The fiancé of a teacher who was found dead with 20 stab wounds in what was controversially ruled a suicide sent her a slew of texts minutes before her death.
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.
The knife went through her chest and pierced her liver, slashed her aorta and severed the dura mater, the membrane surrounding her spinal column.
Another wound was more than three inches deep, near the base of her skull, and caused a bleeding stroke.
Greenberg’s fiancé Samuel Goldberg called 911 saying he found her in a pool of blood after forcing his way inside the apartment when she wouldn’t answer.
He has spent the past decade as a target of suspicion by those convinced Greenberg was murdered.
Assistant Philadelphia Medical Examiner Marlon Osbourne initially ruled her death a homicide, but changed it to suicide after a meeting with police and prosecutors.
New details surrounding her death have been revealed in a CNN investigation, which has also uncovered the final text messages from Goldberg.
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
Greenberg’s fiancé Samuel Goldberg, seen here with her, called 911 saying he found her in a pool of blood after forcing his way inside the apartment when she wouldn’t answer
For the last 13 years Goldberg has always stuck to his story that he returned from the gym in the building and realized he had locked himself out.
Over the course of 22 minutes he sent her a total of nine messages while his fiancé lay dead on their kitchen floor.
In order, he text her: ‘Hello’, ‘open the door’, ‘what r u doin’, ‘I’m getting p*****’, ‘hello’, ‘you better have an excuse’, ‘what the f***’, ‘ahhh’, and ‘u have no idea’.
The outlet have also managed to uncover a clearer timeline of the text messages in the hours proceeding her death.
At around 3:40pm she text her friend Alycia Young and mentioned ongoing trouble in her work as a teacher, which according to friends was causing her stress.
Those messages were the last outgoing text messages sent from her mobile phone, with Goldberg’s cell also going silent around then, according to records.
His phone data also showed frequent and regular call activity in the day before her death, other than a gap between 4pm and 7pm.
The routine of call-making continued the next morning and afternoon, but he was radio silent from 3:40pm until 5:30pm on the day she died.
Surveillance footage showed him getting off the elevator and walking towards the gym in the building at 4:50pm where he told cops he used the elliptical for a half hour.
Over the course of 22 minutes he sent her a total of nine messages while his fiancé lay dead on their kitchen floor. Goldberg is seen here pacing the halls outside of the apartment
At 5:26pm he was then seen walking towards the concierge desk to check his mail before he then returned to his apartment and realized he was locked out.
When asked by detectives why he didn’t force 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.’
As 5:32pm came around, his text messages started to gather up on Ellen’s unanswered mobile. He then resorted to calling her mother Sandee.
Neighbors recalled to officers that they heard him in the hallway banging on the door. He even went downstairs to ask for a tool to undo the latch on the door.
In the hour before he managed to gain entry, he also spoke with his cousin Kamian Schwartzman and his uncle James Schwartzman.
The two men are attorneys, and years later, through their own attorney Geoffrey Johnson provided an account of the phone calls.
They said that they had been on the phone with Goldberg as he forced the door of his apartment – which doesn’t stack up with surveillance footage and his phone records.
Goldberg told officers he forced the door at 6:29pm. At 6:26pm, phone records indicate that he got a call from James Schwartzman which lasted one minute and 12 seconds.
Sam was seen on video near the elevator in the building talking on a cellphone at 6:27pm and by 6:29pm, when he actually got on the elevator, his call with Schwartzman had been over for 2 minutes. He then called 911 at 6:30pm.
Assistant Philadelphia Medical Examiner Marlon Osbourne initially ruled her death a homicide, but changed it to suicide after a meeting with police and prosecutors
In his 911 call Goldberg can be heard telling the operator, who had to urge him to perform CPR: ‘She fell on a knife. Oh no, her knife’s sticking out.’
Goldberg is increasingly in the minority in his insistence that Greenberg killed herself, particularly given the number and location of her stab wounds.
Her parents Joshua and Sandee have spent the decade since, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to reverse the suicide ruling and in July had a major victory in that effort.
They said Greenberg began feeling nervous and anxious in the months before her death.
Friends told her parents that they too noticed a change, and that she increasingly deferred to Goldberg on decisions she would once have made for herself.
Joshua earlier explained to DailyMail.com that his daughter wanted to quit her job, leave Goldberg and move back to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with her parents.
Her parents made her a deal that she could come home if she saw a psychiatrist about what was troubling her, and she agreed.
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.
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
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
Another graphic show’s Ellen’s spinal cord had actually been severed and her brain pierced in two forceful stabs to the neck
Greenberg’s parents have fought for years to get her manner of death in the autopsy report and death certificate changed from suicide to homicide or undetermined.
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 granted their request in July to hear an appeal as a ‘matter of statewide importance’.
The couple filed a second lawsuit in October 2022 claiming a coverup by police and the medical examiner’s office amounted to intentional infliction of emotional distress.
They claimed police committed major blunders in the first days after Greenberg’s death that ’embarrassingly botched their investigation’.
Instead of continuing with the homicide investigation, they instead conspired to cover it up by having her death ruled a suicide, the lawsuit claimed.
The lawsuit accused the defendants of asking the court to ‘whitewash their conduct and perpetuate the concealment of their criminal misdeeds without taking responsibility for their abhorrent wrongdoing or the severe harm attributable to their unspeakable criminal actions’ by dismissing the case.
The alleged cover-up was ‘orchestrated’ by Sam Gulino, Philadelphia’s then-Chief Medical Examiner, and police including Sergeant Tim Cooney and Detective John McNamee.
Then-assistant ME Marlon Osbourne, who performed the autopsy, and pathologist Lyndsey Emery were ‘drawn willingly into the conspiracy’, the document claimed.
In his 911 call Goldberg can be heard telling the operator, who had to urge him to perform CPR: ‘She fell on a knife. Oh no, her knife’s sticking out’. The knife is seen here
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
The documents accused them of ‘heinous acts’ and ‘unforgivable misconduct’, and claimed the case had cost Greenberg’s parents $600,000 and counting.
The lawsuit explained how police failed to properly secure the crime scene, and did not take Goldberg’s clothes or photograph him despite the blood on his hands.
On January 27, police let Goldberg’s family into the apartment unsupervised to take property, and had a crime scene cleanup crew sanitize it before they arrived.
Soon after Osborne called Greenberg’s death a homicide, police ‘spread misinformation’ in the press to ‘perpetuate the myth of Ellen’s death as a suicide’.
The documents claimed this was to ‘deflect attention away from PPD’s grossly substandard work, which they never disclosed’.
The Greenberg’s also hired outside forensic pathologists to analyze the scene photos and the autopsy, and a crime-scene expert to interpret the bloodstains.
They also worked with a retired state police investigator who gathered documents and tracked down potential witnesses.
CNN spoke with Dr. Wayne Ross, an outside pathologist who told them that he believes he found evidence of strangulation.
Having viewed her case on behalf of her parents, he believes that investigators in the case had never managed to successfully rule out homicide.
This graphic shows knife wounds Ellen suffered to her neck and chest, that pierced her brain and severed her spinal cord
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
She did not have any sign of cuts on her hands that victims often suffer when trying to fend off a knife-wielding attacker, Ross said.
He believes that due to a lack of defensive marks it is a possibility that she was first rendered unconscious before being stabbed.
Ross also points to bruising and a hemorrhage found on her neck that he says could have been caused by hand strangulation.
This was not brought up in the initial report by Osbourne, although he had been asked to comment on it during a deposition.
He told an attorney for the Greenberg’s that it could have been caused by blunt trauma but didn’t think it indicated strangulation.
Osbourne was also asked by the family attorney if he had been handed any written reprimands or warnings while working at the Medical Examiner’s Office.
After telling him that he hadn’t, under oath, attorneys for the family showed documents that say he had been reprimanded in two memos from 2012.
Those incidents had stretched over multiple cases from 2009 until 2011, the year Ellen died.
Dr. Gary Collins had cited ‘errors and discrepancies’ in Osbourne’s reports, writing that some were ‘very severe and could have grave consequences for the family’.
Collins added: ‘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’.
His memo made it clear that if Osbourne had missed evidence in Ellen being strangled, it wouldn’t have been the first time.
Goldberg has never been charged, and moved on with Caroline Fay Shnay, the daughter of well-off real estate agents
The couple filed a second lawsuit in October 2022 claiming a coverup by police and the medical examiner’s office amounted to intentional infliction of emotional distress
Ross also believes that the crime scene had been staged. Ellen was found with a line of dried blood on her cheek and was found propped up against a cabinet.
He said that it seemed inconsistent with gravity, as the blood wouldn’t have flowed that way long enough for it to have dried. ‘She’s obviously been moved’, he said.
Ross also worked with a firm to reconstruct her injuries and show how hard it would have been for her to inflict all the knife wounds on herself.
‘Now remember, 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?’, he said.
‘We got an exemplar police officer, of a similar build, height, arm length. And we had her try to reconstruct.
‘We gave her the knife, and see if she could actually contort herself in these positions. And she couldn’t.’
Goldberg has never been charged, and moved on with Caroline Fay Shnay, the daughter of well-off real estate agents, whom he married at the Plaza in New York City on January 11, 2014, almost exactly three years after Greenberg’s death.
Speaking for the first time about the death of Ellen, he told CNN: ‘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.’
