Against All Evidence: The Death of Ellen Greenberg Somehow Ruled a Suicide… Again

Fourteen years later, twenty stab wounds, eleven bruises, and still… the City of Philadelphia insists that Ellen Greenberg killed herself.

You can’t even make this up.

The Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office has once again reviewed her 2011 death and decided to keep the ruling as suicide, ignoring more than a decade’s worth of evidence, expert testimony, and basic logic. It’s one of the most infuriating, haunting stories to ever come out of this city and it’s somehow still ongoing.

For the uninitiated, the Ellen Greenberg background

Ellen Rae Greenberg was born June 23, 1983, in New York City to Josh and Sandee Greenberg.

She was a Penn State graduate with teaching credentials from Temple and Chestnut Hill College, working as a first-grade teacher at Juniata Park Academy in Philadelphia. She was 27 years old, engaged to Samuel Goldberg, and living in the Manayunk neighborhood. By every account, she was happy, social, and loved her students.

Then, on January 26, 2011, a blizzard hit Philadelphia. Ellen Greenberg left work early and went home. Hours later, Goldberg called 911, claiming he found her dead inside their apartment, stabbed twenty times, including ten times in the neck and back, with eleven bruises on her arm, leg, and abdomen.

The knife was still in her chest. Goldberg told police she had “fallen on a knife.” That’s what he went with and somehow, that information stuck with law enforcement.

The Ellen Greenberg Investigation That Wasn’t

Initially, even the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Ellen Greenberg’s death a homicide. But after a meeting between the ME’s office and the Philadelphia Police Department, the ruling was suddenly changed to suicide. No explanation given, no criminal investigation ever opened.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, more information was obtained that just one day after her death, the apartment was cleaned and sanitized. Ellen Goldberg’s uncle, James Schwartzman, who just so happens to be the chairman of the Pennsylvania Judicial Conduct Board, entered the apartment and took Ellen and Sam’s laptops and phones before the police had even finished investigating.

That alone should have blown up the case. Instead, cops later had to issue a search warrant to get the evidence back, long after the chain of custody had been destroyed.

When forensic pathologists reviewed Ellen’s case years later, they were horrified.

Legendary JFK pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht said the case was “strongly suspicious of homicide.” Forensic scientist Henry Lee, who testified in the O.J. Simpson trial, said the blood evidence was consistent with a homicide scene. Dr. Wayne Ross, hired by the family, found signs of strangulation and wounds inflicted after death, including one that likely punctured her brain.

Even the original pathologist, Dr. Marlon Osbourne, who changed the manner of death to suicide under police pressure, later recanted in 2025, admitting he no longer believed Ellen’s death was self-inflicted.

And yet, somehow, Philadelphia refuses to change the record.

The Conflicts and the Cover-Up

In 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office took over the case. In 2019, a spokesperson claimed that “searches found on Ellen’s computer” supported suicide. Except, of course, that those computers were taken by Goldberg’s uncle. The FBI’s own forensic report found no suicide-related searches at all.

By 2022, when people started pointing out Shapiro’s connections to the Goldberg and Schwartzman families, the AG’s office passed the case off to the Chester County District Attorney “to avoid the appearance of a conflict.”

Lets pause and talk about the Josh Shapiro Connection

The connection between Josh Shapiro and the Goldberg/Schwartzman families isn’t direct on paper but it’s close enough to raise every red flag imaginable.

Samuel Goldberg, Ellen Greenberg’s fiancé, is the nephew of James Schwartzman, one of Philadelphia’s most powerful attorneys and the Chairman of the Pennsylvania Judicial Conduct Board. That is the same Schwartzman who entered Ellen’s apartment the day after her death before police had completed their investigation and removed laptops, phones, and credit cards belonging to both Goldberg and Greenberg.

When the controversy over that chain of custody erupted, the case eventually fell under then–Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s jurisdiction.

In 2022, amid growing public outrage, Shapiro’s office quietly handed the case off to Chester County prosecutors, citing the “appearance of a conflict of interest.”

That’s because of the long-rumored social and community ties between Shapiro and the Schwartzman family, both prominent figures in Philadelphia’s Jewish community, with overlapping networks that trace back to the same synagogue and legal circles.

No one’s proven collusion, but the optics are brutal.

Basically, you have a powerful political family tied to the fiancé of the victim, a compromised investigation, and a state attorney general with close community overlap recusing himself midstream. Whether intentional or not, it looks exactly like the kind of insider protection Philadelphia has been infamous for.

Chester County promptly declared the case “inactive,” basing that decision on the opinion of a supposed forensic expert with a degree in entomology, the study of bugs, and no medical training whatsoever.

You cannot find a bigger insult to the Ellen Greenbergs’ intelligence and grief if you tried.

The Legal Battle

Ellen’s parents have rightfully been relentless. They’ve filed lawsuits, petitions, and gathered over 160,000 signatures demanding the city change her manner of death to homicide or at least undetermined.

Their legal team built an airtight case: 3D reconstructions of every wound, depositions from medical examiners who admitted internal pressure to rule it suicide, and expert analyses proving Ellen’s injuries were impossible to self-inflict.

In 2024, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to review the case. Then in February 2025, the Greenbergs settled a lawsuit that required the city to reinvestigate Ellen’s death. Osbourne, the same pathologist who changed the ruling 14 years earlier, even signed a sworn statement saying he no longer agreed with his original conclusion.

This month, Philadelphia Chief Medical Examiner Lindsay Simon issued her “final review” by submitting a 32-page report concluding that, while the injuries were “unusual,” Ellen was “capable of inflicting them herself” because she was “a young woman suffering from anxiety.”

That’s the explanation. Not evidence. Not science. Anxiety.

So, according to Philadelphia, Ellen Greenberg, an anxious 27-year-old schoolteacher — stabbed herself 20 times, including 10 times in the back, then fell forward with the knife still in her chest.

That’s the official story.

Media and Public Outrage

The Greenbergs’ fight has drawn national attention. It’s been featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, People Magazine, and the ABC News docuseries Death in Apartment 603: What Happened to Ellen Greenberg?

Experts, reporters, and regular citizens alike have called this one of the most blatant examples of corruption and incompetence they’ve ever seen. The idea that a woman could stab herself in the spine and back of the neck and still keep stabbing defies logic, anatomy, and reality.

Even more maddening? The city’s only defense is essentially: “Well, we looked at it again, and we’re sticking with suicide.”

Something is clearly off…

This case stopped being mysterious a long time ago. What it is now and what it’s always been is a disgrace. Every piece of physical evidence, every expert analysis, every independent review says Ellen Greenberg was murdered. The only people insisting otherwise are the ones who failed her in the first place.

Philadelphia’s medical and legal systems have turned a 27-year-old teacher’s brutal death into a bureaucratic farce, one that reeks of political protection and institutional rot.

Fourteen years later, the city still won’t say the obvious: Ellen Greenberg didn’t kill herself.

Someone else did. And for whatever reason, Philadelphia doesn’t want you to know who.

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