It looks as if Anna Nicole Smith is finally going to rest in peace. Maybe.

On Wednesday a Florida appeals court ruled that she could be buried in the Bahamas next to her son. But who knows? Until the former playmate is actually in the ground, anything can happen. God knows if this saga of paternity and post mortem disposition were a movie, no one would believe it.

Watching the wall-to-wall coverage of the Smith case in recent weeks - and let's face it, not even the alleged discovery of Jesus' tomb could knock it off the airwaves - you can't help but wonder when our definition of news became so shallow. Tabloid items have always fascinated us, but only recently have they taken on the aura of a crusade.

Fighting over a dead celebrity's estate is nothing new; history is littered with challenges to people's wills. But their decaying flesh? We seem to have entered the era of the modern body snatchers, where shuffling off this mortal coil is no longer a sure thing, even in death.

It's not just Smith, of course. Recently James Brown's widow and his adult children agreed on a burial site for the legendary soul singer, who died on Christmas Day. They won't disclose the proposed location, but you just know that if Brown were still alive, he'd ask what the funk is going on?

As bizarre as the Brown and Smith cases may seem, celebrity body snatching is not unprecedented. When baseball great Ted Williams died in 2002 his children immediately began bickering over his remains. His eldest daughter wanted him cremated and his ashes scattered off the coast of Florida. His younger children - citing a pact they had made with the slugger - wanted him interred in Arizona.

The result? Williams' head was separated from his body, and both parts were cryonically frozen at Scottsdale's Alcor Life Extension Foundation. The case wasn't resolved until 2005, when Williams' eldest daughter, Bobby-Jo Ferrell, dropped her lawsuit against her younger brother and sister. Today, Williams still rests in pieces in Arizona.

Walt Disney was also rumored to have been frozen after his death - a rumor debunked both by a death certificate and a plaque at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, Calif., where his cremated remains were interred.

And let's not forget such bizarre cases as Alistair Cooke, whose body was among those "chopped up for profits" and sold by a rogue Brooklyn mortuary in 2005.

The British have a long history of stealing body parts of dead royals and exhibiting them. Anne Boleyn was beheaded in 1536, yet her heart was stolen from the body and not finally reburied until 1836. Oliver Cromwell's head spent 25 years being exhbited on a pole on Westminster Hall. It was finally buried in a secret spot at Sydney Sussex College in 1960, nearly 300 years after his death in 1658.

Sir Walter Raleigh lost his head in 1618, yet his wife kept the embalmed noggin in a red leather bag for the last 29 years of her life.

Death may be the end of the road for a celebrity, but not for the rest of us. As the Anna Nicole Smith case proves, there's nothing like a post mortem feeding frenzy to sell newspapers or boost TV ratings. We've become a culture of vultures, picking over carrion as though we'd found a piece of the one true cross. Exploitation has no expiration date.

It's more than a little creepy.

So what will happen next? There's the paternity case to be resolved, of course, but there's also a worst-case scenario: Anna Nicole is inadvertently buried in Haiti, and a few months from now we get tabloid reports of her zombie roaming the island crying out for justice.

How sad that she was never as entertaining in life as she has proven in death.

Mike Pearson is features editor. pearsonm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2592.