Ellen Greenberg was a 27-year-old first-grade teacher living in Philadelphia when she died on January 26, 2011. Her fiancé, Sam Goldberg, found her body on the kitchen floor of their apartment after coming back from the building’s gym during a snowstorm. Greenberg had been stabbed 20 times and had a 10-inch kitchen knife still stuck in her chest. Even with such violent injuries, police said her death was a suicide.
The case became controversial right away. Dr. Marlon Osbourne did the autopsy and first ruled Greenberg’s death a homicide. He wrote that she was “stabbed by another person.” But after meeting with police who believed no one else had been in the apartment, Osbourne changed his ruling to suicide. Philadelphia police treated the scene as a suicide from the start and never called the Crime Scene Unit. By the time they came back, the apartment had already been professionally cleaned.
