Parents of a young teacher found with 20 stab wounds have won the right to challenge the ruling of her death as a suicide.
Ellen Greenberg, 27, was found dead on the kitchen floor of her apartment in Philadelphia in the middle of a blizzard on January 26, 2011.
She had 10 stab wounds to her neck and the back of the head, and 10 to her stomach, abdomen, and chest with a 10-inch knife still plunged into her heart.
Her fiancé Sam Goldberg told police he broke down the door, which was locked from the inside, found her, and attempted CPR with on the phone with 911.
Assistant Philadelphia Medical Examiner Marlon Osbourne initially ruled her death a homicide but changed it to suicide after a meeting with police and prosecutors.
Ellen Greenberg was 27 years old when her fiancé Sam Goldberg found her dead in the kitchen of her Philadelphia apartment on January 26, 2011
Greenberg’s parents Joshua and Sandee have spent the 13 years since, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to reverse the death certificate change to suicide
Greenberg’s parents Joshua and Sandee have spent the 13 years since, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to reverse it.
‘Ellen stabbing herself 20 times before dying is bulls**t. She died from a very vicious, very painful knife attack,’ Joshua told DailyMail.com
After amassing a wealth of evidence pointing to homicide, they sued the ME’s office and Osborne in 2019 but were rejected by the Commonwealth Court last September.
But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week granted their appeal to hear the case as a ‘matter of statewide importance’.
‘We’re smiling, we’re very optimistic… I hope we’re making our daughter proud. There’s been a lot of frustration, but we haven’t given up,’ Sandee said.
The court will hear arguments on whether ‘executors and administrators of an estate have standing to challenge an erroneous finding recorded on the decedent’s death certificate’.
The order noted ‘that finding constitutes a bar or material impediment to recovery of victim’s compensation, restitution or for wrongful death, as well as private criminal complaints’.
Joshua said the family would change a longstanding precedent if it won, and hoped Greenberg’s cause of death would at least be changed to ‘undetermined’.
‘Medical examiners apparently have this ability that you and I don’t have – they can walk on water so their conclusions cannot be challenged, except by a court. So, we are challenging something that cannot be challenged,’ he said.
Greenberg’s fiancé Sam Goldberg told police he broke down the door, which was locked from the inside, found her, and attempted CPR with on the phone with 911
Ellen’s parents Sandee and Joshua Greenberg tell DailyMail.com they have ‘a mountain of evidence’ to prove their daughter was murdered
The family’s lawyer, Joseph Podraza, said getting the finding changed could force Greenberg’s death to be reinvestigated as a possible homicide.
‘We’ve got our fingers and toes crossed. That’s why we were ecstatic when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided to take up the matter,’ he said.
‘We’re hopeful that one of the reasons that they took this case is to set that precedent and to correct what we contend is an erroneous determination.’
Though the Commonwealth Court found the Greenbergs had no standing to challenge the medical examiner, the judges were otherwise on their side.
The 39-page decision was a scathing indictment of how the case was handled, giving them hope for the Supreme Court appeal.
Judges wrote they were ‘acutely aware of the deeply flawed investigation’ and their opinion was written ”in the interests of justice’ and ‘with hopes that equity may one day prevail for the victim and her loved ones’.
‘It’s virtually all devoted to how messed up and sloppy and substandard the police investigation was and how many mistakes they made,’ Podraza said.
City of Philadelphia lawyers maintained ‘the law makes clear that a medical examiner can be wrong as to the manner of death yet cannot be compelled to change it’.
‘We’re smiling, we’re very optimistic… I hope we’re making our daughter proud. There’s been a lot of frustration, but we haven’t given up,’ Sandee said
Joshua said the family would change a longstanding precedent if it won, and hoped Greenberg’s cause of death would at least be changed to ‘undetermined’
Greenberg’s parents and their lawyer laid out the evidence they argued pointed to the first-grade teacher being murdered.
They spent years conducting their own investigation with private detectives, several pathologists, and photogrammetry recreating each of the 20 stab wounds.
‘This is not something we thought, in a million years, we would ever be doing or would ever happen. We thought there was a very bright future. We were planning for future generations never expecting her life to end like this,’ Sandee said.
‘It took years for us to piece this together. At the beginning I was sitting up at night looking at reports with a centimeter ruler trying to figure out how that really translated into how shallow or deep the incisions were on my child’s body.
‘We realized we needed to get experts to help us do this so that’s what we did.’
DailyMail.com conducted its own investigation in 2020, speaking with the experts the Greenbergs employed along with others – all of whom agreed the case wasn’t as open and shut as authorities insisted.
Since then, Podraza has conducted depositions with Osbourne and other medical experts involved in the case, as part of the lawsuit.
The depositions revealed startling new information, including that one of the wounds may have been inflicted after Greenberg’s heart stopped.
‘That took us out of hypothetical and put us in reality, that you can actually point to physical evidence that establishes a homicide versus suicide,’ Podraza said, crediting it with getting the Supreme Court appeal.
Much of the suspicion has fallen on Goldberg, who is now a married father-of-two working as a film and TV producer in Manhattan.
He has never spoken publicly about his fiancée’s death, and never been outright accused of causing it.
‘Police murder investigations usually start with the people who are closer in relation to the victim,’ Joshua said.
He added that given the number of wounds, there could have been a second attacker with a murder weapon that was never found.
Goldberg told police he had gone to the gym downstairs about 4.45pm and couldn’t get back inside the apartment when he returned half an hour later
Goldberg is now a married father-of-two working as a film and TV producer in Manhattan. He married Caroline Fay Shnay, the daughter of well-off real estate agents, at the Plaza in New York City on January 11, 2014
Greenberg’s body was also covered in 11 bruises on her arm, abdomen, and leg at varying stages of healing, which her father claimed had to be from abuse over a long period of time.
‘I think those injuries are crucial to the whole thing,’ he said, adding that covering up the abuse could be a motive for murdering her.
Joshua said his daughter’s behavior changed and she wanted to quit her job, leave Goldberg and move back home with her parents, and they had agreed to take her in.
‘Sandy and I both believe Ellen was going to go home that day,’ he said.
‘She had taken off the engagement ring, had packed up her makeup, which was very valuable to her, and she was planning to leave.
‘And I think things didn’t work out well, and she never made it home.’
Police claimed the bruises were likely from playing contact sports, or doing yoga or Pilates – none of which Greenberg did.
‘The whole thing is baloney,’ Joshua said.
Greenberg’s body was also covered in 11 bruises on her arm, abdomen, and leg at varying stages of healing, which her father claimed had to be from abuse over a long period of time
Greenberg’s parents also insisted she was not suicidal, but she was nervous and anxious in the weeks leading up to her death.
Friends told her parents that they too noticed a change, and that increasingly she deferred to Goldberg on decisions she would once have made for herself.
Her parents made her a deal that she could come home if she saw a psychiatrist about what was troubling her, and she agreed.
‘Ellen’s behavior had changed, and the police tried to say that she was crazy and suicidal. Well, she wasn’t,’ Joshua said.
‘I made an agreement because she wanted to come home and I wanted to take care of her, but I didn’t want her to lose her job if she didn’t have to.’
Psychiatrist Ellen Berman saw Greenberg three times, diagnosed her with anxiety, and prescribed her Ambien and Klonopin – but was very clear that she wasn’t suicidal.
Podraza also said the FBI searched her computer and didn’t find any suicide-related searches.
Where is Sam Goldberg now?
Greenberg’s parents said Goldberg sporadically kept in touch with Sandee for two or three years after her death.
‘At the end of the conversation. She would always say, you know, Sam, this was not a suicide, we know this is not,’ she told DailyMail.com
‘He never responded, and he would just hang up.’
The last they heard from him was in 2013 in an email telling them he was getting married.
Goldberg married Caroline Fay Shnay, the daughter of well-off real estate agents, at the Plaza in New York City on January 11, 2014, almost exactly three years after Greenberg’s death.
Sam Goldberg with wife Caroline Shnay Goldberg and their child in a 2017 Facebook photo
Shnay told a blogger in 2017 about how she quit her career as a fashion buyer after 12 years to be a full-time mother to her daughter Lola, who was born in late 2015.
‘Today Lola is 18 months and I stand by this decision. I admit, there are many challenging days and I often remind myself that this day, this time in my life will not last forever,’ she said
‘What they say about motherhood is true, the days are long, the years are short.’
Shnay said Goldberg was ‘hands on, and present, a true life saver’
‘He is also a star in the kitchen. Besides from me breastfeeding Lola for her first five months of life, Sam has cooked most of her meals that are not from an Annie’s box,’ she said.
Martin Shnay and his daughter Caroline Shnay attend Alice + Olivia pop-up store opening at Scoop on November 20, 2009
The couple live in a two-bedroom apartment in Grammercy Park they bought for $1.8 million in 2017.
Goldberg is a film and TV producer whose credits mainly consist of little-known independent titles.
Greenberg’s parents said they hadn’t kept up with his life since then.
‘I don’t think it’s any of our business, I don’t know what he does. There’s no interest on my part about what his life is like,’ Joshua said.
They objection to the very idea that Greenberg could have stabbed herself 20 times, including 10 times in her neck and the back of her head.
They included eight wounds to her chest, including the four-inch wound to her heart, a two-inch wound to her stomach, a 2.5-inch gash across her scalp, and 10 wounds up to three inches deep to the back of her neck.
‘Just think of the magnitude of the wounds. The pain of that alone would incapacitate anybody who was not under some psychotropic drug influence,’ Podraza said.
‘With all of the nerve bundles that are surrounding [the back of the neck], it’s impossible that she would have continued to self-inflict, cause the body would have just shut down from just the magnitude of the pain going through it.’
A deposition with Lyndsey Emery, a former pathologist at the ME’s office, also revealed one of the wounds may have been post-mortem.
Emery was asked in 2019 by Chief Medical Examiner Sam Gulino to analyze a section of Greenberg’s spinal column kept in storage.
She told the deposition that hemorrhaging around the wounds on the spinal column and the dura that didn’t have any hemorrhaging around them.
‘Lack of hemorrhage means no pulse,’ she said.
A crime scene analyst hired by the family noted that Ellen had been moved. She was found seated on the floor, propped up against kitchen cabinets, yet a streak of coagulated blood ran in a horizontal line from her nose to her ear
This graphic shows knife wounds Ellen suffered to her neck and chest, that pierced her brain and severed her spinal cord
There were two other possibilities, Emery said – Greenberg could have died very soon after the wound was inflicted, or it wasn’t serious enough.
But she admitted she would expect to see hemorrhaging if Greenberg was alive when she was stabbed.
‘My attorney almost fell off his chair when she said during the deposition, but we had no knowledge of that at all,’ Joshua said.
‘You cannot have a post-mortem wound inflicted by yourself if you are a suicide victim.’
A month later, Emery made a written declaration saying she didn’t fully grasp the scope of the question and there were three more reasons there could have been no hemorrhaging.
But Podraza and Greenberg’s parents are skeptical.
They also don’t believe Osborne when he said he took a section of Greenberg’s spinal column to renowned neuropathologist Lucy Rorke-Adams to look it.
Bizarrely, he put it in a jar and walked it through heavy snow to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where Rorke-Adams worked.
Osborne claimed she looked at it and could see the spinal cord itself wasn’t cut, so Greenberg wasn’t paralyzed and could have kept stabbing herself.
However, Rorke-Adams never billed for the consultation or wrote a report, and years later said she had no memory of the entire episode.
Another graphic show’s Ellen’s spinal cord had actually been severed and her brain pierced in two forceful stabs to the neck. She could have neither defended nor harmed herself after those blows
More came out of a deposition with Gulino, who said he and Osborne were summoned to an ‘unusual’ meeting with the police and DA’s office.
‘[It’s] clear that they were presenting information because they felt that the manner of death was different from what had been ruled,’ he said.
It was during that meeting that police claimed they confirmed a doorman was with Goldberg when he broke the door down – despite him never saying so.
This became a pivotal moment in the case and was a key factor in the manner of death being changed to suicide.
‘[It] was important to find out if it was broken, if anyone was there to see it be broken, or is it just the story we’re getting from the decedent’s boyfriend that it was broken by him,’ Osbourne said.
‘[It] doesn’t seem like anyone else could have been in the room to inflict those injuries other than Ms Greenberg herself, and that is how I came to the conclusion of suicide.’
But the doorman, Phil Hanton, submitted a signed statement saying he wasn’t there and never left his post as he was the only one on duty.
Goldberg told police he had gone to the gym downstairs about 4.45pm and couldn’t get back inside the apartment when he returned half an hour later.
Neighbors heard him yelling to her through the door, and frustrated, he began calling before texting her nine messages.
They were: ‘Hello,’ ‘open the door,’ ‘what r u doin,’ ‘i’m getting pissed,’ ‘hello,’ ‘you better have an excuse,’ ‘what the f***’ ‘ahhh’ ‘u have no idea.’
Goldberg went back downstairs to ask the apartment building security guard if he had some sort of tool that he could use to break in. The guard did not.
Cameras in the building also showed Hanton did not go upstairs with Goldberg.
Podraza claimed there were indications that Goldberg may have even called 911 from the hallway, not inside the apartment like he claimed.
Ellen had been stabbed ten times in the back of her neck and head and ten in her stomach, abdomen and chest and a knife was still plunged in her heart
The there was the door itself that Goldberg claimed to have broken the lock on.
The door had a swing lock that Greenberg’s family said was barely damaged and not in the right way for it being kicked in.
‘It wasn’t damaged. It wasn’t bent. It wasn’t pulled out of the wall. There’s very little if any damage, to that lock, which would have to have been the formed to allow somebody to to go to go into that apartment,’ Joshua said.
Osborne admitted during the deposition that if he knew there was dispute about what happened with the door, he would have ruled Greenberg’s death ‘undetermined’.
Other reasons he cited under oath for his switch to suicide were the spinal cord exam, the lack of defensive wounds, no incapacitating drugs in Ellen’s system, no sign of an intruder, Goldberg’s statements, and police findings at the scene.
Goldberg said he called 911 when he saw Ellen’s body, the audio of which was only released during the depositions.
‘Help!… My fiancée’s on the floor with blood everywhere,’ he said.
He later added, ‘I can’t see anything… there’s nothing broken… Ellie!… I think she hit her head.’
‘Oh my god! She stabbed herself… she fell on a knife… there is a knife sticking out of her heart.’
The door had a swing lock that Greenberg’s family said was barely damaged and not in the right way for it being kicked in
Goldberg said his fiancée was lying down on the floor when he found her, but when police arrived she was propped up against the wall, despite him saying he did CPR on her.
‘There’s a streak of blood from Ellen’s ear to her nose on one side of her face. That’s horizontal,’ Joshua said.
‘So if the blood was travelling by was by the force of gravity and it went from the nose to the ear, that means the position of Ellen’s head was lying on her back with her face facing the sky.
‘Then how did you get to a seated position? The body was moved.’
Podraza believes the city has fought Greenberg’s family tooth and nail for 13 years because it was covering up how badly ‘botched’ the investigation was.
‘The most troubling thing is that on January 26th, the homicide detectives did not summon the crime scene unit, despite it being suspicious,’ he said.
‘As a result of that, it left the premises unguarded and allowed non-official personnel access the next day.
‘It resulted then, in a crime, a crime scene, clean up company, actually scouring the premises, and cleaning it, and Sam’s relatives having access to remove whatever they desired – all before the police were notified that the medical examiner’s office determined this to be a homicide.
‘So by the time the police showed up, it was too late.’
Sam Goldberg (right) is seen with friends and family in a 2009 Facebook photo posted by his sister
Joshua agreed as he claimed the city sent an army of lawyers to block them at every turn.
‘We have had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and 13 years trying to get justice for our daughter,’ he said.
‘And it could have been handled right away without spending a hell of a lot of money and a lot of time.
‘How much is the city spent on this? How much is the city wasted, time wise, where they could be doing more beneficial things to the citizens of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania?
‘What they’re covering up, I don’t know. Are they covering up police inadequacy and mistakes? Are they covering up some other personality or person?
‘I don’t know, but it’s a cover up. There’s a mistake somewhere here, a big f**king mistake.’
Another bizarre episode was then-Pennsylvania Attorney-General Josh Shapiro, now governor, recusing himself from the case in July 2022.
Another bizarre episode was then-Pennsylvania Attorney-General Josh Shapiro, now governor, recusing himself from the case in July 2022
A YouTuber claimed Goldberg’s family were contributors to Shapiro’s campaign, and he therefore had a ‘conflict of interest’.
Shapiro recused himself three days later and his office said though there was no actual conflict, there was an ‘appearance’ of one.
Greenberg’s parents blasted Shapiro at the time, but Joshua declined to comment to DailyMail.com, since the former attorney-general was now the frontrunner to be Kamala Harris’ running mate.
‘He stole four years from us, holding the case in his office, and we have no evidence of him doing anything,’ Sandee said in 2022.
There is not yet a date for any hearing before the Supreme Court, and the appeal could take up to a year.
