male model whose "spiky black hair" and patented model pose, "Blue Steel," made him the envy of the fashion world.
       Around the time of Anna's move to the Bahamas, stress and depression led to Daniel losing weight—twenty to thirty pounds—and breaking up with a woman he was dating. On July 17, the day before Anna flew to the Bahamas from South Carolina, Daniel was shaking and his heart was racing. He was depressed to the point of breakdown. Ray Martino took him to St. Joseph's Medical Center in Burbank and Daniel was admitted. He spent four days undergoing a battery of tests, including tests for drugs. Doctors found nothing remarkable.
       Daniel told a close family friend that he was depressed and very worried about his mom. Soon after he left the hospital, one of his mother's many doctors, Sandeep Kapoor—the man who wrote her prescriptions for methadone—wrote Daniel a prescription for Lexapro, one of the two antidepressants found in his system when he died. These two drugs were in lethal combination with another drug found in his system . . . methadone, a prescription of which his mother had received less than a month before.

    • • •

    Jackie Hatten spoke to Daniel a couple of months before he died. According to Jackie, Daniel was scared of Howard and all the drugs he kept giving to Anna. He asked Jackie if she would go