By late afternoon on January 26, 2011, a blizzard had shut down Philadelphia. Schools let out early, and Ellen Greenberg, a 27-year-old first-grade teacher, was home in her sixth-floor apartment at the Venice Lofts in Manayunk. Her fiancé, Sam Goldberg, said he left for the building’s gym that afternoon and returned to find their door blocked from inside by its swing latch. Shortly after 6:30 p.m. he called 911, saying he had forced the door open and found Ellen on the kitchen floor with a knife in her chest. “She stabbed herself,” he told the dispatcher. The autopsy would count 20 stab wounds. Within days, the city called her death a suicide.

A Teacher From Harrisburg

Ellen Rae Greenberg was the only child of Joshua and Sandra “Sandee” Greenberg of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She taught first grade at Juniata Park Academy in North Philadelphia and shared the Manayunk apartment with Goldberg, whom she planned to marry later in 2011. In her final weeks she had grown visibly anxious, began seeing a psychiatrist and was prescribed anti-anxiety medication; the city’s 2025 review would later cite that anxiety, including worry over student grades she felt pressured to inflate. Her parents saw a daughter making wedding plans and asking about coming home to Harrisburg, not one preparing to die.

The Scene in Apartment 603

Ellen was found slumped in a corner of the kitchen, a 10-inch knife from her own block still lodged in her chest. The autopsy documented 20 stab wounds, including 10 to the back of her neck, along with wounds to her chest, abdomen and head, and 11 bruises in various stages of healing. There was no suicide note. Police treated the scene that night as a suicide and did not secure it. The next day, before detectives returned with a search warrant, the unit was cleaned, and Goldberg’s uncle, attorney James Schwartzman, removed Ellen’s phone and laptops, a chain-of-custody break her family’s lawyers cited for years.

Homicide, Then Suicide

On January 27, 2011, assistant medical examiner Marlon Osbourne performed the autopsy and ruled the death a homicide. Police pushed back, pointing to the latched door, what they saw as a lack of defensive wounds, and the absence of any evidence of an intruder. After meetings between detectives and the medical examiner’s office, the ruling was reversed, and by early February the death certificate said suicide. That single word closed the criminal investigation. The state attorney general’s office would later say searches found on a laptop attributed to Ellen, including queries about suicide methods, supported the ruling. Her parents never accepted the reversal, and they spent the next 14 years trying to undo it.

The Experts and the Spinal Cord

In March 2019, a Philadelphia Inquirer investigation brought the case back into public view. Forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht called it “strongly suspicious of homicide,” and forensic scientist Henry Lee concluded the bloodstain patterns were consistent with a homicide scene. The sharpest dispute involved one wound at the back of the neck that penetrated the dura and reached Ellen’s spinal cord. Experts hired by the family said the wound showed little hemorrhage, suggesting it came at or near death, and could have been incapacitating, meaning she could not have kept stabbing herself. Neuropathologist Lucy Rorke-Adams, credited with examining the cord in 2011, told the Inquirer she had no recollection of the case. As in the Sherri Rasmussen case, an early reading of a scene hardened into an official story that took decades to challenge.

Fourteen Years in the Courts

In October 2019, the Greenbergs sued to have the manner of death changed to homicide or undetermined. Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office reviewed the case and closed it, reaffirming suicide in February 2022, then handed it to the Chester County District Attorney over a conflict of interest. In late 2024, that office placed the investigation on inactive status, saying it could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had occurred. Meanwhile, on July 30, 2024, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear the family’s appeal on a novel question: whether relatives can force a court to correct a death certificate they believe is wrong. Like the fight over Adnan Syed and the murder of Hae Min Lee, it turned a single contested ruling into years of appeals.

A Settlement and a Stalled Review

The case broke open in early 2025. In a sworn statement signed that January, Osbourne, the pathologist who had certified the suicide, wrote that he had since learned information he did not have in 2011 and that “Ellen’s manner of death should be designated as something other than suicide.” In February 2025, Philadelphia settled with the Greenbergs: the city paid $650,000, the family withdrew its lawsuits, including the Supreme Court appeal, and the medical examiner’s office promised an expeditious reexamination of the manner of death. The settlement itself changed nothing on the certificate, and months passed with no review. At a hearing on September 4, 2025, Common Pleas Judge Linda Carpenter scolded the city, saying “justice delayed is justice denied,” and gave the office until mid-October to show progress.

Reaffirmed Suicide, Then Federal Interest

On October 10, 2025, Chief Medical Examiner Lindsay Simon issued a 32-page report that found three previously undocumented stab wounds, raising the total to 23, and 31 bruises, yet concluded the death was still best classified as suicide. Simon called the distribution of injuries “admittedly unusual” but said Ellen could have inflicted them herself, and suggested the spinal cord defect might have been caused during the autopsy. Days later the court closed its review. Joshua Greenberg called the report “bogus”; Sandee said, “we’re not going away, and we’re not giving up.” Then, in January 2026, the Inquirer reported that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed documents, examining not the manner of death but how city and state agencies handled the case, and whether missteps amounted to corruption. Goldberg has never been charged with any crime and has consistently denied harming Ellen. In a city still haunted by America’s Unknown Child, hers has become the death certificate people argue about.

Why This Case Still Matters

A manner-of-death ruling is not a formality. The moment Ellen Greenberg’s certificate said suicide, the homicide investigation stopped, evidence went uncollected, and every later review had to work from a compromised scene. Her parents’ 14-year fight exposed how little recourse a family has when it believes a medical examiner got it wrong: it took a lawsuit, a state Supreme Court appeal and a $650,000 settlement just to obtain a second look, and that second look reaffirmed the original ruling while finding wounds the first autopsy missed. The federal document requests reported in January 2026 shifted the question to how the institutions that handled the case performed. The suicide ruling remains disputed.

Two city pathologists have now put their names on Ellen Greenberg’s death: the one who signed the suicide ruling says he no longer stands behind it, and the one who reaffirmed it counted three stab wounds no one had documented in 14 years.

Related Cases

• America’s Unknown Child (Boy in the Box) — Philadelphia’s nameless little boy, finally identified after 65 years
• Adnan Syed and the murder of Hae Min Lee — the Baltimore conviction a podcast turned into a national argument
• The Sherri Rasmussen case — a 1986 murder misread for 23 years until DNA pointed inside the LAPD

Sources

• The Philadelphia Inquirer – Philadelphia stands by suicide ruling in Ellen Greenberg case
• The Philadelphia Inquirer – Federal prosecutors request documents tied to the Ellen Greenberg case
• The Philadelphia Inquirer – Judge blasts the city in Ellen Greenberg case
• NBC News – Pathologist says Ellen Greenberg’s death should not be ruled a suicide
• 6abc Philadelphia – Court closes review of Ellen Greenberg case; family vows to continue
• Wikipedia – Death of Ellen Greenberg

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