Ellen Greenberg’s mom now looks back on the months leading up to her daughter’s brutal stabbing death in a whole new light.
‘I thought she was in a safe, loving home,’ Sandee Greenberg tells DailyMail.com.
‘I don’t know what I think now.’
One thing she is now certain of is that Ellen’s violent 2011 death in the Philadelphia apartment she shared with her fiance wasn’t the only violence she suffered in her final months.
‘She was being abused,’ she says. ‘After reading the autopsy report many, many, many times, there were bruises in various stages of healing from abuse.’
Now after 14 years, Philadelphia authorities have finally agreed to reopen the investigation into her cause of death after the pathologist walked back his controversial ruling, declaring she died by suicide despite being found with 20 stab wounds – many to the neck and back of the head.
At the time of her death, family and friends of the 27-year-old elementary school teacher had noticed something wasn’t right.
Ellen was planning her wedding to her boyfriend of three years Sam Goldberg, trying on dresses and sending out ‘Save the dates.’
Josh and Sandee Greenberg with their daughter Ellen. The Greenbergs have fought for 14 years to get the truth about what happened to Ellen
But she had asked her parents if she could move back in with them at their home in Harrisburg. She had begun seeing a psychiatrist and was prescribed anxiety medication.
She had put it down to stress with work and, according to her psychiatrist, she was not suicidal and she never disclosed any domestic abuse.
Sandee says her daughter never told her anything negative about her relationship with TV producer Goldberg and had never said she was being abused or was in danger.
‘But I knew she was struggling with something. But I didn’t know what,’ she says. ‘I tried to find out. But I just couldn’t get to the bottom of it… At the time I did everything I could.’
She adds: ‘It’s 14 years later. We are obviously suffering as she’s no longer with us. We will never be grandparents. I just wish I could have done more.’
On January 26 2011, Ellen was found dead on the kitchen floor inside the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Goldberg in Philadelphia.
She had been stabbed 20 times, many of them to the back of her head and neck. A five-inch kitchen knife was still sticking out of her chest.
Her family instantly believed she had been murdered.
What followed next was a controversial suicide ruling and 14 years of legal battles between Ellen’s parents, Sandee and Josh Greenberg, and Philadelphia officials to have that ruling overturned, launch a homicide investigation and finally reveal the truth about what happened to their daughter.
Ellen and her fiance Sam Goldberg. Goldberg called 911 on January 26 2011 to say he found her in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor of their apartment
Ellen’s family hope that her death will soon be ruled as a homicide – so that a full criminal investigation can begin
Now, in a series of bombshell events this past week, Ellen’s parents are finally one step closer to getting justice.
First, Dr Marlon Osbourne who performed Ellen’s autopsy said he had changed his mind about her manner of death and, based on new information, no longer believes she died by suicide.
The day after Ellen’s death, Osbourne, who was a pathologist at Philadelphia’s Medical Examiner’s Office at the time, had ruled Ellen’s death a homicide, citing ‘multiple stab wounds by an unknown person.’
A few weeks later, following a meeting with Philadelphia police, he amended his ruling to suicide.
On Friday January 31, almost exactly 14 years to the day when he carried out the autopsy, Osbourne signed a written declaration saying that ‘it is my professional opinion Ellen’s manner of death should be designated as something other than suicide.’
‘I am now aware that information exists which draws into question, for example, whether Ellen’s fiancé was witnessed entering the apartment before placing the 9-1-1 call on January 26, 2011; whether the door was forced open as reported; whether Ellen’s body was moved by someone else inside the apartment with her at or near the time of her death; and the findings of Lindsey Emery, M.D. from her neuropathological evaluation of Ellen’s cervical segment sample,’ he said.
Three days after his bombshell statement, and just as a civil trial was set to get under way, a settlement was reached in the two remaining lawsuits brought by the Greenbergs against Philadelphia city officials.
While it includes a financial payout to the Greenbergs, the most significant part of the settlement is that the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office has agreed to reopen its investigation into Ellen’s death.
For the Greenbergs, it’s a huge step forward that for a long time seemed so out of reach. ‘It’s taken me several days. I’m still wrapping my head around this,’ says Sandee.
Ellen, a 27-year-old elementary school teacher, had been stabbed 20 times mainly to the back of her head and neck but her death was ruled a suicide
This kitchen knife was found sticking out of Ellen’s chest. Her family have long believed she was murdered
‘It’s good news but it also took 14 years for this man [Osbourne] to flip flop. I think medical examiners take an oath of their profession to do medicine and I’m not exactly sure these medical examiners have been following the oath they signed up for.’
There are some obvious concerns that the same authorities they believe botched their daughter’s investigation for the last 14 years will now be leading this new review.
But, Sandee warns authorities that ‘the world is watching’ this time round.
‘There’s going to be a lot more transparency, a lot more accountability,’ she says. ‘And the world is watching.’
‘Those in the medical examiner’s office and in other Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies, are going to be held a lot more accountable. Up until now, they’ve gotten away with a lot.’
The Greenbergs’ attorney Joe Podraza tells DailyMail.com he believes it’s only a matter of time before Ellen’s death is ruled as a homicide – a move that would finally lead to a full criminal investigation.
‘We expect that there is more than sufficient evidence to decide that the case is a homicide,’ he says.
‘The question then will be whether there is sufficient evidence to determine one or more people are responsible – and that still remains to be seen.’
At the time of her death, Ellen was planning her wedding to TV producer Sam Goldberg (pictured together)
One person who hasn’t publicly celebrated the reopening of the case is Goldberg.
Sandee tells DailyMail.com that Goldberg, now a married father-of-two living in New York, hasn’t reached out to her, her husband or their legal team about this huge development in his ex-fiancee’s case.
She describes his silence following the medical examiner’s conclusion and city’s announcement of a new investigation as ‘very interesting.’
‘And especially not just him but his family. No one has reached out to us that I’m aware of,’ she says.
Sandee says it no longer surprises her.
The last time she and Josh heard from their once future son-in-law was in an email in 2013 announcing his engagement to his now-wife Caroline Shnay.
The couple married in January 2014 and now live with their two children in a Gramercy Park apartment they bought for $1.88m.
Their nuptials were announced in The New York Times – almost exactly three years after Ellen’s death – revealing fashion designer Shnay is the daughter of a prominent New York real estate magnate.
At the time, Goldberg worked as a features producer for NBC Sports but now works for LIV Golf.
The apartment complex where Ellen and Sam Goldberg lived. Police said there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle
Over the last 14 years, Goldberg and his family haven’t had any part in the Greenbergs’ pursuit for justice for Ellen.
‘In the beginning I never understood that behavior. You know, if you love someone, you want to help them feel good and protect them…’ Sandee says.
The Greenbergs have never accused Goldberg or anyone else of being involved in Ellen’s death.
And Goldberg has never been named a suspect or been accused of a crime. Goldberg did not respond to DailyMail.com’s requests for an interview.
In all the years, Goldberg has only ever spoken out publicly about Ellen’s death once – in a written statement emailed to CNN in the fall of 2024.
In it, he insisted that Ellen died by suicide and blasted the ‘lies, distortions and falsehoods’ about him in the years since.
Dr Marlon Osbourne who performed Ellen’s autopsy said he had changed his mind about her manner of death and, based on new information, no longer believes she died by suicide
‘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,’ he said.
‘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.’
Podraza tells DailyMail.com he was less than impressed with those comments.
‘When I did read that quote attributed to her fiance I was extremely disappointed that it seemed to present the fiancé as the victim,’ he said.
‘And that it again suggests the false narrative that Ellen had serious mental problems.’
Since he took on the Greenbergs’ case around five year ago, Podraza adds there has ‘never been any indication from the Goldberg family that they have any desire to participate or assist us.’
When asked why he thinks that might be, Podraza says: ‘Well, I like to follow the facts, but you know, I’ll leave it to your readers to draw their own conclusion.’
As far as Sandee and Josh are concerned, there’s ‘absolutely’ no doubt that Ellen was ‘brutally’ murdered.
‘The only thing I know is that Ellen did not commit suicide,’ she says. ‘And I knew that from the very beginning.’
She adds: ‘She was being abused. She was brutalized.’
Ellen’s fiance said the door was locked from the inside when he returned from the gym so he had to break it down
The scene inside the kitchen where Ellen was found dead back on January 26 2011 in the middle of a blizzard
It was 6.30pm on January 26 2011 and Philadelphia was in the throes of a major blizzard when Goldberg placed a harrowing 911 call.
The TV producer said he had found his fiancee in a pool of blood inside their apartment at the Venice Lofts, located in the quiet, safe neighborhood of Manayunk.
The 27-year-old was slumped on the floor, perched partly upright on a kitchen cabinet.
The 911 dispatcher told Goldberg she would walk him through CPR.
Then, two minutes into the call, he mentioned there was a knife sticking out of her chest.
‘She stabbed herself,’ Goldberg said.
Moments later, he said: ‘She fell on a knife.’
Emergency responders rushed to the scene but Ellen was pronounced dead minutes later.
She had suffered 20 knife wounds – including 10 to her neck and the back of her head and 10 to her chest – while a 12.5cm steak knife was plunged 10cm deep into her chest.
Goldberg told police he had gone to the gym in the apartment building at around 4.45pm and returned around 30 minutes later to find the door locked from the inside. Surveillance footage had captured him heading to and from the gym and in the lobby of the building around those times.
Locked out, he sent a series of increasingly irate texts to Ellen: ‘Hello,’ ‘open the door,’ ‘what r u doin,’ ‘i’m getting pissed,’ ‘hello,’ ‘you better have an excuse,’ ‘what the f***’ ‘ahhh’ and ‘u have no idea.’
During that time, he also spoke to his uncle and cousin James and Kamian Schwartzman, both powerful attorneys, on the phone.
After around an hour, Goldberg said he broke down the door to get inside and made the chilling discovery.
Police quickly concluded that there were no signs of a struggle and no defensive wounds on Ellen.
Nothing had been taken, there were no signs of anyone else having been in the apartment at the time of her death and Goldberg told them the door had been locked.
The only other entrance was the balcony. But the couple’s apartment was on the sixth floor and the snow on the balcony from the blizzard was undisturbed.
Ellen had been struggling with anxiety in recent weeks and had been prescribed Klonopin and Ambien. But there was no suicide note and her psychiatrist insisted she was not suicidal.
Ellen had been struggling with anxiety before her death but there was no suicide note and her psychiatrist insisted she was not suicidal
Philadelphia police officers on the scene instantly decided the case was likely a suicide and did not call in a crime scene unit, to forensically test the scene.
The medical examiner then ultimately ruled her death a suicide and the case was effectively closed.
Over the years, experts have cast doubts on almost every aspect of the case.
As well as the stab wounds, Ellen also had 11 bruises in various stages of healing, prominent pathologist Wayne Ross, who was enlisted by the Greenbergs to review Ellen’s death, found.
Many of these bruises were older and the ‘patterns were consistent with a repeated beating,’ he said in a report.
He also found bruises, a scratch and what looked like finger marks on Ellen’s neck indicating she could have been strangled.
And he found that one of the stab wounds to her head, which ‘severed the cranial nerves and brain’, would have caused her to lose consciousness – therefore making it impossible for her to cause the final stab wound to her chest.
Questions have also been raised about some of Goldberg’s statements including claims of witnesses being present when he broke down the door.
In an initial police report, an investigator said Goldberg claimed to have been accompanied by the security guard when he made access to the apartment.
The guard later revealed this wasn’t true and footage showed Goldberg alone taking the elevator up to the apartment.
An image of the wounds on Ellen’s body. Experts have cast doubts on almost every aspect of the case including whether she would have been able to inflict the wounds on herself
An attorney for Goldberg’s uncle and cousin also said in an August 2022 statement that they had been on the phone to him at the time he entered the apartment and heard him ‘scream hysterically’ on finding Ellen’s body.
Phone records and surveillance footage contradict this account.
According to phone records, Goldberg received a call at 6.26pm from James Schwartzman, lasting one minute and 12 seconds.
Footage showed him near the elevator in the lobby on that call at 6.27pm.
When he got in the elevator at 6.29pm, the call was over.
One minute later at 6.30pm, Goldberg called 911.
The following day, before a crime scene unit was called to the scene, James Schwartzman went to the apartment and retrieved some items including laptops and cellphones.
Whether or not the door was locked from the inside is also a matter of doubt.
The building manager Melissa Ware told CNN that she had found the latches sometimes swung shut by themselves when the door was closed from the outside.
The conclusion that there was no signs of a struggle also raised eyebrows after evidence photos showed the knife block knocked over on the kitchen counter.
Ellen’s parents have not heard from Sam Goldberg in more than a decade and he has not publicly commented about the bombshell new development in her case
Podraza tells DailyMail.com the case was ‘messed up from the moment homicide detectives got involved.’
‘From that point forward nothing was done in line with standard operating procedures. So it started with the failure to call the crime scene unit to come to the scene to do an investigation. It would manifest in the officers, including the homicide detectives who on their own, concluded that this was a suicide on January 26, without input from a pathologist at the medical examiner’s office. And it just continued to escalate from there,’ he says.
‘Basically this is a classic example of how not to do a police investigation.’
Podraza says the extent of the ‘conspiracy to cover up’ will never fully come to light.
‘But you can infer from the circumstances that the police had a very strong incentive to put behind them the grossly botched investigation surrounding Ellen’s case, and one can also argue that there were others who might have been under suspicion if this was considered a homicide, who also had an incentive to put this behind them,’ he says.
‘Whether it’s both or just one, I don’t know, but it was beyond unusual or just mistakes.’
Criticism of the handling of Ellen’s case has gone all the way up to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Attorney Larry Krasner had represented the Greenbergs in the early days in their fight to get Ellen’s case reopened. Then, in 2018, Krasner became the Philadelphia District Attorney and so, to avoid a conflict of interest, he passed the matter on to then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Shapiro. Shapiro’s office doubled down on the suicide ruling and denied a request to reinvestigate the case.
Ellen’s mom Sandee is now convinced her daughter was being abused because of the many bruises in various stages of development on her body
Following what was described as his own ‘appearance of a conflict’ – after rumors swirled that Shapiro had a connection to the Goldberg family – he sent the case back to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, which then passed the case to the Chester County District Attorney’s Office.
In November 2024, Chester County said there was not enough evidence to say a crime had been committed.
However, one month later, a judge ruled that the Greenbergs’ could take the city of Philadelphia to trial over an alleged ‘cover-up’ of their daughter’s case, paving the way for the settlement.
Now, after 14 years of resistance from Philadelphia officials and the family pouring $700,000 into their own investigations, Ellen’s case is finally being reinvestigated.
Despite the apparent flaws in the initial police response, Podraza is confident that a proper homicide investigation will still uncover evidence to prove Ellen was murdered.
‘There’s still evidence that exists that was not compromised and some investigating activity that still needs to be completed such as fingerprinting on the knife,’ he says.
‘I understand from experts that can still be done and it can still yield information. Even though the premises were cleaned, there are still, as I understand from experts, traces of blood and things of that nature that still can be discerned from the premises even at this late date.’
A homicide ruling – or any ruling that is not suicide – will lead to a full investigation and access to all public law enforcement resources like grand juries, subpoenas, investigators and so on, he explains.
‘When that becomes available, we will be able to get down to what actually happened in this case,’ he says.
‘And I believe, I really truly believe in my heart, that we will get to the bottom of what happened to Ellen and hold whoever murdered her responsible.’
