Marshall, legal adversary of Anna Nicole Smith, dies

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

WASHINGTON, June 24 (Reuters) E. Pierce Marshall, who battled Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith in the courts over his father's vast oil fortune, died unexpectedly this week.

The 67-year-old died after a ''brief and extremely aggressive infection,'' the family said yesterday in a statement from Dallas.

The death in 1995 of his father, J. Howard Marshall, triggered a long-running legal battle with Smith, who married the oil tycoon a year earlier after meeting him while working as a topless dancer. She was 26 when they married; he was 89.

Marshall was one of the wealthiest men in Texas, worth more than an estimated 1.6 billion dollars. Smith claimed that her husband promised her half of his estate. The son said that more than 6 million dollars in gifts she received was all his father left her.

Earlier this year, Smith won from the US Supreme Court a new chance to collect millions of dollars when the justices overturned a US appeals court ruling that the widow was entitled to nothing.

REUTERS SHB VC1432

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