Despite the National Enquirer's claim that the eerie post-mortem images of Anna Nicole Smith it published were "photo re-creations based on eyewitness accounts," a source close to the magazine says they were the actual photos of the Playboy playmate's corpse lying in a Florida mortuary. "We didn't want to get anyone fired," an Enquirer operative told The Post's Braden Keil. Someone with access to the refrigerated drawers scored a big payday after pulling out Smith's pre-embalmed body and unzipping the body bag for an Enquirer photographer to hurriedly snap her bluish face.
If this is true, then I for one won't be using the Enquirer as a source for stories anymore. In fact, when I originally ran this story I had a conversation with my husband on this very subject, and I said emphatically that editors that run photos of actual dead celebrites are the ilk on the bottom of life's shoes. That's just going way over the line, in my opinion.