MIAMI: A bitter and often bizarre legal battle over the body of Playboy model and billionaire’s widow Anna Nicole Smith ended on February 22 with a sobbing judge and rival lawyers agreeing she should be buried in the Bahamas.

Two weeks after the controversial blonde celebrity died at a Florida hotel, a teary-eyed judge concluded an emotionally charged and often bizarre hearing, telling the court he wanted the late celebrity buried alongside her son, who died in the Bahamas in September at the age of 20. “I want them to be together,” Judge Larry Seidlin said in the Fort Lauderdale courtroom.

In his unexpected ruling, Seidlin gave custody of the body to a lawyer he appointed as a guardian for Smith’s five-month-old daughter, rather than to Smith’s estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, or her longtime companion, Howard K Stern.

“I have suffered for this, I have struggled with this, I have shed tears for your little girl,” Seidlin told Arthur, whom he called Mama. Emerging from the courtroom, lawyers for the rival parties said they had agreed to bury Smith at a private ceremony in the Bahamas, even though her mother had wanted to put her to rest in her native Texas.