Death of Ellen Greenberg

Ellen Rae Greenberg was a 27-year-old third-grade teacher at Juniata Park Academy in Philadelphia. She held a communications degree from Penn State University and teaching credentials from Temple University and Chestnut Hill College, and lived in the city's Manayunk neighborhood with her fiancé.

On January 26, 2011, during a blizzard, Greenberg left work early and returned to her apartment. She was pronounced dead at approximately 6:40 p.m. after sustaining 20 stab wounds, ten of them to her back and neck, along with 11 bruises in various stages of healing on her right arm, abdomen, and right leg. According to the investigation report, her fiancé said he returned from the gym to find the apartment door secured by a swing latch; after being unable to reach Greenberg, he forced it open and called 911, telling the dispatcher that she had 'stabbed herself' and 'fell on a knife.'

Police initially treated the scene as a suicide. After the autopsy, the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office ruled the death a homicide, a finding the Philadelphia Police Department publicly disputed the next day, saying the manner of death was still being treated as suspicious. In February 2011 the medical examiner's office reversed itself again and ruled the death a suicide. The apartment was cleaned and sanitized on January 27, 2011, with police permission; that same day, a relative of Greenberg's fiancé retrieved laptops, phones, and credit cards belonging to both of them from the apartment. Police obtained a search warrant and recovered the same items on January 28.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's office took over the case in 2018. A spokesperson said in 2019 that searches of Greenberg's computers pointed toward suicide and that the investigation was closed; the Greenberg family's attorneys disputed this, citing a broken chain of custody for the devices. A separate forensic examination by the Philadelphia Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory found nothing remarkable in keyword searches for suicide-related material. Over the following years, the family's legal team supplied the Attorney General's office with more than 10 gigabytes of additional evidence, including 3D analyses of the stab wounds and depositions from three medical examiner's officials, one of whom said Greenberg was likely already dead when at least one wound occurred.

A March 2019 investigation by The Philadelphia Inquirer prompted renewed scrutiny. Independent forensic reviewers consulted afterward, including a forensic pathologist and a forensic scientist, concluded the wound and bloodstain pattern was consistent with a homicide scene, and an investigator hired by the family wrote that the wounds to Greenberg's brain and spinal cord would have caused severe pain. Greenberg's parents filed a civil suit in October 2019 seeking to change the officially recorded manner of death to homicide or undetermined. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania's Eastern District agreed in July 2024 to review challenges to the cause-of-death ruling. The Chester County District Attorney's Office separately placed its own investigation in inactive status in November 2024, concluding it could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had occurred; attorneys for Greenberg's parents disputed that conclusion.

In February 2025, following a settlement in the family's civil suit, the case was set for re-investigation, and the pathologist who performed the original autopsy signed a sworn statement saying he no longer agreed with the suicide ruling. Because he was no longer employed by the medical examiner's office, the statement did not change the official death certificate. In October 2025, Philadelphia's chief medical examiner issued a new 32-page report reaffirming the suicide finding, while acknowledging the injuries were 'admittedly unusual.' The case has drawn extensive media coverage, including a 2025 documentary series.