The Daily Populous Sunday December 8th, 2024 morning edition
Authored by cnn.com and submitted by rytis

A pathologist at the medical examiner’s office noted multiple bruises while performing Ellen Greenberg’s autopsy. Later, after reviewing the photos, an outside pathologist working with the Greenberg family wrote that the bruises “were consistent with a repeated beating.”

PHILADELPHIA — Sometime around the holidays, Ellen Greenberg began to change for the worse.

She was anxious, overwhelmed at work, less eager to appear in photographs. She talked to a cousin about moving into her guest room, but didn’t say why. She asked her father if she could come home to Harrisburg, but didn’t say why. He told her to see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed adjustment disorder with anxiety. Her mother came to visit, tried to find out what was wrong, but she felt as if Ellen was holding something back.

On the morning of January 26th, 2011, Sandee Greenberg spoke with her daughter for the last time.

“I love you,” Ellen said on the phone. She was 27.

“I love you more more more more,” her mother said, and they both went to work.

That afternoon Ellen returned to the apartment she shared with her fiancé.

That night he called 911 to say Ellen was on the floor, and blood was everywhere.

This story is about secrets, and alleged cover-ups, and how well we know the people we think we know. It’s based on interviews with two dozen people and thousands of pages of official records, some of which have not been previously disclosed.

In hindsight, some memories seemed to take on new importance. A cousin, Debbie Schwab, recalled a moment near the end of Ellen’s life. Schwab had recently visited a dermatologist. She was planning to wear a dress to a party, but she needed to cover a mark on her back. Ellen knew just what to do. She recommended Dermablend, a kind of makeup that can make blemishes invisible.

Maybe this was significant. Maybe it wasn’t. But these days, when Ellen’s cousin thinks about what the autopsy revealed, she sometimes thinks of Dermablend.

A city medical examiner noted 11 bruises on Ellen’s body. He described them “in various stages of resolution,” implying she’d received them over the course of days or weeks. The photographs showed them clearly and suggested that the pathologist had undercounted.

Ellen had one bruise on her abdomen, three more above her right knee, three more on her right thigh. She had a large, dark bruise on her upper right arm, just below the shoulder. She had three more on her right forearm, including a vivid round one near the wrist.

Then there were the knife wounds. The medical examiner counted 20 of those. One went through her chest muscles and pierced her liver. One cut her aorta, the largest artery in the body; she lost more than a quart of blood. One cut the dura mater, the membrane surrounding her spinal column. Another went more than three inches deep, near the base of her skull, causing a subarachnoid hemorrhage, or bleeding stroke.

On January 27, 2011, the day after Ellen died, Dr. Marlon Osbourne wrote that she’d been “stabbed by another person.” He ruled her death a homicide.

But police investigators reached a different conclusion, one that continues to astonish her parents, her friends, and more than 163,000 people who have signed a petition demanding justice for Ellen Greenberg.

The police said Ellen had killed herself. And after a meeting with law enforcement officials, the medical examiner changed her cause of death to suicide.

Ellen’s parents have been married 44 years. They live in Wellington, Florida, in Palm Beach County, where they moved after retirement. Josh was a periodontist; Sandee a dental hygienist. Their daughter had perfect white teeth. Sandee is a small and gentle woman who can be fiery when provoked. Josh is a big man, commanding one moment and vulnerable the next. When I visited them in September, he was sitting on a large couch in a sunlit living room near a golf course. Sandee had recently brought him some grapes.

“She didn’t have to marry me,” Josh said.

“No, he — I know what his qualities are,” Sandee said. “And they work for me.”

“One of my qualities is, I’m tenacious,” he said. “I don’t give up, do I?”

They were both tenacious after the authorities made their ruling in 2011. Neither parent believed that Ellen killed herself. And so they refused to go quietly.

The Greenbergs hired forensic pathologists to analyze the scene photos and the autopsy, and a crime-scene expert to interpret the bloodstains. They worked with a retired state police investigator who gathered documents and tracked down potential witnesses. They filed two lawsuits, one seeking to change the ruling on Ellen’s death certificate and the other alleging a conspiracy by local officials to cover up a murder.

Both lawsuits are still active. The first is pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In 2023, a lower court ruled against the Greenbergs, saying they lacked standing to bring the lawsuit, but the judges’ opinion said the official investigation of Ellen’s death was “deeply flawed.”

The Greenbergs say they have spent more than $700,000 on their lawsuits and investigations. It has continued for more than a decade. It has drawn in a police department, a medical examiner’s office, the district attorneys of two counties, and the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office. And it has raised questions about how Gov. Josh Shapiro handled the case when he was attorney general.

Josh and Sandee Greenberg want the authorities to find and prosecute the person who killed their daughter. But first they must exonerate Ellen of killing herself.

Authorities concluded she died alone in a locked apartment

Ten years after he changed his ruling from homicide to suicide, Dr. Marlon Osbourne explained his decision under oath. In a deposition for the Greenbergs’ lawsuit against him and the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s office regarding the death certificate, he said information from the death scene overruled what he found while examining Ellen’s body. One of the reasons he changed the ruling was that it seemed she must have been alone when she died.

Ellen lived in a sixth-floor apartment at the Venice Lofts, in the quiet neighborhood of Manayunk, between a canal and the Schuylkill River. It seemed like a safe place to live. She died during a snowstorm. No footprints were found on the balcony. So the killer, if there was one, would almost certainly have had to enter and exit through the door from the hallway. To investigators, it appeared the door had been fastened shut from the inside by a hotel-style swing bar latch.

As Osbourne said, “she’s the only one found in the apartment, with nothing disturbed, nothing out of place, no other way of getting in there, it doesn’t lend to the fact that someone else was there to do it. So that was discounted.”

In Osbourne’s mind, the locked-door theory was bolstered by reports that Ellen’s fiancé, Sam Goldberg, had been accompanied by a Venice Lofts employee when he forced open the door, breaking the latch. A medical examiner’s investigator wrote that “an apartment security man was reportedly present during the entry.” Osbourne testified that he met with Philadelphia police officials who told him the same thing.

It’s not clear where this information originated. Anyway, it appears to be untrue.

I’ve found nothing in the records that explicitly says that Sam ever made this claim himself. The medical examiner investigator’s sourcing for the statement is unclear. At one place in the report he seems to attribute it to police; at another to Sam. But there is no mention of this claim on the 911 call or in either of Sam’s statements released by the police. For his part, the security guard, Phil Hanton, filed a declaration saying he did not accompany Sam upstairs that day. Surveillance video showed Sam getting on the elevator without Hanton just before the 911 call was made.

If Osbourne’s recollection of the meeting is correct, it means someone from the police department gave him false information that helped persuade him to change his ruling from homicide to suicide.

Multiple witnesses saw and heard Sam when he was apparently locked out of his apartment. But to Melissa Ware, the property manager at Venice Lofts in 2011, this did not prove that Ellen locked herself in. Ware knew those doors well, understood how the latches worked. She told me someone could have left one of those apartments and fastened the latch behind themselves. One time, by accident, she’d done it herself.

“If you shut the door hard enough, it swings it,” she said of the swinging latch.

“I’ve done it. I didn’t do it on purpose. But I’m sure if I needed to, I could replicate the same thing.”

An outside pathologist says he found evidence of ‘strangulation’

I drove west from Philadelphia, into the horse country of Chester County, to meet a man who has performed more than 13,000 autopsies. The office was in the basement of his house. Green hills were visible through the window. On his assistant’s desk was a large black mug that said,

“So we have three rules in our office,” said Wayne Ross, a forensic pathologist who works with various county coroners in Pennsylvania and reviewed Ellen’s case as a private consultant for the Greenbergs. “Which is rule out homicide, number one. Two, rule out homicide. Number three, rule out homicide. Those are the three rules.”

Ross was dressed for comfort in his socks, gray pants and a faded blue Salt Life T-shirt. Behind him sat a powerful Nikon microscope. In the course of almost two hours, using slides under his microscope and pictures on his gigantic computer monitor, he made his argument that investigators in the Greenberg case had never ruled out homicide.

Dr. Wayne Ross has extensively studied the Ellen Greenberg case. He believes her death was a homicide. Ross works in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, and has performed more than 13,000 autopsies.

Ellen did not have the telltale cuts on her hands that some victims suffer when defending themselves from a knife-wielding assailant. And many of the wounds on her chest and neck were shallow, which is a pattern sometimes seen when suicidal people nick themselves at first before going deeper. Dr. Jonathan Arden, a consultant for the defense in the Greenbergs’ second lawsuit, wrote in his case report that the shallow wounds were indications of suicide.

But to Dr. Ross, this did not prove Ellen killed herself — especially given his other findings.

He said that if Ellen had been rendered unconscious before she was stabbed, she wouldn’t have been able to defend herself with her hands. And he had an idea of how she might have been incapacitated.

“But look at the bruises on her neck,” he said, pointing to a close-up photo from Ellen’s autopsy.

“There’s another one with the scratch, and the bruises. Look like finger marks.”

He moved on to a gruesome picture of Ellen’s neck, with the skin cut away and the muscles exposed.

“Now, here’s the neck opened up,” he said.

“And this this here? That’s a bruise. See that there? That’s a bruise. That’s a hemorrhage.”

He pointed to a spot of dark red blood, glistening under the lights, against a salmon-colored strand of muscle.

“There it is,” he said. “You see the hemorrhage?”

I asked what would cause something like that.

It quickly became clear to me that Ross was diagnosing things that were not in Dr. Osbourne’s autopsy report. When I pointed this out, he said to his assistant, Dave Skinner, “Can you do me a favor, Dave? Can you look on the autopsy and see if they ever mentioned hemorrhages in the neck?”

“Sure,” Skinner said from across the room. A few minutes later he found it, and quoted the report back to Ross:

“Firm brown muscles of the anterior neck have no hemorrhages or injuries.”

At Osbourne’s 2021 deposition, when confronted with a similar photograph to the one Dr. Ross showed me, Osbourne appeared to see the same thing: an “area of hemorrhage” in the “anterior neck muscles.”

“All right,” said Joe Podraza, an attorney for the Greenbergs. “Is the hemorrhage, as far as you understand, caused by pressure on Ellen’s neck?”

“It’s caused by blunt trauma that results from breaking of vessels in that area,” Osbourne said, seeming to confirm an injury to Ellen that was not mentioned in his report. He did not think it indicated strangulation on its own, he said, because he didn’t see a broken hyoid bone or other signs of hemorrhage in the eyes or face.

Minutes later, Podraza asked Osbourne if he’d gotten any written reprimands or warnings while working at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office.

“No,” said Osbourne, whose own attorney declined to comment for this story.

Podraza asked him if he’d ever been criticized for sloppy record-keeping or incomplete autopsy reports.

Podraza asked if Osbourne ever faced any criticism of his work in Philadelphia.

“No, not to my knowledge,” Osbourne said under oath. “No.”

This was not accurate. Attorneys for the Greenbergs obtained documents showing that a supervisor had reprimanded Osbourne in two 2012 memos that referred to multiple cases from 2009 to 2011, the year Ellen Greenberg died. Dr. Gary Collins cited multiple “errors and discrepancies” in Osbourne’s reports, “some of which were very severe and could have grave consequences for the family.”

He wrote that “serious and dangerous flaws in your work were evidenced in case 12-0316, which has been pending since January 2012. Review of the photographs and circumstances clearly shows that there is evidence of strangulation and that the manner of death is a Homicide. The autopsy photographs clearly show a ligature mark around the neck and petechiae of the eyes. Your report reads: ‘The conjunctiva has no petechiae.’”

The Collins memo made one thing clear. If Dr. Marlon Osbourne missed evidence of strangulation in the Ellen Greenberg case, it wouldn’t have been the only time he overlooked such evidence.

Ellen Greenberg met her fiancé on a blind date

One night in 1942 in a village in Poland, a 6-year-old Jewish girl saw her father shot by a Nazi soldier. She thought he was dead, but it turned out he’d only been shot in the ear, and he’d pretended to be dead so they’d leave him alone. That night the Svidler family slipped away from the ghetto and escaped into the woods. Her father dug a cavern in the bank of a stream where they could hide. He foraged for blueberries and mushrooms, read to them from their Bible. They bided their time, waiting until it was safe to come out.

The Svidlers dodged the Nazis until the Nazis were driven out of Poland by the Soviets. After the war, the family escaped again — this time on a boat to America. As they sailed past the Statue of Liberty, the little girl said to her mother, “Mom, I’m going to be free now.”

Many years later, Linda Schwab wrote a book about her experiences. She went to high school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, joining the color guard and playing half a dozen sports, including tennis. She got married and had a daughter, Sandra Rose, or Sandee. Her first grandchild was Ellen Greenberg.

Ellen played tennis, like her mother and grandmother, and when she was in high school her father noticed a pattern. She didn’t smash the ball, but she didn’t miss it either. She just kept returning the shots, returning, returning, biding her time, waiting for her chance. Like a “human backboard,” her father thought, as his daughter persevered through one long point after another.

At Penn State, her dear friend and roommate Alycia Young noticed something else about Ellen: she was relentlessly organized. Everything had to be in the right place. She loved Ellen, loved going dancing with her, loved the way she could cheer up almost anyone with that brilliant smile, but sometimes Ellen’s meticulous habits could be overwhelming. “You’d walk away, be like, ‘I have to go to the bathroom, I’m cutting up this vegetable,’” her friend recalled. She’d come back to find that Ellen had cleaned it all up.

After graduating and moving to Philadelphia, Ellen worked as a teacher’s aide for a special-needs child and studied at night for a master’s degree. A mutual friend set her up on a blind date with a young man from a wealthy family in the western suburbs. He worked for NBC Sports, often on the golf production team. His name was Sam Goldberg.

To Ellen’s father, he seemed like “a nice boy.”

“Charming,” her mother said. “They seemed to really like each other, and she seemed happy. So that made us happy.”

Ellen’s friends liked Sam well enough. He seemed easygoing and harmless. One friend called him a “teddy bear,” and a co-worker remembered Ellen calling Sam her “knight in shining armor.” Ellen was clearly in love. She kept flying out to see him at golf tournaments. On June 27, 2010, Ellen was on a plane with Sam when she grabbed a paper air-sickness bag and scribbled a note to a younger cousin. She drew hearts across the top.

I did not have any paper to write you a letter so I thought this would be pretty funny. Sammy and I are on our way back from California now. I am actually sitting in First Class and he is in the back! How funny!!!

So we have just started talking about wedding plans, but the chat is kind of going in circles. Sam and I really like the idea of the Hershey Hotel (mmm chocolate), next summer. But we are also thinking that a destination wedding could be lots of fun too. I will keep you posted on what we decide. How is camp? Do you like your bunk? Can you dance yet? Give me the scoop! ❤️ Ellen

The first idea prevailed. Their save-the-date card announced that Ellen Rae Greenberg and Samuel Hankin Goldberg would be married at the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on August 13th, 2011.

A handwritten note from Ellen is seen on the back of an air-sickness bag. Friends and relatives remember her as a kind and happy person. Clouds and trees are reflected in the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.

Friends say Ellen didn’t seem like herself in the weeks before her death

In the fall of 2010, as she made plans for her wedding, Ellen worked as a first-grade teacher at Juniata Park Academy in a low-income part of Philadelphia. She loved children, but this was stressful work. Some of the students were failing, and she worried about giving them low grades. A colleague would later tell police that one student had tried to choke himself with a sock.

Meanwhile, Ellen’s friend Alyson Stern thought Ellen’s relationship with Sam was changing — and was changing her. It wasn’t just that she was trying to impress his mother and sisters: losing weight, buying an expensive handbag. She said Ellen seemed increasingly deferential to Sam. When making plans, Ellen needed to ask Sam what he thought. Stern saw them at a party together and noticed Ellen following him around, “like a puppy.” That was not the confident, independent Ellen she used to know.

“And one time she said to me on the phone…I might move into your guest bedroom,” recalled her cousin Debbie Schwab, who lived northwest of the city in Plymouth Meeting. “And she slept in my guest bedroom sometimes. And I was like, ‘Okay. Is Sam moving in too?’ She didn’t say anything, and I don’t know how much I pressed her, but I got nothing out of her.”

“I think she was hiding stuff that was going on in her relationship.” Erica Hamilton, a longtime friend of Ellen Greenberg

When she asked her father about moving home to Harrisburg, Josh Greenberg worried that she would lose her job and be unable to find another one after abandoning her post in the middle of the school year. So he helped her find a psychiatrist, Dr. Ellen Berman, who saw Ellen three times in the last month of Ellen’s life. Some of Berman’s notes would later appear in the court file. Here are some excerpts:

she wants to quit but mom and fiancée don’t want her to

she can get out of contract with 2 weeks notice

when she starts to work on something, she starts thinking about everything else — not suicidal

feels 75% better, agrees she should just get through til June

she tends to walk around compulsively neatening up

Dr. Berman diagnosed Ellen with adjustment disorder with anxiety, a condition that can be connected with suicidal thoughts. Potential causes for the disorder include work stress, “being bullied,” and “living somewhere where you don’t feel safe,” WebMD says. According to the medical examiner’s investigator, Berman later said she had asked Ellen about abuse, and Ellen “denied any verbal or physical confrontations.” The report also cited Berman as saying Ellen had “nothing but good things to say” about Sam Goldberg.

A drug Berman prescribed for anxiety, clonazepam, has been linked with suicidal thoughts. But Berman had written that Ellen was “not suicidal.” Dr. Wayne Ross would later write in one of his case reports that Ellen’s bruises “suggest domestic abuse sufficient to account for her anxiety.”

Sometime in her final weeks, Ellen spoke with her longtime friend Erica Hamilton, who was working on her master’s degree to become a school counselor. Ellen seemed interested in her friend’s newfound counseling expertise. She also appeared to be worried about what she could share with her new psychiatrist.

“She was really concerned,” Hamilton said, “about what her therapist was going to keep confidential.”

Hamilton told her friend that the only way the therapist could break confidentiality would be if Ellen shared any suicidal or homicidal thoughts. She wanted to know if Ellen was suicidal.

“And I basically point-blank asked her. ‘Are you?’ And she said no.”

Ellen blamed it all on work, and said she was worried she could get fired for what she told the therapist. “She was more concerned about the work stress,” Hamilton said. “Obviously, looking back now, I can tell that was not what she was stressed about.”

“I think she was hiding stuff that was going on in her relationship.”

On Saturday, January 22, Ellen met up with a friend who was also planning a wedding. Ellen was going to be one of her bridesmaids, and they needed to pick out dresses.

“She was visibly disheveled,” Alyson Stern remembered. Ellen’s hair wasn’t perfectly done the way it usually was. In the dressing room, tears came to Ellen’s eyes. Her friend asked what was wrong.

“And she said, ‘Nothing, nothing, I’m fine. It’s your day.’ She said, ‘I’m gonna get it together.’”

Ellen died four days later. As the horrible details slowly emerged, her friend Alycia Young tried to make sense of it. Young went back and forth in her mind about what could have happened. She found it implausible that Ellen killed herself. She couldn’t imagine Sam doing it, either.

But something bothered her about one of the pictures from the scene. A picture of the kitchen counter in what was usually a pristine apartment. One item was conspicuously out of place.

“Why?” Young kept asking herself. “Why is the knife block knocked over?”

One expert says the crime scene seemed staged

Rule out homicide, rule out homicide. Dr. Wayne Ross kept saying no one had done that in the case of Ellen Greenberg. On his giant computer screen, he showed me pictures of the death scene. There was Ellen on the kitchen floor, holding a white towel in her left hand. Despite the blood from the stab wounds, the towel appeared to be mostly unstained.

“This looks staged to me,” he said.

Another picture. There was Ellen’s face, with a line of dried blood along her cheek, from the nose to the ear. Ross said that didn’t make sense, because the medics and police found her with her head propped up against a kitchen cabinet. It seemed inconsistent with gravity. The blood wouldn’t have flowed that way long enough to dry.

“So you’ve got to look at the different flow patterns and say, ‘Well, she’s obviously been moved,’” he said.

Another picture. Strands of Ellen’s dark hair on the floor.

“See the hair?” Ross said. “So a lot of times, when you’re being strangled, or somebody’s stabbing you, the person will grab the hair.”

Ross worked with a company called BioMX Consulting to reconstruct and analyze Ellen’s injuries. The company made 3D models of the knife wounds. And although a police forensic analysis found only Ellen’s DNA on the knife and on her nail clippings, the models showed how hard it would have been for Ellen to inflict all the knife wounds on herself. Reading through the autopsy report, I noticed that some of the wounds on the back of her neck were left of the midline, angled from left to right. Ross had noticed the same thing.

Ross examined a tissue sample from a different case through a microscope at his home office. A knife was found in Ellen’s chest. Ross concluded that a previous stab wound would have caused severe pain, neurogenic shock and possible unconsciousness.

“Now remember,” he said, “she’s not using her left hand. There’d be blood on it…There’s no blood on that left hand. So how do you even do that? How do you get your arm back there?”

“Now, what we did was, we, we got an exemplar police officer, of a similar build, height, arm length. And we had her try to reconstruct. Give her — we gave her the knife — and see if she could actually contort herself in these positions. And she couldn’t.”

Of the nine people I interviewed who knew Ellen well, none said they believed the suicide story. But late in November, I heard back from someone with a different opinion.

I had tried for months to get an interview with Sam Goldberg. On the day before Thanksgiving, I sent him a long list of questions. Late that night, he replied to my email. It appears to be his first public statement about Ellen’s death:

When Ellen took her own life it left me bewildered. She was a wonderful and a kind person who had everything to live for. When she died a part of me died with her. Unimaginably, in the years that have passed I have had to endure the unimaginable passing of my future wife and the pathetic and despicable attempts to desecrate my reputation and her privacy by creating a narrative that embraces lies, distortions and falsehoods in order to avoid the truth. Mental illness is very real and has many victims.

I hope and pray that you never lose someone you love like I did to a terrible disease and then be accused by ignorant and misinformed people of causing her death.

If you’re really writing a truthful story, dig deeper, and please do some good by raising awareness for mental health.

If Ellen did kill herself, Sam was indeed a victim twice. First when he walked into their apartment and saw the woman he loved on the floor with a knife in her chest. Then, in the subsequent years, as whispers turned to rumors, as lawsuits against the authorities proceeded through the courts, as the case became more notorious and the comments proliferated, he became a victim again.

Given all this, it seemed worthwhile to examine his life and see what patterns might emerge. This was easier said than done. Sam never agreed to an interview, and he left most of my questions unanswered. But I kept trying things, and eventually got a list of his classmates from his time at The Shipley School, a private K-12 prep school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. One classmate sent me some pages from the yearbook.

On his senior photo page, he cut a classic late-90s figure with his slightly unbuttoned gingham shirt and cryptic references to the Dave Matthews Band. His nicknames included Sammy G., Samuel L. Goldberg, and G-Berg. His favorite sayings included chill, Chill B, and chillin’ like Bob Dylan. He did not like complainers, bad advice or being told not to eat in the lounge. His suppressed desire was to “buy Australia with my wife Ana Kournikova.”

The yearbook had a picture of him with his parents, Richard and Mindy, and his two sisters. His mom and dad wrote him a note:

It has always been a gift to have you as our son. Your ability to easily communicate with all those around you is such an admirable trait. Your infectious warmth and positive outlook on life is a wonderful attribute to carry with you into the future.

You bring us such smiles and happiness, and we are so very proud of you — your spirit and your soul.

Remember, you will always stay “forever young.”

I reached out to at least 15 of his Shipley classmates. Not one would speak to me on the record. Three spoke on background, not to be quoted by name. None of them seemed to know him very well.

One said Sam was nice to everyone, and added, “There’s no way on earth I could possibly see him hurting someone.”

Another said, “I don’t remember a ton. But I do know that he was very well-liked. He was always very kind. I have no negative recollections of him whatsoever.”

A third classmate said, “He was definitely a cool rich kid.”

“I did not know him to be a paragon of moral values. This wasn’t the Eagle Scout or the altar boy or the valedictorian.”

Shortly before Ellen’s body was found, Sam sent her a flurry of texts

After high school, Sam spent some time at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I didn’t learn much about his Arizona years, but his name did come up in a couple of police reports. It was minor stuff. In one case, the police said he was underage drinking and using a fake ID. In another, he and a couple of roommates had apparently been the victims of a burglary. One of his listed roommates was Yosi Samra, who I tracked down and called up. He has done well for himself since college. He now has his own brand of footwear. It’s called Yosi Samra.

“He was a normal guy,” Samra said when I asked about Sam Goldberg.

“We played a lot of basketball together.”

“I have nothing — nothing bad to say about the guy.”

He said they were in a fraternity together, Zeta Beta Tau, and later Sam’s name came up in a group chat between Samra and some other fraternity brothers.

“I was in complete shock when I heard the news,” Samra said.

“I mean, people joke about, ‘Do you think he did it? Do you think he did it?’”

“He wasn’t that type of person. He was like actually a sweet guy.”

“I don’t think it’s possible that it could have been a suicide, but I’ve also never seen that side of Sam.”

“I hope and pray that you never lose someone you love like I did to a terrible disease and then be accused by ignorant and misinformed people of causing her death” Sam Goldberg, in an email to CNN

I asked what other friends I should talk to. He said, “I mean, Adam Pally is probably the closest.”

That name was familiar. Adam Pally was listed in the police report about the burglary as another of Sam’s roommates. He also did well after college. Pally is a comedian and actor who has appeared on such TV shows as “Happy Endings” and “The Mindy Project” and in such films as “Iron Man 3” and “Sonic the Hedgehog.” I reached out to Pally, both directly and through a publicist, and did not hear back. But in late 2020, in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, Adam Pally and Sam Goldberg started a podcast together. It was about NBA basketball. They called it “Ball Sometimes Lie.”

In the first episode, Pally said Sam Goldberg had been his best friend for almost 20 years. When Sam mentioned the Portland Trail Blazers, Pally said, “Sammy, as long as we have known each other, roommates in — at the University of Arizona, playing NBA 2K, drug-fueled for decades, you have always loved the Blazers.”

In the second episode, Sam told a story about his young daughter smuggling marshmallows into bed. (Sam got married in 2014; he’s now living in New York.)

“Oh yeah, I sneak food all the time,” Pally said. “I sneak liquor, I sneak food, I sneak — my whole life is sneaking.”

“Yeah, me too,” Sam said, adding that “right now, there’s an unopened peanut butter ice cream that I just, I bought, and I hid under a bunch of frozen vegetables, and no one knows about it, and I can’t eat it now, ‘cause I’m not having sugar, but I will.”

That episode’s sponsor was a man selling high-tech humidors for protecting marijuana and keeping it fresh.

“I need that,” Sam said, “because it takes me a long time to go through. Like I love having a ton of weed on me, but ... it takes me a while to get through it.” (The police recovered suspected marijuana and marijuana paraphernalia from Sam’s closet after Ellen died.)

Throughout these episodes, Sam Goldberg came across the same way he came across to people who knew him in high school, and college, and after that, when he met and fell in love with Ellen Greenberg. He was easygoing and likable.

Even so, I kept thinking about something I read in the medical examiner investigator’s report. The investigator had found Ellen’s cellphone in the master bathroom and reviewed her call and message log. The investigator listed her “last incoming texts and an email” from Sam Goldberg.

These nine messages came in between 5:32 and 5:54 p.m. on the day Ellen died, when Sam was apparently locked out of their apartment.

Philadelphia police apparently didn’t ask about Ellen’s bruises

I have found no explanation for Ellen’s bruises anywhere in the official record. Nor have I found any indication that the police ever tried to determine their origin. The Philadelphia Police Department did not respond to my interview request.

When Philadelphia Police Sgt. Timothy Cooney was asked about the bruises in a deposition for the Greenbergs’ civil suit, he said, “I cannot say what caused those injuries.” And when asked whether anyone else could explain the bruises, he said, “That would be a medical question, sir.”

Osbourne, the medical examiner, was at least somewhat curious about them. In his deposition, he said, “I believe I had asked the investigator to find out, through talking to the family, about anything — if they knew anything about the bruising. Again, I don’t think our efforts to speak to the boyfriend were met successfully. And that would have been a question I would have had the investigator ask him. But I don’t know that any answer was ever garnered from the boyfriend at that time regarding the bruising.”

On February 6, 2011, Sam Goldberg visited Philadelphia police headquarters to answer questions from homicide Det. Willie Sierra. With Sam was Brian McMonagle, who sometimes represents police officers and is known as one of the nation’s best criminal-defense attorneys.

By this time, Ellen’s autopsy was complete. Her many bruises had been photographed, with 11 of them noted in the report. But in the five-page transcript of Detective Sierra’s interview, there is no mention of Ellen’s bruises.

It appears Osbourne was right: No answer was ever garnered from Sam Goldberg about Ellen’s bruises.

That’s because the police apparently never asked.

Sam’s relatives say they were on the phone with him as he broke into his apartment

On Ellen Greenberg’s last day as a teacher, school closed early for a snowstorm. She walked outside and saw Bruce Stern, a friend and colleague whose son was engaged to one of Ellen’s friends. As Stern helped Ellen clean the snow off her car, they stood in the cold and talked.

Ellen was worried. Report cards were coming out soon, and one student’s mother frightened Ellen. If the kid failed, she thought the mother “might come after her,” Stern said. But Stern was in a good position to reassure her. As the union shop steward at Juniata Park, he knew the school administrators well. They liked and respected Ellen, he said, and he knew her job was not in jeopardy.

“I said, ‘Just calm down, Ellen. Calm down. Probably won’t have school tomorrow. Just relax. You’re in good shape…Your bosses know what’s going on, and they have your back.’”

At the apartment in the early afternoon, Sam also found Ellen worried about work. “She was very stressed out about school, particular(ly) the grades that were due January 27th, the next day,” he later told police. “She was trying to do the work but it didn’t seem like she could concentrate on the task at hand.”

Sam had noticed a change in Ellen.

“In January when she started getting depressed, she asked me if I would still love her if she was crazy,” he said. “Obviously I would try to console her, of course I would. It was pretty much unconditional love at this point.”

Around 3:40 p.m., Ellen was texting with her friend Alycia Young. Once again, she mentioned that the grades were due, and she couldn’t seem to get them done. Those were the last outgoing text messages recorded on her phone.

Sam’s phone also went quiet around then, according to records released by the DA’s office to an attorney for the Greenbergs in 2012. Sam’s phone records showed frequent and regular call activity the previous day, other than a gap between about 4 and 7 p.m. The routine of call-making and call-taking continued that morning, and that afternoon. But from around 3:40 to 5:30 p.m. on the day Ellen died, the records showed no incoming or outgoing calls.

At 4:50 p.m., according to a timeline later released by the authorities, Sam was seen on surveillance video getting off the elevator and walking toward the fitness center. He told police he used the elliptical machine for about half an hour and did a few sit-ups.

At 5:26, he was seen walking toward the concierge desk, apparently checking his mail. He stepped onto the elevator, reading something in his hand. It was just after that, he said, when he got back upstairs and realized that he’d been locked out of his own apartment.

When the detective asked why he didn’t force open the door right away, he said, “I thought she was in the shower, doing her hair, or doing work with her headphones on, or even taking a nap.”

Between 5:32 and 5:54, Sam’s escalating text messages accumulated on Ellen’s phone. He called Ellen’s mother, Sandee. Neighbors saw and heard him in the hallway, banging on the door. He went down to the concierge desk to ask for a special tool to undo the latch, but was told no such tool was available.

In the hour before he got into the apartment, Sam spoke with his cousin Kamian Schwartzman and his uncle James Schwartzman.

Both men are attorneys. Years later, through their own attorney, Geoffrey Johnson, they provided an account of the interaction:

“Indeed, Sam Goldberg did call Kamian Schwartzman to let him know he was locked out of his apartment and that Ellen was not responding to repeated telephone calls and texts from Sam to let him in. Kamian, who was living at his parents’ home at the time, put the call on speaker so that James Schwartzman could listen in as Sam was sitting on the floor in the hallway outside his apartment where several tenants saw him. After some period of time, James and Kamian suggested that Sam go downstairs and ask the security guard to let him in the apartment. In a subsequent call between the Schwartzmans and Sam Goldberg, after being told that Sam went to the security guard and asked for assistance but the security guard either would not or could not help, Sam went back up to the apartment and Kamian and James instructed Sam to force his way in. In fact, Sam was still on the phone when he broke the door and forced his way into the apartment and James and Kamian heard Sam scream hysterically on the phone. At that time, James and Kamian Schwartzman instructed Sam Goldberg to call 911, which he did immediately.”

In an email to me this October, Johnson added that “Sam was on the telephone with his cousin and uncle, Kamian and James Schwartzman (who were together at James Schwartzman’s home) before, during and after Sam broke down the door. Sam’s entry into the apartment was witnessed – albeit telephonically – by the Schwartzman(s).”

Here’s what strikes me about this account: It’s the second time someone has tried to provide a witness for the moment Sam broke into the apartment.

And it’s the second such claim that was later contradicted by other available facts.

The Schwartzman account, written by an attorney on behalf of two other attorneys, is not consistent with the records I’ve reviewed.

Sam told the police he forced open the door at 6:29 p.m. But the phone records and surveillance video indicate that he was not on the phone with the Schwartzmans, or anyone else, at that time.

I called Johnson, the Schwartzmans’ attorney, to go over the timeline. Even after checking back with his clients, he could not account for this discrepancy.

“They stick by the story,” he said.

“All I can tell you is, my clients are steadfast as to the sequence of events from their end of the phone.”

At 6:26 p.m., according to his phone records, Sam got a call from James Schwartzman’s landline. The call lasted a minute and 12 seconds.

At about 6:27, Sam was seen on video near the elevator, talking on a cellphone.

By 6:29, around the time Sam was getting on the elevator, the Schwartzman call had already been over for about two minutes.

At 6:30, Sam Goldberg called 911.

‘There’s a knife sticking out of her heart’

“Help,” he said, “I need I need…I just, I just walked into my apartment, my fiancée’s on the floor with blood everywhere.”

The operator asked for the address, which Sam provided.

“Where is she bleeding from?” the operator asked.

“See, I don't know,” he said. “I can’t tell. She’s—”

“Sir, sir,” the operator said, “you have to calm yourself down in order to get you some help.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. She. I don’t know. I’m looking at her right now.”

The call was transferred to another operator, who asked Sam what was wrong.

“My, my, I just, my — I went downstairs to go work out,” he said. “I came back up. The door was latched. My fiancée’s inside. She wasn’t, she wasn’t answering. So after about a half hour, I decided to break it down. I see her now, just on the floor, with blood, like, she’s not, she’s not responding.”

The operator asked him if she was breathing. He said he didn’t think so.

“Look at her chest,” the operator said.

The operator repeated the phrase “look at her chest” four times in about 10 seconds. This was more than a minute after Sam said, “I’m looking at her right now.”

As I listened to this recording with Josh and Sandee Greenberg almost 14 years later, in the living room of their house in Florida, what they found strange about this moment was the thing Sam had not yet said.

“I think he — he should have seen the knife by now,” Josh said.

“That should have been the first thing he saw,” Sandee said.

“It’s sticking out of her chest,” Josh said.

The 911 call continued. More than two minutes in, Sam had still said nothing about the knife. The operator asked if Sam was willing to try CPR.

“I gu — I have to, right?” Sam said.

The operator told him to kneel by Ellen’s side, lay her flat on her back, and rip her shirt off.

“Her shirt won’t come off,” Sam said. “It’s a zipper. Oh my God. She stabbed herself!”

“She fell on a knife,” Sam said. “Oh no. Her knife’s stickin’ out.”

“There’s a knife sticking out of her heart,” Sam said.

A former prosecutor questions the official account of Ellen’s death

I was listening to the call again, in a tower near Philadelphia City Hall, in the law office of former prosecutor Guy D’Andrea. With each passing second, he seemed to get more incredulous.

Where is she bleeding from? the operator asked.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” said D’Andrea, who reviewed Ellen’s case at the request of a colleague who knew the Greenbergs during his time at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.

“You see, you walk in and your fiancée’s in a seated position up against the cabinetry. Bleeding. With blood everywhere. How do you not run up and be like, like, ‘Ellen!’ Like, check the head. Check the face, check the, what’s going on? Right. How do you not do that? So that when you call 911, how do you have zero idea of where she’s bleeding from?”

I can’t see anything, Sam said on the recording.

“How about the chef’s knife sticking out of her chest?” D’Andrea said. (The medical examiner’s investigator said it was a steak knife with a five-inch blade.) “How are you this close to someone with a knife sticking out of their chest and you don't see it?”

“You would think that he would have already checked her out, right? Isn’t that what you do when you find someone non-responsive? Like, I would do that if it was a stranger.”

Are you willing to do CPR with me over the phone? the operator asked.

I gu — I have to, right? Sam said.

“I have to, right?” D’Andrea said. “Okay.”

Oh my God, Sam said. She stabbed herself!

She fell on a knife, Sam said.

As a civil litigator, D’Andrea represents survivors of sexual violence. He said he understands that traumatic situations can elicit strange and unexpected responses. Still, he struggled to understand this 911 call. He imagined taking a poll of 100 people, asking them what they would think if they saw a knife sticking out of someone’s chest. How they might guess it happened.

“I’m going to go on a limb and say 100 out of 100 people wouldn’t have in their top ten ways that could have occurred, someone would have FALLEN on that knife.”

D’Andrea wondered why Sam never seemed afraid on the 911 call — why it never seemed to occur to him that someone had killed his fiancée, and that the intruder might still be in the apartment.

“Even if it’s not your first thought, it has to cross your mind. Has to. HAS TO. That someone did this to her. Right? Did you do a sweep of the apartment? Did you make sure you were safe?”

I sent Sam Goldberg several questions about the 911 call. He did not answer them.

Josh Shapiro’s office reviewed Ellen’s case when he was attorney general

D’Andrea found the case file in a storage closet at the DA’s office around 2015. And the deeper he dug, the stranger it all seemed.

He looked at the autopsy photographs, noticed the bruises, and guessed they were inflicted “abusively by another person,” as he would later say in his deposition.

Examining the pattern of knife wounds, he was perplexed by the huge laceration on the back of Ellen’s head: not a stab wound but a deep cut, as if someone had hit her on the back of the head with the sharp edge of a knife.

Scanning the timeline, he realized something astounding: Police on the scene had not summoned the department’s Crime Scene Unit, which meant the apartment was not processed for evidence that night.

“And in that regard,” D’Andrea said in a deposition for the Greenbergs’ second lawsuit, “the blood in the other areas of the apartment should have been tested, there should have been testing on the floor and cabinetry, luminol, other testing could have been performed. Why is that important? Well, if they found any cleaning solution or any blood that would have cleaned up — and the room would have lit up if that happened with the testing materials they have — then they would know definitively that someone had at least attempted to clean up the apartment, which obviously Ellen would not have been able to do in the state that she was in, meaning dead. So if that’s the case, then this is a definitive homicide, right? And so none of that testing was done. Why not?”

“It’s a bizarre way to kill yourself if your searches are for painless suicide.” Guy D’Andrea, former prosecutor

By the time Osbourne ruled Ellen’s death a homicide and the Crime Scene Unit made its delayed arrival on the 28th, the police had already given permission to have the apartment professionally cleaned. Evidence they might have gathered was lost forever. A relative of Sam Goldberg had already visited the apartment and collected certain items, including Ellen’s iPhone and computers — her personal laptop and another one from work. They would later be handed over to the police by the attorney James Schwartzman, the same uncle who said he was on the phone with Sam when Sam forced his way into the apartment.

What was on those computers — and how it got there — is still in dispute.

“There is no note found or anything indicative of suicide on the computers or in the rest of the apartment,” the medical examiner’s investigator wrote in his report.

Later, the police sent three computers — two from Ellen and one from Sam — to the Philadelphia Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory (RCFL) for a forensic examination. A police document later summarized the findings: “Keyword Searches were done on every computer searching for Suicide Information and the examination did not reveal anything remarkable.” The same unremarkable results were found on her iPhone.

Thus, D’Andrea was perplexed to get a phone call years later from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office when it was reviewing the Greenberg case. He says an attorney there asked him what he thought about the “suicide searches” — that is, alleged searches for topics related to “painless suicide” on Ellen’s computer.

“They were like, look, not only all the evidence that we have, you know, leading up to this, there was all these searches by painless suicide — about painless suicide searched by Ellen,” he said in his deposition. “I said, ‘One, how do you know it was searched by Ellen; two, it’s a bizarre way to kill yourself if your searches are for painless suicide.’”

When I inquired about this with the AG’s office, a spokesperson mentioned “evidence” that “included searches on Ellen’s computer regarding ‘suicide’ and ‘suicide methods,’ made near the time of her death. Additionally, there were phone text conversations between Ellen and her mother, in the days preceding Ellen’s death, indicating that Ellen was struggling with her mental health.”

The spokesperson said this information had come from the RCFL, where the police sent Ellen’s laptops and iPhone. Given that the police said nothing remarkable was found in that review, I don’t know how to reconcile the conflicting accounts. I asked communications director Jennifer Crandall to provide the underlying evidence, but she declined.

Josh Shapiro, now Pennsylvania’s governor, was attorney general when the agency reviewed the Greenberg case and affirmed the ruling of suicide. I requested an interview with him, but did not get one. After I sent a list of questions, a spokesperson declined to comment.

Guy D’Andrea, the former prosecutor, remains skeptical of the claims from the attorney general’s office. In one of our interviews, I asked him to do a thought experiment. If Ellen really had searched for suicide-related material before she died, would that convince him that she’d killed herself?

He said no. Not in light of the physical evidence.

For one thing, it looked to him as if Ellen had been stabbed when she was already dead.

Was Ellen stabbed after she was dead?

As D’Andrea continued his review of the Greenberg file at the DA’s office, he zeroed in on a line from the autopsy report. In a description of the wound that pierced the membrane next to Ellen’s spinal cord, Dr. Osbourne wrote that an eminent neuropathologist had looked at the specimen “and concluded there is no defect of the spinal cord.”

This was important, according to multiple officials who have reviewed the case. If there was an injury to Ellen’s spinal cord, it would have made suicide unlikely or impossible, because she couldn’t have kept stabbing herself long enough to put the knife in her chest, where it was ultimately found. But Osbourne wrote that Dr. Lucy Rorke-Adams had found no injury to the spinal cord, meaning it was theoretically possible for Ellen to stab herself again after that.

“So I said, ‘Okay, well, he’s noting it, but where’s HER report?’ Right?” I mean, that’s what you would expect to see. So I call Doctor Rorke. She has no recollection at all of doing this.”

“And so I said, show me anything. Show me the logs. Show me her report, show me her actual report. Show me the payment that would have been submitted to her for doing the autopsy. ‘Well, we don’t have any of those things.’ … I’m like, like, if none of those things exist, then to me, it’s evidence that it wasn’t done.”

A tissue sample from a recent case is illuminated under Dr. Wayne Ross’s microscope. Guy D’Andrea is now an attorney in private practice, often working with survivors of sexual violence.

Before he left DA’s office in 2017 to go into private practice, D’Andrea says, he told his superiors that Ellen’s death looked like a homicide. And he thought there might still be a way to prove it. As it turned out, the medical examiner’s office had preserved the portion of Ellen’s spinal column that had the wound in question. It was not too late to have a neuropathologist take a look.

In the summer of 2019, neuropathologist Dr. Lyndsey Emery examined Ellen’s spinal column for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office. About two years later, in a deposition for the Greenbergs’ first lawsuit, she said she had no opinion about Ellen’s manner of death. She also said she had found no hemorrhage in the wound in the spinal column.

“There is no tissue injury, which I know, then, by looking at it under the microscope. So I have all of this evidence that says there is no — there’s no hemorrhage or reaction to any of these changes in the spinal cord.”

“So what you’re saying is, Ellen would have been dead when this (wound) was administered?” attorney Joe Podraza asked.

Later in the deposition, Podraza put a finer point on it.

“All right,” he said. “But if the 1.1-centimeter wound was administered after Ellen was dead, can we agree that she couldn’t have administered that wound, correct?”

Years later, looking back on this deposition, Podraza’s co-counsel, Will Trask, told me, “I almost fell out of my chair.”

“And I mean, that was, that was game, set, match.”

Podraza remembered it clearly, too. He was sitting in a conference room with Trask and Tom Brennan, a private investigator working with the Greenbergs.

“And we must have sat in that room looking at each other literally for like five minutes before any of us spoke. Because it was like, ‘Did I just hear her say there’s a stab wound after Ellen was dead?’ And everybody was like, ‘Yeah, she just said that.’”

But their elation did not last. Emery heard from a city attorney after the deposition, and then filed a declaration saying the lack of vital response to the wound did not necessarily mean Ellen was already dead. There could have been other explanations for it. She said once again that she had no opinion about the manner of death.

What had seemed so clear to the Greenbergs’ attorneys was now unclear again. Officially, Ellen Greenberg’s death remained a suicide.

‘I stand by the investigation,’ a police lieutenant says

I drove east toward the Jersey Shore one afternoon, looking for a police lieutenant who’d been at the scene of Ellen’s death.

I’d been investigating Ellen’s death for more than two months, long enough to know what mattered and what didn’t. Even though several agencies appeared to have failed in one way or another, my questions kept leading back to the police.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court would soon consider arguments in one of the Greenbergs’ lawsuits. A local judge was considering arguments in another one. The district attorney in Philadelphia had handed the case off to the attorney general, and eventually it ended up with the district attorney in Chester County, which was reviewing the case and would soon announce that it was “inactive” for now because, “based on the current state of the evidence, we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed.”

But the most consequential decisions were made at Ellen’s apartment, the night she died. The main decision — to treat Ellen’s death as an open-and-shut suicide, and therefore not to call in the Crime Scene Unit or aggressively question any potential suspects — had made other potential evidence difficult or impossible to discover.

According to the crime scene log, no fewer than 13 police officers entered Ellen’s apartment the night she died. As best I could tell, none had ever given an interview to a reporter.

I drove to the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #5, in Philadelphia, where I’d been told former Det. Willie Sierra now worked. I had a lot of questions for him, including why he didn’t ask Sam Goldberg about Ellen’s bruises.

The receptionist called for Sierra. A few minutes later he came out. I told him who I was and asked if we could talk about the Greenberg case.

“F--k that,” he said. “I ain’t talking to you.”

Later that afternoon I drove to the Jersey Shore to look for Lt. Walter Bell, the highest-ranking officer at the death scene. Sea Isle City was nearly empty in mid-October, and the further south I drove the more deserted it felt. Almost ghostly. Near land’s end I saw the modest three-story beach house I was looking for. A woman answered the door.

He was in the garage, working on his boat. A muscular man of 62, recently retired, in blue rubber gloves and a sleeveless shirt that said Holmesburg Mens League. Behind him I could see a weight bench and a motorcycle. I told him why I was there.

“There’s a lot to be said,” he said.

“I feel so deeply for the family. I do.”

He obviously had more to say, so I kept standing there. He started talking again.

The next part was awkward, because he would say something, and I would start to write it down, and he would say don’t write that down, and I would put the notebook down, afraid that he’d tell me to leave, and to be honest he said more interesting things when I wasn’t writing.

But here are a few things I did write down.

“I just want the mother to find peace, honestly.”

I asked if he still believed that Ellen Greenberg had killed herself.

“I can’t explain her bruising on her body,” he said.

We talked for a moment about Sam Goldberg.

“Trust me,” he said. “We know crocodile tears when we see them. The guy was crushed.”

“I stand by the investigation,” he said.

There was much more I wanted to ask him. Pictures and documents I wanted to show him. Timelines I wanted to go over. Who did what, when, and why. But Lt. Bell was done talking. His wife said it was dinnertime.

As I drove back toward Philadelphia, I thought about a story he told me. He said one time a man was found dead, apparently from blunt trauma, and blood was all around. Bell and his colleagues in the homicide unit were ready to go looking for a murderer. And then it all turned. They found out the incident had been captured by a video camera. The footage solved the mystery. No one had killed the man. He had fallen, hurt himself, and died, and if not for the camera they would have been searching for a killer who did not exist.

‘I want justice for Ellen. I want to see that before I die’

Josh Greenberg was sitting on the couch in Florida, talking about the case, sharing his theories, speculating about the backstory, when suddenly his voice went high with excitement.

“LOOK AT THIS!” he said. “Look who’s there. Look who just came in here. Look who just came in here to be with her daddy.”

It was the happiest I’d ever seen him, petting this little dog, a miniature schnauzer named Harri.

“Daddy loves you, Harri,” he said, and petted her some more, and said, “How long do you want Daddy to do this for, Ellen?”

Then he caught himself, and called her Harri again.

In the car after dinner the previous night, we were heading back to their house. Sandee was driving, and I sat in the back. I asked them what they wanted out of life.

“I want justice for Ellen,” Josh said. “I want to see that before I die.”

I asked what that would look like.

“That she’s exonerated,” he said, “that she did not commit suicide. And the police open an investigation with an unbiased team led by an unbiased leader.”

I asked if Ellen had been wrongly accused of killing herself.

“They’re fighting so hard,” she said, referring to various civil authorities in Philadelphia, “they thought we would give up. But I’m feeling more empowered and more optimistic. Because the lies just keep spinning. And at some point, they’re gonna get what’s coming to ‘em.”

To the right, through Josh’s window, I could see the colors of the sunset. Orange and pink and lavender. I asked the Greenbergs if they felt themselves gathering momentum.

“Yes,” Sandee said. “I do. You know, I mean, I’m kind of excited to wake up every morning and find out what’s going to happen next.”

“I feel like every day, we get closer to the truth.”

For almost 14 years, they’d been gathering facts about a single day. They saw the picture becoming clearer and clearer. One day Sandee was going through Ellen’s purse when she found a thin white piece of paper. A receipt.

It was dated January 26, 2011, and time-stamped 1:26 p.m. Ellen had used her Visa card at a gas station on Umbria Street, not far from Venice Lofts. She had spent $41.20 at Pump #4, filling her tank with 12.878 gallons of unleaded gasoline.

Was she preparing for a trip? The Greenbergs thought so. In her orderly apartment, there were other signs of motion. A picture showed a makeup case and toiletry bag near the bathroom sink, next to her pashmina scarf, as if Ellen had been gathering her things. She usually wore socks at the apartment, but she was found in her winter boots.

Josh kept thinking about the time Ellen asked him if she could come home.

“In my mind,” he said, “she was escaping.”

She was the tennis player who stayed alive, returning one shot after another. Granddaughter of the little girl who fled into the woods. He imagined her in those final hours, those final minutes: Bruised, but not yet broken. Announcing her departure. And then fighting for her life.

Oknight on December 8th, 2024 at 00:19 UTC »

Makes perfect sense... after being stabbed 20 times and beaten up, she decided to end it all -- sad but I can understand.

This is like the intro to a detective show where the Main Character says "Something about this just doesn't feel right..." and the Chief is like "Leave it alone, Diamond, you have enough REAL cases without looking into suicides."

Mor_Tearach on December 7th, 2024 at 22:56 UTC »

This is a horrible story. It's insanity. Love to know who in hell is being protected here.

Her parents have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get this to make sense - and recently lost yet another legal case. I think just this past November?

20 stab wounds. Suicide? Nope. PA here, the parents lived around 30 minutes away from our house but I think left the state.

Abeneezer on December 7th, 2024 at 22:31 UTC »

So the perp was a cop?