June 10, 2025 • 41 mins
The death of Ellen Greenberg was initially ruled a homicide, but without warning or explanation, Doctor Marlon Osbourne changed the ruling to suicide. Ellen's parents have spent the last 14 years trying to have it changed back to homicide, or undetermined. The Greenberg's have two civil suits about the case, one headed for the state supreme court later this year, but on the first day of jury selection for the other case, a settlement is reached. Doctor Marlon Osbourne, who conducted the autopsy on Ellen Greenberg as the former assistant medical examiner with the ME's office, signed a sworn verification statement in which he says he now believes Ellen's manner of death should be designated as something other than suicide. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case and breakdown how this change impacts the case today and in the future.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00:00 Introduction
03:29.50 Dr. Osbourne changes ruling from homicide to suicide
07:23.79 The life of Ellen Greenberg
12:21.71 location of injuries
17:19.04 Joe talks about autopsy
22:22.18 Greenberg had active day, no issues
27:36.97 Classification of "manner of death"
32:45.96 Giving a statement to police
37:06.32 Steps in death investigation
42:48.71 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body doctors with Joseph's gotten more. January twenty sixth, twenty eleven.
I guess, by all measure is kind of an innocuous date.
I don't remember what I was doing on that date,
and unless it's your birthday perhaps, or you had some
seminal event that occurred, most of us would just look
(00:25):
at that date and just kind of march on. That's
what we did right in life. But for one family,
that date marks a moment in time that will be
forever written in their hearts. It's the date of the
(00:50):
death of Ellen Greenberg, and it also marks that moment
in time when both her mama and her daddy We're
scarred forever. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks
(01:15):
brother Dave fourteen fourteen one, four fourteen years later, and
we have had I don't know, people throw around the
term seismic many times, but we've had kind of a
seismic shift I think just in the past forty eight
(01:38):
hours relative to this case that has just it's gone
on and on forever and ever involved in Ellen and
her death. And there's been a ruling on the civil
side of all this, and I think that it is
kind of seismic, at least when you look at it
from the perspective of the fan. Would you agree with.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
That, Yes, one hundred percent, because we have the death
of Ellen Greenberg, and you and Nancy have done Nancy
Grace have done a remarkable job of studying this case,
and you know more about it than a lot of
the investigators probably and I have wondered ever since we've
(02:26):
started with this show of how is it possible that
in Ellen Greenberg's case, that she could go have so
many injuries, have her death ruled a homicide, and then
without explanation, without warning, it's changed from homicide to suicide
(02:48):
and sits there for the next fourteen years with the family,
the parents going through the most heartbreaking of cases, just
trying to get justice for their daughter. They don't believe
for a second that she committed suicide. The facts don't
seem to bear it out, but they've been like sis
(03:08):
if it was pushing the you know, the the boulder
up the hill. Yeah, and I'm blown away that. Thankfully
today we actually are able to talk about some movement
forward that actually makes sense, and we have a medical examiner,
doctor Osborne, who actually is the guy who originally said
it was a homicide and then changed to suicide and
(03:32):
has refused to change it back since. And I don't
even know how that plays out, Joe. I hope you
can explain it.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So yeah, I am gonna I am going to kind
of lay that out here. Lord knows, you know, when
when you get look, there's there are no guarantees in
this life that that you're going to have peace. I
think people labor under that delusion that life is going
(03:58):
to be perfect when you get to be a certain
age and it's not. As a matter of fact, you
have all kinds of things that happen, but for them
being up in age, and you know, there were residents
up up in PA and when all of this happened,
and people don't realize that. You know, Greenberg is a clinician.
(04:19):
I mean, I think, if I'm not mistaken, he's a dentist.
He has a baseline understanding of pathology and human disease pathology.
And here's another thing that he understands. He understands bibomechanics.
You know, the way the human body moves. And I
think for someone to sit there and you're trying to
(04:40):
explain to him from a medical legal perspective, that this
is in fact plausible that his daughter could have self
inflicted twenty Some people say more because there's some overlapping,
but twenty sharp force injuries and not to mention multiple
multiple contusions over the surface of her body. I think
(05:03):
that it would it would give it would give anybody pause.
But you have somebody that has a scientific mind like him,
and the equation just doesn't add up, you know, if
you apply logic to it. And I think that that
was one of the big driving forces, you know, and
(05:23):
then you know, to try to explain this a way
to try to say that this is in fact suicide
is very very difficult. But you know, back to my
case in point, I don't know if if many people
understand the financial burden that this has just wrecked on
this family and because they have literally given up everything.
(05:49):
I mean, they they've had to sell their house, they've
moved away to another state now, and it has been
such a grind day for them. And you know, you
look at this in this precious child that you held
in your arms and that you nurtured, and you you know,
and she raised her adulthood. That's actually at the functioning,
(06:11):
got a job, you know, the whole nine yards, and
is in a relationship. You know, it's everything that you
could probably want. I'm sure that there were problems. Everybody
has them. We're not free in this life of problems.
There's no guarantees, but you get them to this point
and the next thing you know, she's found with a
knife sticking out of her chest, in her in her kitchen,
(06:35):
you know, in this kind of weird position on the
floor in an apartment that was locked from the inside.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Can we can we break that down a little bit, Joe,
For those who are who don't know the case as
well as you do, or even me. The death of
Ellen Greenberg happened on a blizzard. As the blizzard is
on the way and in Philadelphia, and she's a teacher
(07:05):
at school, engaged, and she gets home. She stops for
gas on the way home, because you know, most of
us know when you have bad weather on the way,
you go ahead and get extra gas in your car
just in case. And that's what she did. Stops Mike,
gets gas and goes home. Now she's preparing dinner. She's
got food on the counter, she's cutting up a salad
in some other things. Her boyfriend or fiance brother leaves
(07:29):
the apartment to go to the gym on site to
work out, and in between the time that he leaves
the apartment to go work out and the time that
he returns, Ellen Greenberg decides, you know what, I'm tired
of cutting up this salad. I'm tired of thinking about
getting married. I'm tired of thinking about my career. And
(07:51):
you know what, it's just time for me to leave.
And I mean, that's the story we are told to believe,
and up until the last forty eight hours and then
what takes place physically, you know, to her that that
up until now, they've suggested that she did this to herself.
(08:12):
She tortured herself in such a way. Joe, I can't
even physically figure out how you would inflict all this
damage on yourself, no matter how committed you were. It
boggles my mind. So did I set the table up
properly to get to the point?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Okay, no, no, you did, brother. And that's the thing
about it, you know, with this it it's one thing.
And I've had people, Look, I've had people ask me
over these many years that that Nancy and I and
others have and my friend Gavin Fish have been talking
about Ellen's case. Well, Morgan, you're the one that was,
(08:51):
you know, in the trenches, and you you worked as
a medical legal death investigator. Have you ever seen self
inflictedab wounds? Are cuttings, well, cuttings, cuttings and stab wounds
or let's say, insized wounds are different if you think
about people that have sliced their wrists, okay, in an
(09:14):
attempt to take their own life. Yes, and I've seen
various modalities. I've seen everything from butcher knives to as
we say in South Louisiana, filay knives. I've seen red
devil razor blades, scraping razor blades with actual duct tape
(09:35):
taped around the blunt edge so that they can maintain
a grip on it. A lot of planning went into that. So, yes,
the insized wounds as a means to take one's on
life do, in fact happen. More rare, however, are stab wounds.
And just so that we're clear, stab wounds literally taking
(09:58):
the business end of the knive, that sharp point and
driving it into into one's person, okay, into a potentially
fatal location. That has happened but Dave that that is
by far the exception as opposed to the norm. I
(10:20):
don't I think that people, even in a heightened state
of of I don't know how to say it, psychiatric
distress for instance, even even that is really off putting
for them to think about stabbing, stabbing oneself, and you
(10:40):
you have to do it multiple times, many times, because
you don't know if you're actually going to strike a
vital area, Because just because you stab yourself does not
mean that it's going to end your life. With Ellen,
we've got, as people have stated, and as I've previously stated,
stat wounds, and they're not they are not anatomically consistent throughout.
(11:09):
And I'm talking about just the anatomical makeup of the
location of the injuries that cover her day. They're both
anterior which means front and post heior, and not just posterior.
But we're talking about getting into literally, we're talking about
getting into the cranial vault, where we're talking about going
near the brainstem, brushing up against it, which is one
(11:33):
of the big bones of contention in this case and
has been. There was a pathologist at the Medical Examiner's
office in Philly, not Osborne one of his colleagues that
was actually deposed because she had viewed she had viewed
the samples and everything, and she actually concluded that Ellen
(11:56):
sustained post mortem injuries, particularly one of these in the
back of her neck. Now, how do you explain that?
And that's that's the toughest thing here.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
I think Lember of injuries, Joe, how many times did
she actually have knife injuries to her body?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah? Right at twenty and there has been over the
period of time. I think some people have questioned an
assessment and this is not this is not I'm not
throwing as the young folks say, I'm not throwing shade
on doctor Osborne here. But one can have overlapping injuries.
(12:34):
We get it a lot with gunshot woes. We have
multiple gunshot woes, or where you have multiple assaults like
blunt force trauma that leave lacerations, and you'll have these
communicating injuries. There's a couple of injuries that they thought
might communicate or it may have been one as opposed
to And again it comes back to how much can
(12:57):
you tolerate as an individual who is self inflicting these insults,
And that's that's the big question. Isn't it. Dave Ken,
a young woman who has her life laid out before her, suddenly,
in the midst of food preparation, stare down at a
(13:19):
household kitchen knife and decide in that one moment that
she is in fact going to end her life there
on the floor of where she has prepared meals for many,
many months. I want to tell you something, Dave, I've had.
(13:56):
I've had when you can elicit most of the time
when you can listit a a response from a forensic
pathologist in the autopsy room, like that, there's kind of
this moment in time when forensic pathologist you open you
open the bag for the first time, the body bag,
(14:18):
and when you can elicit a response from the from
the forensic pathologist of oh my, it's it's a moment
that you should mark, I think because most of the
time nothing really phases them, and most of the time
(14:40):
you're going to see this when you have multiple, multiple injuries,
like like grossly over the top. And I can only
imagine when doctor Osborne walked into the autopsy suite that
day and the text are there, the photographers are there,
(15:00):
and they unzip that bag and pull that flat back
and here you have this young woman that's laid out
before you, and she's got multiple stab wounds all over
her body. And listen, we're talking about Philly Day. This
is nothing in that environment for Seed for them to
see a gross amount of trauma on a body. But
(15:24):
even I think that it would give him pause at
that moment in time to say, well, let's try to
work this out. And you know, one of the most
difficult things about trying to understand multiple trauma like this
as it ap applies to sharp force injuries is doing
what we refer to as tracking wounds because there's so
(15:46):
much study that you have to do externally. I mean,
this is a very involved autopsy. We're talking about first off,
taking photographs of the body if the body still has
clothing on and I think in her case it, and
then trying to marry up any of the little insize
if you think about taking a piece of cloth and
(16:07):
cutting a slit in it, trying to look you know,
because clothing is I can you know everybody understands clothing
is not static like our skin is. You're still going
to have individuals that when you look at the injuries
or the cuts and the clothing is it possible that
(16:30):
you can look at the clothing and marry up the
defect and the cloth with the stab wound. And that's
that's just the beginning, you know, beyond you know, we
do you know, X rays and all sorts of things.
Then you take the clothing off and you hold it up,
you examine it, you photograph it, and you allow it
to dry. You put it in a what's referred to
as a forensic clothes dryer, which we could get into that.
(16:55):
It's it's a separate, low humidity kind of thing that
we use. Then you have to go in and actually
physically look at the injury still external, before you ever
open the body. It's a daunting task. But here's the thing.
Every time you look at one of these injuries and
you try to compare it. Once you open the body up,
(17:19):
you track the wound. And one of the things you're
doing with tracking the wound, you're looking for, well, what
underlying vessels or organs are involved. Okay, you try to
look at the location and then probably one of the
biggest things is you try to see if there's actually
hemorrhage in the wound track And Dave, I got to
tell you most of the injuries that Ellen Greenberg sustained
(17:44):
had hemorrhage in the woond track. Okay, they were there. However,
one of the critical locations where there was no hemorrhage
in the woond track was the f four mentioned insult
to the back of her head per this consulting or
the colleague of doctor Osborne, who was a forensic pathologist.
(18:04):
So I've always been fascinated by that and the level
of injuries that have been sustained. You know, how do
you move on from that? How do you how do
you try to square that in your mind with these
pain centers that are firing. You know, I think that
(18:26):
you're kind of a handy man around the house. How
many times have you swung a hammer? And maybe what
was it? The old preacher said, I don't normally cuss,
but if there's a cuss word in me, it'll bring
it out. Yeah, you hit your thumb with a hammer. Well,
that's pain response, okay, And most people can identify with that,
(18:49):
tripping over piece of furniture in the middle of the night,
you know, bruising your shin, stubbing your toe, those are
pain responses day. We're talking twenty times brother.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
That's my problem with all of this show. You actually
pointed out to me how oftentimes in a suicide there
will be more than one mark. There will almost be
a practice attempt. Yes, And I was fascinated by that
in the science, you know, psychological scientific, knowing all the
different issues that go along to that. I don't want
(19:18):
to When I say fascinated, I hope nobody thinks I'm
being flipping because I don't want That's what we.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Do, and you have to be fascinated by it. You
have to be, and that's what we're here for. We're
here for the science to try to understand it. Because
I still I got to tell you, I still don't.
It's hard for me to comprehend, I think, to try
to understand it.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
But that's where with all of this show. How is
it possible that you could you could? These injuries are traumatic,
several of them are beyond anything you know that you
could imagine, And to rule it a suicide, one has
to believe that in the midst that all of a
(20:01):
sudden in her apartment as she's preparing dinner, she decides
to kill herself. And this is all the lead up
time to what was taking place in the minutes before,
does not see there's nothing there that says something was
going wrong with her at that moment. You know, there's
none of that.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Now, Listen, half the world has anxiety, half the world
has depression. If you went down your street, every other
house is going to have some kind of you know,
medication that somebody's on. Okay, that's nothing new under the sun. Okay,
but did her diagnoses of these issues that she was in.
(20:44):
She's planning a wedding, to save the date card, all
that stuff is going out, and do you have enough
to hang your hat on to say that. Okay, this
is now jumped from jumped from a time where you know,
I'm stable, I've been teaching my classes, I'm not missing work,
(21:08):
all that sort of thing too. Okay, Not only am
I going to end my life, I'm going to end
my life, arguably in one of the most horrific ways
that you can. It just it doesn't mesh. And you know,
we're not here to do and I hate this term,
but we're not here to do a psychological autopsy. And
(21:30):
that's that's for other people. If you even believe that term,
which I have trouble with many times you can go
back and retroactively look at people's psychiatric records and then
you know, what are people saying around them that are
in their world. But just if you're looking at this
from physical science standpoint, and you're a clinician and you're
(21:51):
trying to understand what happened, then I think that it's important.
And Dave, there's a term, and you and I had
mentioned this last night. We had talked about this, you know,
prior to laying this down today. There's a term that
physicians use, and it's called a differential diagnosis. And that's
(22:12):
where you have multiple indicators of some type of indwelling
disease or pathology that's going on, or manifestation's physical manifestations,
and it could be this, or it could be that. Okay,
you don't really know. You're trying to kind of narrow
it down. You get a bunch of people around you're
(22:32):
looking at lab results. They're scratching their heads and they're saying, oh, okay,
you know, I think that this is maybe a bowel
obstruction or and I'm just throwing this out there, a
bowel obstruction or I don't know, they've got some other
manifestation in their digestive track. They've ultimately the diagnosis has
(22:52):
been made. Let's just take let's take Osborne out of
the context of law enforce, which he is not. He
is a medical examiner. Okay. Homicides are not all he
deals with, all right, matter of fact, they're the lowest
end of what he deals with. You deal with fewer
(23:13):
homicides than you do anything else. So he's always having
to make diagnosis. Well, his ultimate diagnosis day, based upon
the empirical scientific data, was first an undetermined and I
think initially initially a homicide undetermined and then then you
(23:34):
land on suicide. First off, do you know how rare
it is that a forensic pathologist will change that ruling
multiple times day. We only have five choices here, We'll
go over them again, Okay.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Please do Because we talk about this, people get kind
of confused at the terminology if you're not in the field,
and it does when when we think about homicide suicide,
there are some just crossover. We we kind of messed
things up.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
YEA, thinking yeah, and everybody does. Could you know one
of the most cringe moments I'll ever have is when
I see a reporter come on, uh, come on the
air and you know, they're breathlessly outside the medical examiner's
office getting that shot, you know, for the six o'clock news,
and they say, uh, the medical examiner has ruled the
(24:26):
cause of death as homicide. Right, Well, sugar, that ain't.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, you know you say that, Joe, I've done that.
I have been that guy, and thankfully you corrected me.
I'm not kidding. I was able to go back and
change what I said because it was I was like,
I didn't know that, I'm an idiot dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
It's it's not that's not a cause of death. That
is a manner of death. And we only have five
that we can choose from. Our doctor has used three.
You only got five. He's used three, one, two, three,
And now you know it. You begin to think about
(25:09):
a lot of the other stuff that you know that
that you consider went on with this case. I think
probably uh again, one of the most glaring things is
uh uh that you know you've got You've got arguably
(25:30):
one of the most famous uh famous, I don't know.
She's a neural pathologist. Uh literally, one of the pioneers
as far as women go in the field of neuro
uh neuropathology. Uh, Lucy Rourke Adams, you know, claiming that
(25:50):
Ellen's case that was consulted out to her, and Lucy
Rourke Adams, who is in her nineties, states that I've
never seen this case, this was never sent to me,
you know. And so you combine things like that with
this jumping around of this terminal you know, terminal ruling
(26:14):
as far as the classification of manner of death, and
it causes it gives you, certainly gives you pause, but
it also erodes any kind of trust that you might have. So,
you know, when it comes down to Ellen, we have
finally landed in a place where maybe we're starting to
(26:35):
see a few rays of sunshine break on the horizon. Maybe,
just maybe there's going to be some more definitive answers
coming down the track. There's by my way of thinking,
(27:03):
at least, there is little or no joy in anything
involving a homicide of your child. See what would be
a better word. I don't know, maybe peace. I don't
(27:23):
know victory because I can't imagine finding victory in this validation.
Hope maybe people throw that term around a lot, but
hope that before you finally close your eyes breathe. Your
last breath that you screaming from the rooftops has had
(27:47):
an impact finally on the perception of your precious child.
I don't know justice, which is always kind of a
mushy thing, you know that people say, do people ever
attain justice? I don't know, But Dave, based upon what
(28:09):
we heard in the last forty eight hours, I think
that we've got some pause to perhaps be at least
intrigued and perhaps bearing witness to some peace coming down
(28:30):
the road.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
For I think that's important because you're talking about fourteen
years all right, when their daughter, when Ellen Greenberg died,
it was ruled a homicide because it was it appeared
to be anyway it appeared to be, I mean, a
homicide based on the injuries, the number, of the type,
all those things, and so they prepared, you know, for
(28:52):
the funeral and life without our daughter and let's find
the killer. Well, when her death was ruled it was
changed from homicide to suicide. They were given the warning.
It was just pulled the rug out from underneath, you know,
and let them fall. And ever since then, you know,
they haven't been fighting to have it changed to homicide.
(29:16):
They've been fighting just to have it ruled undetermined is
better than suicide. And they just want you know, you
and I have talked about peace and things like that
and justice and moving on, And in reality, you've got
a really big hole in your heart already. This is
your daughter and now, for whatever reason, you're looking at
(29:38):
something that really does seem jacked up. It seems like
something really wrong is happening here. And we're talking about
a cover up. We're talking about we're talking about the
basics of life in the United States of America of
what we expect and demand of our public servants. Look,
you're going to protect and serve great protect and service
all you got to serve the family here what happened
(30:01):
to Ellen Greenberg. And they've been trying to get this
looked at reopened ever since, and finally they had You know,
you and I have covered them many times. They have
filed different suits or tried to get something done. They
fired experts. You and Nancy did a reenactment or actually
had a stage thing because there were so many parts
(30:23):
of the scene of the crime that made absolutely no
sense based on what we were told in official statements.
When you give a statement to police of what you
saw when you got there, and what you did when
you got I mean, all those things, and you're going
the one that sticks out to me. Ellen Greenberg's body
(30:46):
is found leaning up against the cabinet, sitting but on
the ground, back against the cabinet. Yes, and yet she
has a horizontal line of blood going from her nose
to her ear. And in the world in which we live,
that is not a possibility.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
No, it's not. It's an empirical impossibility that the flow
of any kind of liquid, you know, in blood obviously
is more viscous than water. But that is a telltale
sign of manipulation perhaps of the body, that the body
has been moved because of gravity, which is like the
one constant force. And I've talked about gravity in the
(31:27):
sense of in the past, post War mo lividity and
those sorts of things that I love to you know,
use as indicators for PMI. With this in particular, though,
we're talking about the flow of liquid, and again that's glaring,
you know, how in fact can you do this? Here's
(31:47):
my thing, though, Dave, you know we're talking fourteen years
down range now from when this happened. Correct, we do
know that the door has been opened for the family. Yes,
(32:11):
relative to you know, we've got in correct me if
I'm wrong based upon the ruling, and I'll let you
give more detail about the ruling. But just correct right now.
Just correct me if I'm wrong. Doctor Osborn has stated
openly now that he does not believe that this is
a suicide.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
He says, this, Yeah, it is my professional opinion. Ellen's
manner of death should be designated as something other than suicide,
he said, and this was he did give an example
of what helped make that determination for him all these
years later. He said, for example, whether Ellen's fiancee was
(32:51):
witnessed entering the department before placing the nine to one
one call in January twenty six, twenty eleven, whether the
body was forced whether the door was forced open as reported,
and whether Ellen's body was moved by someone else inside
the apartment with her at or near the time of
her death. That's what Osborne wrote is his reasons for saying,
I didn't know this. This is new information to me,
(33:13):
and when I found out now it doesn't make any sense.
And we all knew that.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, we know that there were multiple consultations along the way,
So I can't imagine that a man of this esteem,
who the city of Philadelphia has put so much weight
behind what's the term that they'd love to use gravitas
based on his learned abilities as a forensic pathologist, that
(33:41):
he would not have had access to this information. I
don't know. Maybe he's had that moment, Tom, where that
epiphanal moment where he can sit back and say, eh,
you know, maybe just maybe my way of thinking about
this was all wrong. Here's here's one of the one
of the things that is really troubling to me, Dave,
is the idea that her remains were documented at the scene.
(34:07):
How well were they documented? What did you miss at
that moment time? Was there anything to miss? And yeah,
I can assume that there was, how thorough because you know,
I it's and I'm not saying, you know, they initially
ruled this as a homicide. I think my question would
(34:27):
be is how enthusiastically was this case investigated as a
quote unquote homicide at that moment? Tom, Because there are
certain steps and people don't know this about death investigation. Yeah,
we're human beings and we get there's almost like this
adrenaline boost that you get when you know when you
(34:50):
walk into a scene you know it's a homicide, right,
wrong or indifferent, there's something that kicks in in your
brain where you're thinking, oh my god, I gotta be
really careful here, I got to really be there, or thorough.
I'm just questioning right now, I'm really thinking how thorough
has this been? And hopefully it has been, because you know,
(35:13):
you only get those few moments, even though it seems
like we stay at crime scenes forever and ever, gave
us a very short period of time in the whole
grand timeline. Now we're talking about fourteen years later. That
hour or two they spent out there at that scene
working that did they do everything possible to document the
(35:35):
dynamics of the scene, because this is a very dynamic,
dynamic event that occurred in a very small space, man,
a very small space. But you know, I am holding
out hope, tell me it. Just give us the quick
and dirty here, brother, about what are they saying now
(35:57):
relative to this?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Here's the big part of game. This coming down because
a trial was getting ready to start. They were trying
to see the jury. Two civil suits have been filed
by the Greenbergs, and they're trying to see a jury
for the first one. Now they've got two. One was
(36:18):
at the Supreme court level. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court was
slated to hear one of these cases later on. Now.
The first suit was filed in twenty nineteen and it
was slated for a hearing before the Supreme Court, and
it sought to have the manner of Ellen Greenberg's death
(36:39):
changed from suicide back to homicide or undetermined. They had
chased that through the court system all the way up
to the state Supreme Court. The second suit, which was
filed in twenty twenty two, slated that that was for
the trial this week. That was the actual Hey man,
we're seeding the jury right now. And it allows to
(37:01):
in a civil case, yes, all civil and it alleges
that the investigation into Ellen Greenberg's death was quote embarrassingly
botched and resulted in a cover up by Philadelphia authorities. Now,
in this particular case, it saw monetary damages for intentional
infliction of emotional distress against several city employees who were
(37:23):
involved in the investigation. This is what was going on
when this agreement was struck between the city and the
Greenberg's And it does impact the other case as well,
because this stops everything. Okay, Now that we're getting this
from Osborne, they've been asking Osborne forever change this. You know,
(37:44):
you can change it. Done determined, you don't have to
call it Hume, We don't. That's not where eff. We're
just after this saying this, This is not a suicide.
That's all we're saying.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
I got to tell you one thing about this that
had come out earlier, and I still remember this where
they were saying that we have no authority over the
metal examiner. Then they are an independent entity within the
governmental structure. They make these determinations. You cannot force them
to do anything, okay, because they're independent of the police.
(38:15):
And here's the thing about it, Dave, you really wonder
what the driver is behind this, because when you have
a medical legal authority that changes an opinion multiple times,
then you begin to think about undue influence. Is there
somebody else within this construct, the investigative construct, that is
(38:36):
pressing the buttons here? And I think that that's something
that is going to be explored. I have to say,
now you flip the switch, okay, because if in fact
they rule this as a homicide, they reclassify this as
far as a manner of death. If they flip that switch.
(38:58):
When you flip that switch and you use the H word,
you set all kinds of things in motion because you
have to look at it. Okay, well, is this a
cold case. No, it's not a cold case. It is not.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
It's only been active from the parents standpoint though.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Right it has, But it's kind of gone into stasis,
if you will, this kind of paused moment with with
the with the authorities. Now we're going to see if
they rule this as a homicide, if they change that
ruling to homicide, We're going to see how bad they
(39:39):
want it. And I ain't talking about the green Bergs.
I'm talking about the authorities because as horrible as this
was for Ellen and is what a continual assault its
men upon the green Bergs, it does give one pause.
(40:00):
And here it is for every Ellen Greenberg case in Philadelphia,
how many other cases are there out there where you
haven't had the same time poured into it, the same resources.
That mind, you almost broke the Greenberg family financially, and
(40:21):
on one level it did the emotional the emotional stamina.
Maybe some people don't possess that. How many other cases
are there and this is a big step, I think,
and trying to reassure the public that perhaps those in
charge are now taking notice and they're going to have
(40:44):
to rebuild trust in this one area that a lot
of people don't normally think about, but I think that
I could say it's one of the most critical areas
because we're not talking about a park being made for
kids to play, and we're not talking about after school,
we're not talking about road repairs. We're talking about the
(41:04):
most precious thing in the world, a life that was
ended far too soon. I'm Josephcott Morgan, and this is
Bodybacks
Body doctors with Joseph's gotten more. January twenty sixth, twenty eleven.
I guess, by all measure is kind of an innocuous date.
I don't remember what I was doing on that date,
and unless it's your birthday perhaps, or you had some
seminal event that occurred, most of us would just look
(00:25):
at that date and just kind of march on. That's
what we did right in life. But for one family,
that date marks a moment in time that will be
forever written in their hearts. It's the date of the
(00:50):
death of Ellen Greenberg, and it also marks that moment
in time when both her mama and her daddy We're
scarred forever. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks
(01:15):
brother Dave fourteen fourteen one, four fourteen years later, and
we have had I don't know, people throw around the
term seismic many times, but we've had kind of a
seismic shift I think just in the past forty eight
(01:38):
hours relative to this case that has just it's gone
on and on forever and ever involved in Ellen and
her death. And there's been a ruling on the civil
side of all this, and I think that it is
kind of seismic, at least when you look at it
from the perspective of the fan. Would you agree with.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
That, Yes, one hundred percent, because we have the death
of Ellen Greenberg, and you and Nancy have done Nancy
Grace have done a remarkable job of studying this case,
and you know more about it than a lot of
the investigators probably and I have wondered ever since we've
(02:26):
started with this show of how is it possible that
in Ellen Greenberg's case, that she could go have so
many injuries, have her death ruled a homicide, and then
without explanation, without warning, it's changed from homicide to suicide
(02:48):
and sits there for the next fourteen years with the family,
the parents going through the most heartbreaking of cases, just
trying to get justice for their daughter. They don't believe
for a second that she committed suicide. The facts don't
seem to bear it out, but they've been like sis
(03:08):
if it was pushing the you know, the the boulder
up the hill. Yeah, and I'm blown away that. Thankfully
today we actually are able to talk about some movement
forward that actually makes sense, and we have a medical examiner,
doctor Osborne, who actually is the guy who originally said
it was a homicide and then changed to suicide and
(03:32):
has refused to change it back since. And I don't
even know how that plays out, Joe. I hope you
can explain it.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So yeah, I am gonna I am going to kind
of lay that out here. Lord knows, you know, when
when you get look, there's there are no guarantees in
this life that that you're going to have peace. I
think people labor under that delusion that life is going
(03:58):
to be perfect when you get to be a certain
age and it's not. As a matter of fact, you
have all kinds of things that happen, but for them
being up in age, and you know, there were residents
up up in PA and when all of this happened,
and people don't realize that. You know, Greenberg is a clinician.
(04:19):
I mean, I think, if I'm not mistaken, he's a dentist.
He has a baseline understanding of pathology and human disease pathology.
And here's another thing that he understands. He understands bibomechanics.
You know, the way the human body moves. And I
think for someone to sit there and you're trying to
(04:40):
explain to him from a medical legal perspective, that this
is in fact plausible that his daughter could have self
inflicted twenty Some people say more because there's some overlapping,
but twenty sharp force injuries and not to mention multiple
multiple contusions over the surface of her body. I think
(05:03):
that it would it would give it would give anybody pause.
But you have somebody that has a scientific mind like him,
and the equation just doesn't add up, you know, if
you apply logic to it. And I think that that
was one of the big driving forces, you know, and
(05:23):
then you know, to try to explain this a way
to try to say that this is in fact suicide
is very very difficult. But you know, back to my
case in point, I don't know if if many people
understand the financial burden that this has just wrecked on
this family and because they have literally given up everything.
(05:49):
I mean, they they've had to sell their house, they've
moved away to another state now, and it has been
such a grind day for them. And you know, you
look at this in this precious child that you held
in your arms and that you nurtured, and you you know,
and she raised her adulthood. That's actually at the functioning,
(06:11):
got a job, you know, the whole nine yards, and
is in a relationship. You know, it's everything that you
could probably want. I'm sure that there were problems. Everybody
has them. We're not free in this life of problems.
There's no guarantees, but you get them to this point
and the next thing you know, she's found with a
knife sticking out of her chest, in her in her kitchen,
(06:35):
you know, in this kind of weird position on the
floor in an apartment that was locked from the inside.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Can we can we break that down a little bit, Joe,
For those who are who don't know the case as
well as you do, or even me. The death of
Ellen Greenberg happened on a blizzard. As the blizzard is
on the way and in Philadelphia, and she's a teacher
(07:05):
at school, engaged, and she gets home. She stops for
gas on the way home, because you know, most of
us know when you have bad weather on the way,
you go ahead and get extra gas in your car
just in case. And that's what she did. Stops Mike,
gets gas and goes home. Now she's preparing dinner. She's
got food on the counter, she's cutting up a salad
in some other things. Her boyfriend or fiance brother leaves
(07:29):
the apartment to go to the gym on site to
work out, and in between the time that he leaves
the apartment to go work out and the time that
he returns, Ellen Greenberg decides, you know what, I'm tired
of cutting up this salad. I'm tired of thinking about
getting married. I'm tired of thinking about my career. And
(07:51):
you know what, it's just time for me to leave.
And I mean, that's the story we are told to believe,
and up until the last forty eight hours and then
what takes place physically, you know, to her that that
up until now, they've suggested that she did this to herself.
(08:12):
She tortured herself in such a way. Joe, I can't
even physically figure out how you would inflict all this
damage on yourself, no matter how committed you were. It
boggles my mind. So did I set the table up
properly to get to the point?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Okay, no, no, you did, brother. And that's the thing
about it, you know, with this it it's one thing.
And I've had people, Look, I've had people ask me
over these many years that that Nancy and I and
others have and my friend Gavin Fish have been talking
about Ellen's case. Well, Morgan, you're the one that was,
(08:51):
you know, in the trenches, and you you worked as
a medical legal death investigator. Have you ever seen self
inflictedab wounds? Are cuttings, well, cuttings, cuttings and stab wounds
or let's say, insized wounds are different if you think
about people that have sliced their wrists, okay, in an
(09:14):
attempt to take their own life. Yes, and I've seen
various modalities. I've seen everything from butcher knives to as
we say in South Louisiana, filay knives. I've seen red
devil razor blades, scraping razor blades with actual duct tape
(09:35):
taped around the blunt edge so that they can maintain
a grip on it. A lot of planning went into that. So, yes,
the insized wounds as a means to take one's on
life do, in fact happen. More rare, however, are stab wounds.
And just so that we're clear, stab wounds literally taking
(09:58):
the business end of the knive, that sharp point and
driving it into into one's person, okay, into a potentially
fatal location. That has happened but Dave that that is
by far the exception as opposed to the norm. I
(10:20):
don't I think that people, even in a heightened state
of of I don't know how to say it, psychiatric
distress for instance, even even that is really off putting
for them to think about stabbing, stabbing oneself, and you
(10:40):
you have to do it multiple times, many times, because
you don't know if you're actually going to strike a
vital area, Because just because you stab yourself does not
mean that it's going to end your life. With Ellen,
we've got, as people have stated, and as I've previously stated,
stat wounds, and they're not they are not anatomically consistent throughout.
(11:09):
And I'm talking about just the anatomical makeup of the
location of the injuries that cover her day. They're both
anterior which means front and post heior, and not just posterior.
But we're talking about getting into literally, we're talking about
getting into the cranial vault, where we're talking about going
near the brainstem, brushing up against it, which is one
(11:33):
of the big bones of contention in this case and
has been. There was a pathologist at the Medical Examiner's
office in Philly, not Osborne one of his colleagues that
was actually deposed because she had viewed she had viewed
the samples and everything, and she actually concluded that Ellen
(11:56):
sustained post mortem injuries, particularly one of these in the
back of her neck. Now, how do you explain that?
And that's that's the toughest thing here.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
I think Lember of injuries, Joe, how many times did
she actually have knife injuries to her body?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah? Right at twenty and there has been over the
period of time. I think some people have questioned an
assessment and this is not this is not I'm not
throwing as the young folks say, I'm not throwing shade
on doctor Osborne here. But one can have overlapping injuries.
(12:34):
We get it a lot with gunshot woes. We have
multiple gunshot woes, or where you have multiple assaults like
blunt force trauma that leave lacerations, and you'll have these
communicating injuries. There's a couple of injuries that they thought
might communicate or it may have been one as opposed
to And again it comes back to how much can
(12:57):
you tolerate as an individual who is self inflicting these insults,
And that's that's the big question. Isn't it. Dave Ken,
a young woman who has her life laid out before her, suddenly,
in the midst of food preparation, stare down at a
(13:19):
household kitchen knife and decide in that one moment that
she is in fact going to end her life there
on the floor of where she has prepared meals for many,
many months. I want to tell you something, Dave, I've had.
(13:56):
I've had when you can elicit most of the time
when you can listit a a response from a forensic
pathologist in the autopsy room, like that, there's kind of
this moment in time when forensic pathologist you open you
open the bag for the first time, the body bag,
(14:18):
and when you can elicit a response from the from
the forensic pathologist of oh my, it's it's a moment
that you should mark, I think because most of the
time nothing really phases them, and most of the time
(14:40):
you're going to see this when you have multiple, multiple injuries,
like like grossly over the top. And I can only
imagine when doctor Osborne walked into the autopsy suite that
day and the text are there, the photographers are there,
(15:00):
and they unzip that bag and pull that flat back
and here you have this young woman that's laid out
before you, and she's got multiple stab wounds all over
her body. And listen, we're talking about Philly Day. This
is nothing in that environment for Seed for them to
see a gross amount of trauma on a body. But
(15:24):
even I think that it would give him pause at
that moment in time to say, well, let's try to
work this out. And you know, one of the most
difficult things about trying to understand multiple trauma like this
as it ap applies to sharp force injuries is doing
what we refer to as tracking wounds because there's so
(15:46):
much study that you have to do externally. I mean,
this is a very involved autopsy. We're talking about first off,
taking photographs of the body if the body still has
clothing on and I think in her case it, and
then trying to marry up any of the little insize
if you think about taking a piece of cloth and
(16:07):
cutting a slit in it, trying to look you know,
because clothing is I can you know everybody understands clothing
is not static like our skin is. You're still going
to have individuals that when you look at the injuries
or the cuts and the clothing is it possible that
(16:30):
you can look at the clothing and marry up the
defect and the cloth with the stab wound. And that's
that's just the beginning, you know, beyond you know, we
do you know, X rays and all sorts of things.
Then you take the clothing off and you hold it up,
you examine it, you photograph it, and you allow it
to dry. You put it in a what's referred to
as a forensic clothes dryer, which we could get into that.
(16:55):
It's it's a separate, low humidity kind of thing that
we use. Then you have to go in and actually
physically look at the injury still external, before you ever
open the body. It's a daunting task. But here's the thing.
Every time you look at one of these injuries and
you try to compare it. Once you open the body up,
(17:19):
you track the wound. And one of the things you're
doing with tracking the wound, you're looking for, well, what
underlying vessels or organs are involved. Okay, you try to
look at the location and then probably one of the
biggest things is you try to see if there's actually
hemorrhage in the wound track And Dave, I got to
tell you most of the injuries that Ellen Greenberg sustained
(17:44):
had hemorrhage in the woond track. Okay, they were there. However,
one of the critical locations where there was no hemorrhage
in the woond track was the f four mentioned insult
to the back of her head per this consulting or
the colleague of doctor Osborne, who was a forensic pathologist.
(18:04):
So I've always been fascinated by that and the level
of injuries that have been sustained. You know, how do
you move on from that? How do you how do
you try to square that in your mind with these
pain centers that are firing. You know, I think that
(18:26):
you're kind of a handy man around the house. How
many times have you swung a hammer? And maybe what
was it? The old preacher said, I don't normally cuss,
but if there's a cuss word in me, it'll bring
it out. Yeah, you hit your thumb with a hammer. Well,
that's pain response, okay, And most people can identify with that,
(18:49):
tripping over piece of furniture in the middle of the night,
you know, bruising your shin, stubbing your toe, those are
pain responses day. We're talking twenty times brother.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
That's my problem with all of this show. You actually
pointed out to me how oftentimes in a suicide there
will be more than one mark. There will almost be
a practice attempt. Yes, And I was fascinated by that
in the science, you know, psychological scientific, knowing all the
different issues that go along to that. I don't want
(19:18):
to When I say fascinated, I hope nobody thinks I'm
being flipping because I don't want That's what we.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Do, and you have to be fascinated by it. You
have to be, and that's what we're here for. We're
here for the science to try to understand it. Because
I still I got to tell you, I still don't.
It's hard for me to comprehend, I think, to try
to understand it.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
But that's where with all of this show. How is
it possible that you could you could? These injuries are traumatic,
several of them are beyond anything you know that you
could imagine, And to rule it a suicide, one has
to believe that in the midst that all of a
(20:01):
sudden in her apartment as she's preparing dinner, she decides
to kill herself. And this is all the lead up
time to what was taking place in the minutes before,
does not see there's nothing there that says something was
going wrong with her at that moment. You know, there's
none of that.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Now, Listen, half the world has anxiety, half the world
has depression. If you went down your street, every other
house is going to have some kind of you know,
medication that somebody's on. Okay, that's nothing new under the sun. Okay,
but did her diagnoses of these issues that she was in.
(20:44):
She's planning a wedding, to save the date card, all
that stuff is going out, and do you have enough
to hang your hat on to say that. Okay, this
is now jumped from jumped from a time where you know,
I'm stable, I've been teaching my classes, I'm not missing work,
(21:08):
all that sort of thing too. Okay, Not only am
I going to end my life, I'm going to end
my life, arguably in one of the most horrific ways
that you can. It just it doesn't mesh. And you know,
we're not here to do and I hate this term,
but we're not here to do a psychological autopsy. And
(21:30):
that's that's for other people. If you even believe that term,
which I have trouble with many times you can go
back and retroactively look at people's psychiatric records and then
you know, what are people saying around them that are
in their world. But just if you're looking at this
from physical science standpoint, and you're a clinician and you're
(21:51):
trying to understand what happened, then I think that it's important.
And Dave, there's a term, and you and I had
mentioned this last night. We had talked about this, you know,
prior to laying this down today. There's a term that
physicians use, and it's called a differential diagnosis. And that's
(22:12):
where you have multiple indicators of some type of indwelling
disease or pathology that's going on, or manifestation's physical manifestations,
and it could be this, or it could be that. Okay,
you don't really know. You're trying to kind of narrow
it down. You get a bunch of people around you're
(22:32):
looking at lab results. They're scratching their heads and they're saying, oh, okay,
you know, I think that this is maybe a bowel
obstruction or and I'm just throwing this out there, a
bowel obstruction or I don't know, they've got some other
manifestation in their digestive track. They've ultimately the diagnosis has
(22:52):
been made. Let's just take let's take Osborne out of
the context of law enforce, which he is not. He
is a medical examiner. Okay. Homicides are not all he
deals with, all right, matter of fact, they're the lowest
end of what he deals with. You deal with fewer
(23:13):
homicides than you do anything else. So he's always having
to make diagnosis. Well, his ultimate diagnosis day, based upon
the empirical scientific data, was first an undetermined and I
think initially initially a homicide undetermined and then then you
(23:34):
land on suicide. First off, do you know how rare
it is that a forensic pathologist will change that ruling
multiple times day. We only have five choices here, We'll
go over them again, Okay.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Please do Because we talk about this, people get kind
of confused at the terminology if you're not in the field,
and it does when when we think about homicide suicide,
there are some just crossover. We we kind of messed
things up.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
YEA, thinking yeah, and everybody does. Could you know one
of the most cringe moments I'll ever have is when
I see a reporter come on, uh, come on the
air and you know, they're breathlessly outside the medical examiner's
office getting that shot, you know, for the six o'clock news,
and they say, uh, the medical examiner has ruled the
(24:26):
cause of death as homicide. Right, Well, sugar, that ain't.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, you know you say that, Joe, I've done that.
I have been that guy, and thankfully you corrected me.
I'm not kidding. I was able to go back and
change what I said because it was I was like,
I didn't know that, I'm an idiot dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
It's it's not that's not a cause of death. That
is a manner of death. And we only have five
that we can choose from. Our doctor has used three.
You only got five. He's used three, one, two, three,
And now you know it. You begin to think about
(25:09):
a lot of the other stuff that you know that
that you consider went on with this case. I think
probably uh again, one of the most glaring things is
uh uh that you know you've got You've got arguably
(25:30):
one of the most famous uh famous, I don't know.
She's a neural pathologist. Uh literally, one of the pioneers
as far as women go in the field of neuro
uh neuropathology. Uh, Lucy Rourke Adams, you know, claiming that
(25:50):
Ellen's case that was consulted out to her, and Lucy
Rourke Adams, who is in her nineties, states that I've
never seen this case, this was never sent to me,
you know. And so you combine things like that with
this jumping around of this terminal you know, terminal ruling
(26:14):
as far as the classification of manner of death, and
it causes it gives you, certainly gives you pause, but
it also erodes any kind of trust that you might have. So,
you know, when it comes down to Ellen, we have
finally landed in a place where maybe we're starting to
(26:35):
see a few rays of sunshine break on the horizon. Maybe,
just maybe there's going to be some more definitive answers
coming down the track. There's by my way of thinking,
(27:03):
at least, there is little or no joy in anything
involving a homicide of your child. See what would be
a better word. I don't know, maybe peace. I don't
(27:23):
know victory because I can't imagine finding victory in this validation.
Hope maybe people throw that term around a lot, but
hope that before you finally close your eyes breathe. Your
last breath that you screaming from the rooftops has had
(27:47):
an impact finally on the perception of your precious child.
I don't know justice, which is always kind of a
mushy thing, you know that people say, do people ever
attain justice? I don't know, But Dave, based upon what
(28:09):
we heard in the last forty eight hours, I think
that we've got some pause to perhaps be at least
intrigued and perhaps bearing witness to some peace coming down
(28:30):
the road.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
For I think that's important because you're talking about fourteen
years all right, when their daughter, when Ellen Greenberg died,
it was ruled a homicide because it was it appeared
to be anyway it appeared to be, I mean, a
homicide based on the injuries, the number, of the type,
all those things, and so they prepared, you know, for
(28:52):
the funeral and life without our daughter and let's find
the killer. Well, when her death was ruled it was
changed from homicide to suicide. They were given the warning.
It was just pulled the rug out from underneath, you know,
and let them fall. And ever since then, you know,
they haven't been fighting to have it changed to homicide.
(29:16):
They've been fighting just to have it ruled undetermined is
better than suicide. And they just want you know, you
and I have talked about peace and things like that
and justice and moving on, And in reality, you've got
a really big hole in your heart already. This is
your daughter and now, for whatever reason, you're looking at
(29:38):
something that really does seem jacked up. It seems like
something really wrong is happening here. And we're talking about
a cover up. We're talking about we're talking about the
basics of life in the United States of America of
what we expect and demand of our public servants. Look,
you're going to protect and serve great protect and service
all you got to serve the family here what happened
(30:01):
to Ellen Greenberg. And they've been trying to get this
looked at reopened ever since, and finally they had You know,
you and I have covered them many times. They have
filed different suits or tried to get something done. They
fired experts. You and Nancy did a reenactment or actually
had a stage thing because there were so many parts
(30:23):
of the scene of the crime that made absolutely no
sense based on what we were told in official statements.
When you give a statement to police of what you
saw when you got there, and what you did when
you got I mean, all those things, and you're going
the one that sticks out to me. Ellen Greenberg's body
(30:46):
is found leaning up against the cabinet, sitting but on
the ground, back against the cabinet. Yes, and yet she
has a horizontal line of blood going from her nose
to her ear. And in the world in which we live,
that is not a possibility.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
No, it's not. It's an empirical impossibility that the flow
of any kind of liquid, you know, in blood obviously
is more viscous than water. But that is a telltale
sign of manipulation perhaps of the body, that the body
has been moved because of gravity, which is like the
one constant force. And I've talked about gravity in the
(31:27):
sense of in the past, post War mo lividity and
those sorts of things that I love to you know,
use as indicators for PMI. With this in particular, though,
we're talking about the flow of liquid, and again that's glaring,
you know, how in fact can you do this? Here's
(31:47):
my thing, though, Dave, you know we're talking fourteen years
down range now from when this happened. Correct, we do
know that the door has been opened for the family. Yes,
(32:11):
relative to you know, we've got in correct me if
I'm wrong based upon the ruling, and I'll let you
give more detail about the ruling. But just correct right now.
Just correct me if I'm wrong. Doctor Osborn has stated
openly now that he does not believe that this is
a suicide.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
He says, this, Yeah, it is my professional opinion. Ellen's
manner of death should be designated as something other than suicide,
he said, and this was he did give an example
of what helped make that determination for him all these
years later. He said, for example, whether Ellen's fiancee was
(32:51):
witnessed entering the department before placing the nine to one
one call in January twenty six, twenty eleven, whether the
body was forced whether the door was forced open as reported,
and whether Ellen's body was moved by someone else inside
the apartment with her at or near the time of
her death. That's what Osborne wrote is his reasons for saying,
I didn't know this. This is new information to me,
(33:13):
and when I found out now it doesn't make any sense.
And we all knew that.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, we know that there were multiple consultations along the way,
So I can't imagine that a man of this esteem,
who the city of Philadelphia has put so much weight
behind what's the term that they'd love to use gravitas
based on his learned abilities as a forensic pathologist, that
(33:41):
he would not have had access to this information. I
don't know. Maybe he's had that moment, Tom, where that
epiphanal moment where he can sit back and say, eh,
you know, maybe just maybe my way of thinking about
this was all wrong. Here's here's one of the one
of the things that is really troubling to me, Dave,
is the idea that her remains were documented at the scene.
(34:07):
How well were they documented? What did you miss at
that moment time? Was there anything to miss? And yeah,
I can assume that there was, how thorough because you know,
I it's and I'm not saying, you know, they initially
ruled this as a homicide. I think my question would
(34:27):
be is how enthusiastically was this case investigated as a
quote unquote homicide at that moment? Tom, Because there are
certain steps and people don't know this about death investigation. Yeah,
we're human beings and we get there's almost like this
adrenaline boost that you get when you know when you
(34:50):
walk into a scene you know it's a homicide, right,
wrong or indifferent, there's something that kicks in in your
brain where you're thinking, oh my god, I gotta be
really careful here, I got to really be there, or thorough.
I'm just questioning right now, I'm really thinking how thorough
has this been? And hopefully it has been, because you know,
(35:13):
you only get those few moments, even though it seems
like we stay at crime scenes forever and ever, gave
us a very short period of time in the whole
grand timeline. Now we're talking about fourteen years later. That
hour or two they spent out there at that scene
working that did they do everything possible to document the
(35:35):
dynamics of the scene, because this is a very dynamic,
dynamic event that occurred in a very small space, man,
a very small space. But you know, I am holding
out hope, tell me it. Just give us the quick
and dirty here, brother, about what are they saying now
(35:57):
relative to this?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Here's the big part of game. This coming down because
a trial was getting ready to start. They were trying
to see the jury. Two civil suits have been filed
by the Greenbergs, and they're trying to see a jury
for the first one. Now they've got two. One was
(36:18):
at the Supreme court level. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court was
slated to hear one of these cases later on. Now.
The first suit was filed in twenty nineteen and it
was slated for a hearing before the Supreme Court, and
it sought to have the manner of Ellen Greenberg's death
(36:39):
changed from suicide back to homicide or undetermined. They had
chased that through the court system all the way up
to the state Supreme Court. The second suit, which was
filed in twenty twenty two, slated that that was for
the trial this week. That was the actual Hey man,
we're seeding the jury right now. And it allows to
(37:01):
in a civil case, yes, all civil and it alleges
that the investigation into Ellen Greenberg's death was quote embarrassingly
botched and resulted in a cover up by Philadelphia authorities. Now,
in this particular case, it saw monetary damages for intentional
infliction of emotional distress against several city employees who were
(37:23):
involved in the investigation. This is what was going on
when this agreement was struck between the city and the
Greenberg's And it does impact the other case as well,
because this stops everything. Okay, Now that we're getting this
from Osborne, they've been asking Osborne forever change this. You know,
(37:44):
you can change it. Done determined, you don't have to
call it Hume, We don't. That's not where eff. We're
just after this saying this, This is not a suicide.
That's all we're saying.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
I got to tell you one thing about this that
had come out earlier, and I still remember this where
they were saying that we have no authority over the
metal examiner. Then they are an independent entity within the
governmental structure. They make these determinations. You cannot force them
to do anything, okay, because they're independent of the police.
(38:15):
And here's the thing about it, Dave, you really wonder
what the driver is behind this, because when you have
a medical legal authority that changes an opinion multiple times,
then you begin to think about undue influence. Is there
somebody else within this construct, the investigative construct, that is
(38:36):
pressing the buttons here? And I think that that's something
that is going to be explored. I have to say,
now you flip the switch, okay, because if in fact
they rule this as a homicide, they reclassify this as
far as a manner of death. If they flip that switch.
(38:58):
When you flip that switch and you use the H word,
you set all kinds of things in motion because you
have to look at it. Okay, well, is this a
cold case. No, it's not a cold case. It is not.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
It's only been active from the parents standpoint though.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Right it has, But it's kind of gone into stasis,
if you will, this kind of paused moment with with
the with the authorities. Now we're going to see if
they rule this as a homicide, if they change that
ruling to homicide, We're going to see how bad they
(39:39):
want it. And I ain't talking about the green Bergs.
I'm talking about the authorities because as horrible as this
was for Ellen and is what a continual assault its
men upon the green Bergs, it does give one pause.
(40:00):
And here it is for every Ellen Greenberg case in Philadelphia,
how many other cases are there out there where you
haven't had the same time poured into it, the same resources.
That mind, you almost broke the Greenberg family financially, and
(40:21):
on one level it did the emotional the emotional stamina.
Maybe some people don't possess that. How many other cases
are there and this is a big step, I think,
and trying to reassure the public that perhaps those in
charge are now taking notice and they're going to have
(40:44):
to rebuild trust in this one area that a lot
of people don't normally think about, but I think that
I could say it's one of the most critical areas
because we're not talking about a park being made for
kids to play, and we're not talking about after school,
we're not talking about road repairs. We're talking about the
(41:04):
most precious thing in the world, a life that was
ended far too soon. I'm Josephcott Morgan, and this is
Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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