Ellen Greenberg was stabbed 20 times in her apartment. Investigators classified it as a suicide. This is the story of the true crime case that left everyone baffled. 

 

On the afternoon of January 26, 2011, a winter storm swept across Philadelphia, sending schoolchildren home early and leaving the city wrapped in quiet sheets of snow. Twenty-seven-year-old first-grade teacher Ellen Greenberg returned to the apartment she shared with her fiancé, Sam Goldberg, planning to spend the unexpected time working on wedding plans. Friends later said she was excited about the future. She would never make it down the aisle.

According to Sam, he left the apartment around 4:45 p.m. to work out at the building’s gym. When he returned at about 5:30 p.m., he said the apartment door was secured from the inside with a hotel-style swing-bar latch. After trying to reach Ellen by phone and getting no response from inside, Sam later told investigators he forced the door open.

Inside the kitchen, he said he found Ellen slumped against a cabinet with a knife embedded in her chest. At 6:33 p.m., Sam called 911.

The recording of that call would later become one of the most scrutinized pieces of evidence in the case. Early in the conversation with the dispatcher, Sam stated that Ellen had “stabbed herself” and that she had “fallen on a knife.” At one point, he said he was unzipping her sweater to see where she was injured but it was later pointed out that crime scene photographs appear to show the knife handle clearly protruding from Ellen’s chest. When the dispatcher instructed him to begin CPR, Sam reportedly responded, “I guess I have to.”

Phone records would later show that Sam placed a brief call to his cousin, a physician, moments before dialing 911. Investigators never publicly suggested the call indicated wrongdoing, but critics of the investigation have questioned why the call came before the emergency call for help.

When police arrived, they found Ellen Greenberg dead on the kitchen floor. What they discovered during the autopsy shocked even seasoned investigators. Ellen had been stabbed twenty times.

Ten of those wounds were to the back of her neck and head. Other wounds were found on her chest and abdomen. One wound to the back of her neck penetrated deep enough to injure her spinal cord. The official cause of death was multiple stab wounds and, initially, the medical examiner ruled the manner of death homicide. But that ruling would not last.

After discussions with Philadelphia police about the circumstances at the apartment, including the locked door and the lack of signs of forced entry, the medical examiner changed the manner of death from homicide to suicide. Officials argued that the physical evidence did not show signs of a struggle and that investigators found no indication another person had been present in the apartment. 

While medical examiners routinely consider information from police when determining the manner of death, the offices are meant to function independently. The reversal of Greenberg’s death from homicide to suicide after discussions with police has been a strong point of controversy in the case. No one was more stunned than Ellen’s family and they have spent more than a decade challenging the suicide ruling in court.

For Reddit sleuths and independent forensic experts, the case raises a series of very troubling questions.

The apartment door Sam claims to have busted down is central to the entire conclusion. Sam’s account that the door was secured with the swing-bar latch has never been independently verified. There were no witnesses to the door being forced open and there is no surveillance footage documenting the moment he allegedly broke through the latch.

Others point to the injuries themselves. The number of wounds, and especially the location of many wounds to the back of Ellen’s neck, struck some forensic experts as unusual for suicide. Several pathologists who later reviewed the case for Ellen’s family said the manner of death should have been classified as homicide or undetermined rather than suicide.

The strangest of all was the spinal cord injury. It’s been the subject of much debate. Some experts have questioned whether a wound that damaged the spinal cord could have impaired Ellen’s ability to inflict additional injuries. If she had severed her spinal cord, she couldn’t have then buried a knife in her chest. Supporters of the suicide conclusion note that spinal cord injuries do not always cause immediate paralysis and that the exact sequence of wounds cannot be determined with certainty.

The handling of the crime scene has also drawn criticism. Ellen’s family has argued in legal filings that investigators quickly assumed suicide and failed to treat the apartment as a potential homicide scene. They say the scene was not thoroughly processed by a forensic team and that important evidence, including electronic devices belonging to both Ellen and Sam, was not immediately collected by police.

In the years since Ellen’s death, the case has been reexamined multiple times. Independent experts have issued conflicting opinions about the injuries and the official ruling. In 2025, Philadelphia’s chief medical examiner released a detailed review of the case reaffirming the conclusion that Ellen Greenberg’s death was a suicide. The report concluded that, although the injuries were unusual, they were medically possible for a self-inflicted attack and that no evidence proved another person had been involved.

Ellen’s parents strongly dispute that conclusion. For them, the case remains a mystery that has never been properly investigated.

How did a young teacher suffer twenty stab wounds inside her own apartment? Could the injuries truly have been self-inflicted, or was the investigation guided too quickly by the assumption that the locked door meant Ellen was alone?

Fourteen years later, those questions remain unanswered. And for Ellen Greenberg’s family, the fight to uncover what really happened that snowy afternoon in Philadelphia is far from over.