Smith ordered the follow-up autopsy to end "media speculation surrounding the matter", said her Bahamian lawyer, Michael Scott. He could not say whether the results would be made public.

Head Bahamian coroner Linda Virgill said it was not unusual for families to ask for an independent examination.

A hearse took Smith's remains from the morgue to a funeral home making arrangements to return the body to California.

Wecht, 75, is facing trial on charges he used his staff when he was the Allegheny County coroner to do work for his multimillion-dollar private pathology practice. He resigned from office in January and contends he did nothing wrong.

The forensic pathologist received international prominence as a critic of the Warren Commission's single-gunman theory of US president John F Kennedy's assassination. He has also worked as a consultant on cases such as the slayings of JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson.

Smith, 38, who came to the Bahamas during her pregnancy to avoid media scrutiny, is free to leave the Caribbean island chain, authorities have said.

Scott said she was not prepared to speak with the media.

"She is depressed and she's at home, and remember that she's got a new child that she's looking after," he said.

Daniel Smith, who appeared several times on the E! reality series, The Anna Nicole Show, was the son of Anna Nicole and Bill Smith, who married in 1985 and divorced two years later.

The identity of the father of her newborn daughter has not been publicly released.

Smith married Texas oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II in 1994, when she was 26 and he was 89. He died the following year and she has since been involved in legal disputes over the estate.

AP