April 16, 2025 • 29 mins
This podcast was previously released under The Crime Solvers Podcast. We have since changed our name to Under Suspicion.
Podcast host Brian Long was previously referred to as Dale Lawrence (pseudonym)
Welcome to Under Suspicion, the weekly true crime podcast hosted by retired Crime Analyst and Police Officer Brian Long and Journalist College Professor Dave Rattigan. Each week they will analyze the Means, Opportunity and Motive of unsolved heinous cases in an attempt to solve the mystery.
Brian and Dave will cover everything from murders, missing persons to the nations most notorious serial killers. Under Suspicion is not your typical true crime podcast, its much more! It’s your weekly look into the complex world of criminology and victimology.
Why was Ellen Rae Greenberg Stabbed 20 Times? Was It Murder or Suicide? In 2011, the Ellen Rae Greenberg case drew national attention due to the cause of death finding being ruled a suicide by the state of Pennsylvania. Outrage by her family and victims' rights groups quickly followed. As most experts agreed that suicide was scientifically impossible and the correct cause of Ellen Rae Greenberg's death should have been ruled homicide! Take a listen to this week's podcast as Brian and Dave revisit the case.
UPDATE:On Friday, Nov 8, 2024, the Chester County District Attorney’s Office announced that they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed and the investigation into Ellen Greenberg's death was placed as inactive.
Podcast host Brian Long was previously referred to as Dale Lawrence (pseudonym)
Welcome to Under Suspicion, the weekly true crime podcast hosted by retired Crime Analyst and Police Officer Brian Long and Journalist College Professor Dave Rattigan. Each week they will analyze the Means, Opportunity and Motive of unsolved heinous cases in an attempt to solve the mystery.
Brian and Dave will cover everything from murders, missing persons to the nations most notorious serial killers. Under Suspicion is not your typical true crime podcast, its much more! It’s your weekly look into the complex world of criminology and victimology.
Why was Ellen Rae Greenberg Stabbed 20 Times? Was It Murder or Suicide? In 2011, the Ellen Rae Greenberg case drew national attention due to the cause of death finding being ruled a suicide by the state of Pennsylvania. Outrage by her family and victims' rights groups quickly followed. As most experts agreed that suicide was scientifically impossible and the correct cause of Ellen Rae Greenberg's death should have been ruled homicide! Take a listen to this week's podcast as Brian and Dave revisit the case.
UPDATE:On Friday, Nov 8, 2024, the Chester County District Attorney’s Office announced that they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed and the investigation into Ellen Greenberg's death was placed as inactive.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome Just Under Suspicion, where we pick a crime and
then analyzed the means opportunity in motive to help solve
the mystery. Here are your hosts, Retalian police officer and
crime analyst Bryan pte Long and journalist college professor Dave Radigan.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Here's the basic info. January twenty sixth, twenty eleven, twenty
seven year old Ellen Greenberg was either killed or died
of suicide, stabbed twenty times while alone in an apartment
that she shared with her fiance, Sam Goldberg. Ellen was
a teacher and Sam was a television producer. They lived
(00:47):
in the Many Young section of Philadelphia in the Venice
Lofts on the sixth floor of that apartment building, in
a part of Philadelphia known to have one of the
lowest violent crime rates in the area. At the time
of the death, Ellen was found alone in the kitchen
area of her apartment, with the only logical entry point
into the apartment being the front door, which was allegedly
(01:11):
locked from the inside. There was a porch to her apartment,
so entry could have been gaining through there. However, as mentioned,
it was the sixth floor and it was during a
nor'easter snowstorm occurring at the time of her death. I
don't know, Dale, maybe you would have been able to
get up there.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well, maybe a spider Man type individual could have done that.
And then that leads us right to our first thing
about our podcast. As a former crime analyst, you need
to look at a situation objectively. So I'm going to
throw out two things right away. You mentioned originally just
a minute ago that the only way to get in
there not through the door that was locked, but the
(01:47):
scale of six story apartment, which is not logical. However,
I'm going to give you a couple of scenarios. When
I was in law enforcement, we had a guy it's
like three in the morning. He's on the third story
on the roof of a bill he had just broken into.
He ran up to the top floor, was out in
the roof. We had the building surrounded. There was a
couple of trees, probably within ten feet of the roof
(02:09):
of the building. We ordered them to come down. We
had a dog coming. The dog wasn't there yet. He
jumped from the roof out ten feet, jumped onto the
branch of a tree, and scaled his way down the
tree and was gone. We never even knew who he was.
He was gone in the darkness. So there are Spider
Man types out there. We had a guy that we
(02:30):
thought was kind of locked into a certain apartment complex.
We went into the building. Originally we lost them. We
figured he went up into the attic. We secured the area.
There was a row of apartments that were all connected.
There was around ten or fifteen of them. When we
sent the dog up there about half hour later, he
wasn't there. So what we did was we went up
there in all the apartments, their roofs and the attics
(02:51):
were all connected. So he went from one apartment and
he went about one hundred feet down through around twenty apartments,
and he went through the inside of each of the
apartment the crawl spaces, and we got him at the
last apartment in that build at them. Yeah, we did
get them. He wasn't getting out, but we didn't know
where he was. So there are people out there who
can escape and can get into buildings when you would
(03:14):
think they could. So this case is back in the news.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
In twenty eleven, Ellen Greenberg was stabbed twenty times. It
was ruled a homicide, then it was changed to a suicide. Yes,
twenty stabbings in a locked apartment by herself.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Twenty stabbings tend to the front of her body, tend
to the back of her body, her neck area. How
does she reach the neck area. You're going to get
into that day, all right.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
We're going to look at the case through the eyes
of how a crime analysu del lawrence might approach the investigation. Ultimately,
we're going to break down the case to its most
base level, look at all the potential possibilities. And in
this case, there are only two possibilities. There is suicide
and there is homicide. The official ruling, as we said,
was suicide.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
As of right now, it's suicide. And the reason why
the case is back in the news is because as
Ellen's parents filed a civil suit. It's being heard as
we speak right now in the Philadelphia court system. So
they're going to come down with a binding at any
point going forward this week. It could be this week.
I would doubt it. They're going to come up with
a finding. It's either going to be changed to homicide
(04:17):
or undetermined, or they may keep it the same as suicide.
So we're going to give you all the facts and
you can make your own decision because we're going to
have a conclusion at the end.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
And here's a fun fact. Person is twice as likely
to die at their own hand. Absolutely, yeah, an homicide,
which is interesting and kind of disturbing.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yes, it is. And that's why, like I said, as
a crime analyst, as a police officer, you need to
be able to have a parallel investigation. Even though you
may think that one of the possibilities is not possible.
You still have to have an open and objective mind.
And like I said, that fact is just out there,
more likely suicide than homicide.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
You say, an open and objective mind. But I know you.
You think everybody's guilty.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah, we're gonna get into that today. Absolutely funny is
guilty most cops do. Look at it that Most.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Cops go in you think they think you're guilty, and
then you've got.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Approval if you If you look at it that way,
then you're not gonna get You're not gonna stumble during
an investigation.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
You're not gonna be manipulated. Well, here's a timeline Ellen's
last minutes alive. Two thirty. She makes a cell phone
call to a local restaurant and at four forty six,
her laptop was.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Used, and the question we're going to look at going
forward is did she actually log onto the laptop or
did someone log on or her to make it look
as though something's different to develop an alibi.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
At four fifty four, Sam goes to the gym in
the building and they've got a video. At four fifty four,
stays about a half an hour. A little bit more
comes out at around five thirty all right, and then
he tries to get back into the car, into the.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Environment at around five thirty two. Yep.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Now at five thirty two he calls it. He Textsallent
to let him at numerous times. Apparently he was knocking
on the door and she didn't answer. He couldn't get
in because there was a swing lock.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
What's a swing swing lot If you haven't been in
a motel or a hotel, it's one of those little locks.
It kind of swings over to the left and it
hooks with a little like nipple. But most people won't.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Be able to get in if they really want, say,
but it's effective because if you want to, if you
want to get into a lock like that, you've got
to you gotta kick the door.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
You've gotta do some damage.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
At five point fifty four, Sam goes convinced the security.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Guard to hell, he's not leaving his post.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Help him get in. Oh, that's why, that's why he
couldn't leave. If he comes down, he says, I can't
get into my condo. I need you to I need
you to help me, and the guy says, no, I'm
not going to leave my post absolutely, so that's why
he refuses. So Sam kicks in the door by himself
at six point thirty and according to the story, he
finds Allen dead.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
In the kitchen. However, when when you look at the
crime scene photo, which I did, if you kick a
door in that's locked, not only will the small inward
frame of the door break, but the whole door jam.
If the lock is on properly, the whole door jam
is gonna break because the lock is going to prevent
you from getting in.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So you're gonna do a lot of damage on both
sides of what you could do. And I've been to crimes.
I've been to many crime scenes that were staged.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
A lot of drug addicts claimed people broke into their
house and stole their drugs. I've been to a crime
scene where a boyfriend said that his girlfriend died of
a drug overdose. The house was immaculate, she was on
the ground. It looked as though she had died of
a drug overdose. However, he cleaned up the crime scene.
He placed her body on the ground. She died of
(07:25):
multiple trauma to her stomach area. He kicked her about
one hundred times. But initially it looked like a drug overdose,
that's what. And she was a known drug.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
User, so something might look a certain way. Now in
that case, she looks like she's mean. Is that going
to turn up before the autopsy.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
On the situation I just spoke of, We actually had
a medical examiner to come into the house before they
moved anything, because we initially thought he was giving us
the true story. But then we spoke to a neighbor
and the neighbor nonchalantly said, well, gee, I heard a
very loud argument this morning at seven in the morning.
There was a lot of kicking and screaming going on, screaming,
but she never called the police department. So we brought
(08:03):
it a medical doctor and he just touched her stomach.
He touched the back of her head, and he knew
right there that something was a missed so an educated
eye can make a determination. So in this case in
Ellen's apartment, educated I would say that breakage of the
door happened from the inside and it was possibly instructed
that way by whoever made the call I e. Sam,
(08:25):
And it didn't happen from the outside. The door was
not broken from the outside. It was actually unlocked, but
he made it look like it was broken. But he
didn't do his homework, and he did it incorrectly.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
All right, Back to Sam.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
He makes a nine one one call.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
At six thirty or so. He calls, uh, nine one ones, Yes,
fiance is not breathing, and then he may that she
may have stabbed herself because there was a knife in
her chest till hease arrived eleven minutes later six forty
one and she was prounced dead shortly thereafter. The timeline
is verified via video. Yes, However, nobody has seen entering
the building or entering the head.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
There is no suspicious people either entering at the time
at this timeline or exiting the building, Meaning if an
unknown offender did it, which we're going to get into shortly,
then you may have seen him or her enter or
exit the building. The only one you really see on
the video is Sam.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Based on Sam's nine one one call, re sponding officers
are dispatched to a call of a person not breathing,
hossible suicide.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
The first mistake the cops probably made was they get
the call and they say over the radio, respond to
a suspected suicide. Based on the caller, Sam says, my
girlfriend committed suicide.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, I think she committed suicide. So they go in,
gets what I think. Yes, nice neighborhood, absolutely neighborhood, high
rent district, possible suicide.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
What a cop should never do is go in there
assuming anything. A cop has to go in there objectively
look at any situation, from a robbery, from a domestic situation,
from a suicide to a homicide, look at it from
both sides of the fence, regardless of what the report
(10:00):
awarding parties says to you, whether on scene or via
a phone call.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
In this instance, they went in with the mindset of suicide.
We go back to your creed that you'll live your
lifebo don't believe anyone.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Well, in law enforcement, you can't afford to believe everyone
until proven Otherwise.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Pops get there Ellen's in a semi upright position.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah, kind of slumped against a couple of kitchen cabinet. However,
during the nine to one one conversation that Sam was having,
he told the nine one one to operate a she
was on the ground and they were going over CPR protocol.
That's your first little thing that you click into the
head of a responding officer if you don't.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Do if you're doing CPR, if you're trying to.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Have to be flat on the ground on their back. Now,
let me ask you this question.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Sam's traumatized back from the gym, seizes his girlfriend.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
It's freaked out, absolutetize absolutely. In those situations, your mind
can play tricks on you and you can say the wrong.
You can say the wrong.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So police spend an hour, maybe a little bit less
process in the scene.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Because they believe based on what Sam told them, and
they believe based on probably just seeing the knife in
her chest and a knife wound is going to bleed.
And they didn't do anything other than that, a little
cursory look on the crime scene, and they cleared it
as a suicide.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Right, twenty twenty knifeone, yes, twenty nine, Well.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
If she's on her back. You're not necessarily going to
see him from the back. I'm not trying to justify
what the cop did or didn't do. Obviously, it was
horrible investigatory work by the police department and the responding
officer and the so called responding detective. They dropped the
ball from the beginning of this call is they had
a predetermined thought in their head and that's how they
(11:39):
handled it.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
This is like a murder mystery from television. You know,
the person dies in a locked room. I think there's
a showlock homes. Somebody died in the life room, crowd
they die.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
If it wasn't suicide, the detective probably spoke to the
officer on scene and said, what do you got. The
officer said, well, the boyfriend said it was a suicide.
Detective said, well anything looked suspicious. Well, she's dead on
the grounds, a knife in her chest, there's a lot
of blood. Well it's a suicide. But what they should
have done, what they didn't do. They should have secured
the scene. The detective should have been on scene. They
(12:09):
could have done blood pat and evidence. How the blood
will spurt in different directions, and how it will go
against the wall DNA, whether it be Sam's DNA, Ellen's DNA,
or an unknown offenders DNA.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
And by the way, in this case, if you've got
Sam's DANA.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
He's gonna have it there because he lives there.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It's boyfriend, it's not and he's gonna He's tried CPR,
so she his DNA.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Should be on and his fingerprints are going to be
on her.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I mean, if you go there, when you do DNA
and you find Sam and Ellen and another person, yes,
and all of a sudden, your Spider Man theory comes
back to play.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
But they also didn't do that. They didn't secure Ellen,
Ellen's cell phones or computers. And we're gonna get into
this very quire.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
This is almost like an assumption like they made, which
is they're assuming that the story that they got from
the television producer boyfriend, yes, is accurate from the start.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
They didn't. I'm not sure how they into viewed him,
but I believe they did not bring him back to
the station because you never interview someone at a crime scene.
You bring him in an environment where the police control
the environment.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
But let me ask you this question. He's the grieving
boyfriend of a suicide victim.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
You need to be compassionate in law enforcement. However, you
need to be thorough and you need to run a
parallel investigation, suicide investigation and a homicide investigation, regardless of
whether you sympathize with his current situation. So what else
have you got to wrap up? Police respond, We've already
concluded that it was inept, it was inadequate, and they
(13:35):
took Sam's word for it, that it was a suicide,
and they should have looked at it in both directions.
But there are four glaring deficiencies what they did. First
of all, in the police report says dead bolt lock.
It was not a dead bolt lock. I previously described
it as a lock that flipped over from left to right. Second,
police said in their report that the security god witnessed
(13:57):
Sam kicking in the door and break the lock, when
in fact the security guard never left his post. That's
another bit of evidence. There was a statement by a
coroner that supported the police's theory of suicide. However, there
is no evidence that that particular coroner ever examined the body,
and the last one police most likely intimidated or strongly
(14:22):
influenced the coroner to change the manner of death from
homicide to suicide. Because if that's the case, any deficiencies
that the cops had when they were unseen are going
to be covered up. So does it lead one to
believe that the Philadelphia Police Department and the offices that
did this investigation corrupt to a certain extent, to include
(14:44):
the medical examiner who allowed her name on the report.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
But how much of this is you get there? You've
got a locked room, You've got a dead person inside.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
If you have a locked room, based on what the
information Sam gave.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
You, I had to break the lock to get in.
The plus is broken. You have a take a close
look at it. Why do you Why do you go
to homicide first and not suicide?
Speaker 3 (15:03):
You don't go to anything first. You observe the scene
and then let the scene tell you what happened, not
what the boyfriend says to you. Let the scene tell you.
The scene will tell the story.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
All right.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
So now the next day, now the next day comes
more again.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
If you believe that everything was done incorrectly and sloppily,
you can never backtrack. Certainly, it was done quickly, It
was done quickly. The next day, the crime scene was cleaned,
it was cleaned by an independent by independent card crime
scene Services and the uncle.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Sam's uncle who was a lawyer now currently a judge
in the Philadelphia area, will give his name, James Schwartzman.
He went to the apartment, he had the apartment cleaned.
He took Ellen's computer and her cell phone. He's not
a dumb guy, he's a lawyer. In his head, he's
doing what the cops are doing. He's thinking suicide. But
(15:53):
then he probably understands what happened, and he's thinking, my
nephew could have killed this young girl. So he grabs
the computer on this could have thought that nephew did
it and did it.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
But you're right, attorneys being the way that they are,
he's going to be a prime suspect. I'm gonna grab
the cell phone just in case, and it's going to.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
You just wipe everything clean, any type of text messages
that might have happened, anything on the computer that might
have happened. I will say this that they did find
some information on the cell phone. They did find some
information on the computer. Once you grab a piece of
evidence and you pull it from a crime scene and
there's a chain of custody that is broken, that evidence
(16:29):
is not going to be able to be used in
most court proceedings. However, there has never been a core
proceeding up to this point. We obviously he knew something.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Maybe he knew something, and maybe he suspected means. Yes,
I always getting into means, opportunity and motive.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
Okay, now we already spoke about the means earlier. However,
Ellen was stabbed twenty times, ten to the back of
the net, ten to the front the chess in the
abdomen area.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Can somebody physically stab themselves? I mean, I know you
can sell you back the back of it, but if
you're a contortionist.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
I'm going to get into shortly about types of suicide
and what I've seen in law enforcements. But yes, people
do stab themselves. Yes, you can stab yourself in various
parts of your body. So when you look at ten
to the back, ten to the front, no apparent struggled,
meaning she didn't have any defense wounds on her. So
that would tell an investigator that she was probably attacked
from the back and a blitz attack. Blitz attack is
(17:24):
someone comes from behind, you don't see them, and there
was so much force and ferocity and overkill that before
you even know what's going on, you're incapacitated. You cannot
defend a blitz attack all right, especially from the battle.
Many of the wounds would have caused death. And the
big red flag here that there are some wounds on
her body that did not bleed. If you get stabbed
(17:46):
and your heart is pumping, that means wherever you were stabbed,
there's going to be signs of blood in that area.
If you're already dead and your heart is stopped pumping
wherever you are stabbed, you're going to see a different
type of stab wound because there's no blood in that area.
She had stab wounds, which the coroner, an independent coroner,
(18:07):
stated that she was already dead. Her heart was already
stopped when she was stabbed. How can you stab yourself
when you're dead, You can't do it. That's interesting suicide first,
but before we get into that, depress people. People who
want to end their lives it will go to great
lengths to kill themselves. Some of the suicides that I've
(18:29):
been on, people will walk in front of trains, They'll
walk down the highway, how's are going eighty miles an hour?
They'll walk into a car. What a train or a
high speed motor vehicle will do to a body is
completely blow it up, be limbs all over the area.
People will hang themselves, people will shoot themselves, people will
(18:49):
cut off a limb, and people will stab themselves. You
can stab yourself in the leg five times. You can
stab yourself in the forearm and in the shoulder five times.
So now you have a person who's been stabbed ten
times by themselves. But the last time you stab yourself
is usually going to be the killing wound. Stab yourself
in the chest, in the heart, slice your throat. So
(19:13):
people will stab themselves ten or fifteen times. When you
say Ellen was stabbed twenty times, that's possible to stab
yourself twenty times, But not wish she was stabbed. Not
to the back of your head, back of your neck,
into your spine, into your skull. Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Angle doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
Yeah, she's not a contortionist. She wasn't on PCP, meaning
she had no pain threshold, and she had superhuman strength. However,
the theory ran with itself because it was based on
Sam's initial report and incompetent police work.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
You keep saying incompetent by saying competent, we may say lazy.
So the suicide theory, and this is based on medical
experts that were hired independently by Ellen's family.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Is that the wounds to the back of her net impossible.
You may be able to stab yourself one time, but
the other nine or ten just the sheer pain and
what's gonna happen to you when you insert the knife
into your brain. You're gonna lose bodily functions and to
go eight to nine or ten more times. Physically not
(20:17):
possible to have those wounds self inflicted by Ellen. That
means someone else did it, right, So you know the
bottom line with the suicide theory, from a rookie cop
to a first year medical student, the suicide theory is
an embarrassment to all good people and the law enforcement
and medical profession because it didn't happen that way. It
(20:38):
was physically impossible for Ellen to inflict those wounds on
herself based on independent medical evidence.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
All right, So now we look at opportunity and we
know that if it wasn't suicide, the only other way
that Ellen died was by homicide, either by somebody she
knew or by that stranger.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yes, spider Man that we talked. Absolutely, So let's look
at the stranger homicide possibility. Entry into the apartment could
only have been gained via the front door or by
scaling a six story building door in a snowstorm. As
for the scaling of the building, I mean, do we
really have to go there, Dave. The police report mentioned
inside of the apartment that there was no signs of
(21:19):
snow or wetness.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
They were ing out the stranger.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Absolutely, they're ruling that out. As for the front door,
the police and Sam are both sticking to their statement
that the door was locked from the inside. So the
police and Sam was saying, oh no, no one could
have came in because it was locked from the inside.
So that doesn't that doesn't help Sam's case because if
there's no stranger and it wasn't a suicide, then who
(21:45):
wasn't And there's no video evidence of an unknown person
in the building at the alleged time of the murder.
With that being said, Dave, a mysterious unknown killer is
really not even in the cards. And another thing that
I looked at I looked at that area of Philadelphia,
and you would think a sindistic overkill homicide like this.
(22:07):
If it was an unknown offender, if it was a stranger,
that person may strike again. There are no similar homicides
in that area that fit mo of how Ellen was killed. Now,
there are people in Philadelphia who were killed on the
street by knives during that time, but there were street
level crimes, crime, high crime, neighborhoods, gang type incidents, drug rips.
(22:30):
People were stabbed, but not like Ellen was stabbed. Like
I said, you would think razy psychotic offender like that
would strike again, but they heaven't.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
So this leaves who what do you think, Dave, I
know exactly what you think.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
It ci fiance. Well, it's the most logical explanation, because
someone killed her. It's the most logical explanation. Now, the
known offender. We talked about known offender in the last podcast.
We talked about that the last person to see someone
alive is usually at least top in the list as
a suspect. Who was the last person to see her alive?
Speaker 2 (23:04):
For as far as we know, the last person to
see her alive was Sam.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Now we don't know a neighbor could have come to
the door, not to the door.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
It's unfortunate. At this point the crime scene was mishandled
so bad you're not gonna ever know that.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Let me go one more step though us that neighbor
then would have had to lock the door, swing down
from his from his balcony to balcony below, and either
go from there to his own place.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
All these theories that were coming up with would just
they're they're almost comical because we're trying to we're trying
to explain what happened by filling in the blanks after
it happened, and it just makes no logical sense. But
like I said, you could theorize, but it always comes
back to who was the last person to see her alive,
and who set this whole thing in motion with the
suicide theory and the locked.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Door, and who had the opportunity and who.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Had the opportunity. And we're gonna get into motive very shortly.
Sam does have an alibi if we're going to go
on that Dave, he was at the gym, and that
can be verified through video. Like I said, it doesn't
mean he didn't kill her. My thought on this is
that he killed her, cleaned himself up, went onto her
computer for the last time. Now, when you come into
the crime scene and you look at the computer that
(24:15):
they got back from the uncle, and that just happened
to be there. Now you have somewhat of a timeline that, oh,
she was alive at four forty six, so there was
really only this half hour window that Sam could have
killed her. But in fact, he probably killed her prior
to going to the gym and did that little last
login on her computer.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
If you believe in the known offender theory.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Absolutely, and the non offender we're talking about is Sam.
Also the coroner's report, and this is the first time
we're mentioning it, Ellen had bruises on her body that
were not as a result of being stabbed to death.
They were older bruises on her body. Now that could
lead someone to believe that she was the victim of
domestic violence. And there's something that I actually missed early on.
(24:58):
The suicide theory was brought up by the least apartments
because Ellen was on some anti anxiety and depression medication.
Based on when you're on anti anxiety and depression meds,
one of these side effects is you could become suicidal.
Why was she on that? Did Sam lead her to
be to depression and anxiety? By being involved in a
(25:19):
domestic with her and abusing.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Her, let's put it this way, or she liked rock climbing.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
There's no evidence that she was involved in anything like
that that would lead her to have those bruises. So
how did she get them? And in law enforcement, it's
very simple. It's very simple. If you get rid of
any possibility, and the only other possibility is that you're
being abused by your husband, by your boyfriend, by your father,
(25:46):
by your mother, that's the logical explanation. It's not there's
no sustaining as a mystery. The mystery is when you
never have the answer, but something happened for her to
get those bruises. It's not a mystery. It's logical that
she probably got him from either Sam or if she
had another boyfriend. Who're going to get into that motive.
We're going to get into that motive.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
That's I was already. I was one step ahead of.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
On that one.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Now we're at motive Dave, all right, So motive is
why was Ellen kill? Why would somebody? Why would somebody
do this?
Speaker 3 (26:17):
So suicide that's out the window, stranger homicide. We strongly
believe that that is out the window. Based on the
simple fact that Sam said the door was locked from
the inside and there's no way out of that apartment.
All right, I got three motives. First one, did Ellen
(26:38):
find out that Sam was having an affair and she
told him that she was leaving him? Second one was
Ellen having an affair and Sam found out. That would
be a jealousy or a revenge motive. I'll give you.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I'll give you one more. Yes, takes both of those.
Maybe Ellen was having the affair and she said, yeah,
I'm leaving you. Absolutely, that could be another one.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
The last one, and this is like the hardest one
to try to comprehend in the average mind. Is Sam
just a complete psycho and he killed Ellen in a
crime of passion because he wanted out of the relationship. Now,
this could explain also the bruises obviously if he's abusing
or and you know, death isn't always it's a rare
outcome in a domestic situation, but it definitely happens.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
But I will say one thing. Sam got married three
years after this whole thing was over. Three years later,
he got married, is married again somewhere out there.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
But I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
I'm thinking that I believe it one hundred percent to
be him, that no girl around him is safe because
if he is a psycho or a closet psycho, meaning
he can just snap out of the blue, then no
one is safe around him. Final thought. A bottom line
on this case is that the offender probably will never
be determined unless there was a deathbed confession by either
(27:56):
Sam or someone else you know, you know. Originally, this
case wasn't particularly difficult to investigate or solve. In all appearances,
an innocent girl, Ellen and a loving daughter was brutally
murdered in her apartment. Cops showed up at the scene.
Everything spoke to them. If they had done a thorough investigation,
a proper investigation, an investigation that was sympathetic to the victim,
(28:22):
was sympathetic to the victim's family, they should have been
motivated to solve this case. They should have been motivated
to get this killer off the streets. Do some justice
for the family. Because the family, eleven twelve years later,
there's no closure here. They're still suffering. They don't know
what happened to their daughter. They know what happened to
their daughter, but ar enforcement isn't recognizing that some aspects
(28:46):
of the medical community, the ones that are affiliated with
the State of Philadelphia, and not recognizing that at this point,
the only justice Ellen's family can hope to achieve is
that the autopsy in the overall case is rightfully changed
to unsolved pompist
Welcome Just Under Suspicion, where we pick a crime and
then analyzed the means opportunity in motive to help solve
the mystery. Here are your hosts, Retalian police officer and
crime analyst Bryan pte Long and journalist college professor Dave Radigan.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Here's the basic info. January twenty sixth, twenty eleven, twenty
seven year old Ellen Greenberg was either killed or died
of suicide, stabbed twenty times while alone in an apartment
that she shared with her fiance, Sam Goldberg. Ellen was
a teacher and Sam was a television producer. They lived
(00:47):
in the Many Young section of Philadelphia in the Venice
Lofts on the sixth floor of that apartment building, in
a part of Philadelphia known to have one of the
lowest violent crime rates in the area. At the time
of the death, Ellen was found alone in the kitchen
area of her apartment, with the only logical entry point
into the apartment being the front door, which was allegedly
(01:11):
locked from the inside. There was a porch to her apartment,
so entry could have been gaining through there. However, as mentioned,
it was the sixth floor and it was during a
nor'easter snowstorm occurring at the time of her death. I
don't know, Dale, maybe you would have been able to
get up there.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well, maybe a spider Man type individual could have done that.
And then that leads us right to our first thing
about our podcast. As a former crime analyst, you need
to look at a situation objectively. So I'm going to
throw out two things right away. You mentioned originally just
a minute ago that the only way to get in
there not through the door that was locked, but the
(01:47):
scale of six story apartment, which is not logical. However,
I'm going to give you a couple of scenarios. When
I was in law enforcement, we had a guy it's
like three in the morning. He's on the third story
on the roof of a bill he had just broken into.
He ran up to the top floor, was out in
the roof. We had the building surrounded. There was a
couple of trees, probably within ten feet of the roof
(02:09):
of the building. We ordered them to come down. We
had a dog coming. The dog wasn't there yet. He
jumped from the roof out ten feet, jumped onto the
branch of a tree, and scaled his way down the
tree and was gone. We never even knew who he was.
He was gone in the darkness. So there are Spider
Man types out there. We had a guy that we
(02:30):
thought was kind of locked into a certain apartment complex.
We went into the building. Originally we lost them. We
figured he went up into the attic. We secured the area.
There was a row of apartments that were all connected.
There was around ten or fifteen of them. When we
sent the dog up there about half hour later, he
wasn't there. So what we did was we went up
there in all the apartments, their roofs and the attics
(02:51):
were all connected. So he went from one apartment and
he went about one hundred feet down through around twenty apartments,
and he went through the inside of each of the
apartment the crawl spaces, and we got him at the
last apartment in that build at them. Yeah, we did
get them. He wasn't getting out, but we didn't know
where he was. So there are people out there who
can escape and can get into buildings when you would
(03:14):
think they could. So this case is back in the news.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
In twenty eleven, Ellen Greenberg was stabbed twenty times. It
was ruled a homicide, then it was changed to a suicide. Yes,
twenty stabbings in a locked apartment by herself.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Twenty stabbings tend to the front of her body, tend
to the back of her body, her neck area. How
does she reach the neck area. You're going to get
into that day, all right.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
We're going to look at the case through the eyes
of how a crime analysu del lawrence might approach the investigation. Ultimately,
we're going to break down the case to its most
base level, look at all the potential possibilities. And in
this case, there are only two possibilities. There is suicide
and there is homicide. The official ruling, as we said,
was suicide.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
As of right now, it's suicide. And the reason why
the case is back in the news is because as
Ellen's parents filed a civil suit. It's being heard as
we speak right now in the Philadelphia court system. So
they're going to come down with a binding at any
point going forward this week. It could be this week.
I would doubt it. They're going to come up with
a finding. It's either going to be changed to homicide
(04:17):
or undetermined, or they may keep it the same as suicide.
So we're going to give you all the facts and
you can make your own decision because we're going to
have a conclusion at the end.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
And here's a fun fact. Person is twice as likely
to die at their own hand. Absolutely, yeah, an homicide,
which is interesting and kind of disturbing.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yes, it is. And that's why, like I said, as
a crime analyst, as a police officer, you need to
be able to have a parallel investigation. Even though you
may think that one of the possibilities is not possible.
You still have to have an open and objective mind.
And like I said, that fact is just out there,
more likely suicide than homicide.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
You say, an open and objective mind. But I know you.
You think everybody's guilty.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah, we're gonna get into that today. Absolutely funny is
guilty most cops do. Look at it that Most.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Cops go in you think they think you're guilty, and
then you've got.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Approval if you If you look at it that way,
then you're not gonna get You're not gonna stumble during
an investigation.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
You're not gonna be manipulated. Well, here's a timeline Ellen's
last minutes alive. Two thirty. She makes a cell phone
call to a local restaurant and at four forty six,
her laptop was.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Used, and the question we're going to look at going
forward is did she actually log onto the laptop or
did someone log on or her to make it look
as though something's different to develop an alibi.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
At four fifty four, Sam goes to the gym in
the building and they've got a video. At four fifty four,
stays about a half an hour. A little bit more
comes out at around five thirty all right, and then
he tries to get back into the car, into the.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Environment at around five thirty two. Yep.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Now at five thirty two he calls it. He Textsallent
to let him at numerous times. Apparently he was knocking
on the door and she didn't answer. He couldn't get
in because there was a swing lock.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
What's a swing swing lot If you haven't been in
a motel or a hotel, it's one of those little locks.
It kind of swings over to the left and it
hooks with a little like nipple. But most people won't.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Be able to get in if they really want, say,
but it's effective because if you want to, if you
want to get into a lock like that, you've got
to you gotta kick the door.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
You've gotta do some damage.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
At five point fifty four, Sam goes convinced the security.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Guard to hell, he's not leaving his post.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Help him get in. Oh, that's why, that's why he
couldn't leave. If he comes down, he says, I can't
get into my condo. I need you to I need
you to help me, and the guy says, no, I'm
not going to leave my post absolutely, so that's why
he refuses. So Sam kicks in the door by himself
at six point thirty and according to the story, he
finds Allen dead.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
In the kitchen. However, when when you look at the
crime scene photo, which I did, if you kick a
door in that's locked, not only will the small inward
frame of the door break, but the whole door jam.
If the lock is on properly, the whole door jam
is gonna break because the lock is going to prevent
you from getting in.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So you're gonna do a lot of damage on both
sides of what you could do. And I've been to crimes.
I've been to many crime scenes that were staged.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
A lot of drug addicts claimed people broke into their
house and stole their drugs. I've been to a crime
scene where a boyfriend said that his girlfriend died of
a drug overdose. The house was immaculate, she was on
the ground. It looked as though she had died of
a drug overdose. However, he cleaned up the crime scene.
He placed her body on the ground. She died of
(07:25):
multiple trauma to her stomach area. He kicked her about
one hundred times. But initially it looked like a drug overdose,
that's what. And she was a known drug.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
User, so something might look a certain way. Now in
that case, she looks like she's mean. Is that going
to turn up before the autopsy.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
On the situation I just spoke of, We actually had
a medical examiner to come into the house before they
moved anything, because we initially thought he was giving us
the true story. But then we spoke to a neighbor
and the neighbor nonchalantly said, well, gee, I heard a
very loud argument this morning at seven in the morning.
There was a lot of kicking and screaming going on, screaming,
but she never called the police department. So we brought
(08:03):
it a medical doctor and he just touched her stomach.
He touched the back of her head, and he knew
right there that something was a missed so an educated
eye can make a determination. So in this case in
Ellen's apartment, educated I would say that breakage of the
door happened from the inside and it was possibly instructed
that way by whoever made the call I e. Sam,
(08:25):
And it didn't happen from the outside. The door was
not broken from the outside. It was actually unlocked, but
he made it look like it was broken. But he
didn't do his homework, and he did it incorrectly.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
All right, Back to Sam.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
He makes a nine one one call.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
At six thirty or so. He calls, uh, nine one ones, Yes,
fiance is not breathing, and then he may that she
may have stabbed herself because there was a knife in
her chest till hease arrived eleven minutes later six forty
one and she was prounced dead shortly thereafter. The timeline
is verified via video. Yes, However, nobody has seen entering
the building or entering the head.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
There is no suspicious people either entering at the time
at this timeline or exiting the building, Meaning if an
unknown offender did it, which we're going to get into shortly,
then you may have seen him or her enter or
exit the building. The only one you really see on
the video is Sam.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Based on Sam's nine one one call, re sponding officers
are dispatched to a call of a person not breathing,
hossible suicide.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
The first mistake the cops probably made was they get
the call and they say over the radio, respond to
a suspected suicide. Based on the caller, Sam says, my
girlfriend committed suicide.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, I think she committed suicide. So they go in,
gets what I think. Yes, nice neighborhood, absolutely neighborhood, high
rent district, possible suicide.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
What a cop should never do is go in there
assuming anything. A cop has to go in there objectively
look at any situation, from a robbery, from a domestic situation,
from a suicide to a homicide, look at it from
both sides of the fence, regardless of what the report
(10:00):
awarding parties says to you, whether on scene or via
a phone call.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
In this instance, they went in with the mindset of suicide.
We go back to your creed that you'll live your
lifebo don't believe anyone.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Well, in law enforcement, you can't afford to believe everyone
until proven Otherwise.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Pops get there Ellen's in a semi upright position.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah, kind of slumped against a couple of kitchen cabinet. However,
during the nine to one one conversation that Sam was having,
he told the nine one one to operate a she
was on the ground and they were going over CPR protocol.
That's your first little thing that you click into the
head of a responding officer if you don't.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Do if you're doing CPR, if you're trying to.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Have to be flat on the ground on their back. Now,
let me ask you this question.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Sam's traumatized back from the gym, seizes his girlfriend.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
It's freaked out, absolutetize absolutely. In those situations, your mind
can play tricks on you and you can say the wrong.
You can say the wrong.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So police spend an hour, maybe a little bit less
process in the scene.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Because they believe based on what Sam told them, and
they believe based on probably just seeing the knife in
her chest and a knife wound is going to bleed.
And they didn't do anything other than that, a little
cursory look on the crime scene, and they cleared it
as a suicide.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Right, twenty twenty knifeone, yes, twenty nine, Well.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
If she's on her back. You're not necessarily going to
see him from the back. I'm not trying to justify
what the cop did or didn't do. Obviously, it was
horrible investigatory work by the police department and the responding
officer and the so called responding detective. They dropped the
ball from the beginning of this call is they had
a predetermined thought in their head and that's how they
(11:39):
handled it.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
This is like a murder mystery from television. You know,
the person dies in a locked room. I think there's
a showlock homes. Somebody died in the life room, crowd
they die.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
If it wasn't suicide, the detective probably spoke to the
officer on scene and said, what do you got. The
officer said, well, the boyfriend said it was a suicide.
Detective said, well anything looked suspicious. Well, she's dead on
the grounds, a knife in her chest, there's a lot
of blood. Well it's a suicide. But what they should
have done, what they didn't do. They should have secured
the scene. The detective should have been on scene. They
(12:09):
could have done blood pat and evidence. How the blood
will spurt in different directions, and how it will go
against the wall DNA, whether it be Sam's DNA, Ellen's DNA,
or an unknown offenders DNA.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
And by the way, in this case, if you've got
Sam's DANA.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
He's gonna have it there because he lives there.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It's boyfriend, it's not and he's gonna He's tried CPR,
so she his DNA.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Should be on and his fingerprints are going to be
on her.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I mean, if you go there, when you do DNA
and you find Sam and Ellen and another person, yes,
and all of a sudden, your Spider Man theory comes
back to play.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
But they also didn't do that. They didn't secure Ellen,
Ellen's cell phones or computers. And we're gonna get into
this very quire.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
This is almost like an assumption like they made, which
is they're assuming that the story that they got from
the television producer boyfriend, yes, is accurate from the start.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
They didn't. I'm not sure how they into viewed him,
but I believe they did not bring him back to
the station because you never interview someone at a crime scene.
You bring him in an environment where the police control
the environment.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
But let me ask you this question. He's the grieving
boyfriend of a suicide victim.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
You need to be compassionate in law enforcement. However, you
need to be thorough and you need to run a
parallel investigation, suicide investigation and a homicide investigation, regardless of
whether you sympathize with his current situation. So what else
have you got to wrap up? Police respond, We've already
concluded that it was inept, it was inadequate, and they
(13:35):
took Sam's word for it, that it was a suicide,
and they should have looked at it in both directions.
But there are four glaring deficiencies what they did. First
of all, in the police report says dead bolt lock.
It was not a dead bolt lock. I previously described
it as a lock that flipped over from left to right. Second,
police said in their report that the security god witnessed
(13:57):
Sam kicking in the door and break the lock, when
in fact the security guard never left his post. That's
another bit of evidence. There was a statement by a
coroner that supported the police's theory of suicide. However, there
is no evidence that that particular coroner ever examined the body,
and the last one police most likely intimidated or strongly
(14:22):
influenced the coroner to change the manner of death from
homicide to suicide. Because if that's the case, any deficiencies
that the cops had when they were unseen are going
to be covered up. So does it lead one to
believe that the Philadelphia Police Department and the offices that
did this investigation corrupt to a certain extent, to include
(14:44):
the medical examiner who allowed her name on the report.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
But how much of this is you get there? You've
got a locked room, You've got a dead person inside.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
If you have a locked room, based on what the
information Sam gave.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
You, I had to break the lock to get in.
The plus is broken. You have a take a close
look at it. Why do you Why do you go
to homicide first and not suicide?
Speaker 3 (15:03):
You don't go to anything first. You observe the scene
and then let the scene tell you what happened, not
what the boyfriend says to you. Let the scene tell you.
The scene will tell the story.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
All right.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
So now the next day, now the next day comes
more again.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
If you believe that everything was done incorrectly and sloppily,
you can never backtrack. Certainly, it was done quickly, It
was done quickly. The next day, the crime scene was cleaned,
it was cleaned by an independent by independent card crime
scene Services and the uncle.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Sam's uncle who was a lawyer now currently a judge
in the Philadelphia area, will give his name, James Schwartzman.
He went to the apartment, he had the apartment cleaned.
He took Ellen's computer and her cell phone. He's not
a dumb guy, he's a lawyer. In his head, he's
doing what the cops are doing. He's thinking suicide. But
(15:53):
then he probably understands what happened, and he's thinking, my
nephew could have killed this young girl. So he grabs
the computer on this could have thought that nephew did
it and did it.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
But you're right, attorneys being the way that they are,
he's going to be a prime suspect. I'm gonna grab
the cell phone just in case, and it's going to.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
You just wipe everything clean, any type of text messages
that might have happened, anything on the computer that might
have happened. I will say this that they did find
some information on the cell phone. They did find some
information on the computer. Once you grab a piece of
evidence and you pull it from a crime scene and
there's a chain of custody that is broken, that evidence
(16:29):
is not going to be able to be used in
most court proceedings. However, there has never been a core
proceeding up to this point. We obviously he knew something.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Maybe he knew something, and maybe he suspected means. Yes,
I always getting into means, opportunity and motive.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
Okay, now we already spoke about the means earlier. However,
Ellen was stabbed twenty times, ten to the back of
the net, ten to the front the chess in the
abdomen area.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Can somebody physically stab themselves? I mean, I know you
can sell you back the back of it, but if
you're a contortionist.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
I'm going to get into shortly about types of suicide
and what I've seen in law enforcements. But yes, people
do stab themselves. Yes, you can stab yourself in various
parts of your body. So when you look at ten
to the back, ten to the front, no apparent struggled,
meaning she didn't have any defense wounds on her. So
that would tell an investigator that she was probably attacked
from the back and a blitz attack. Blitz attack is
(17:24):
someone comes from behind, you don't see them, and there
was so much force and ferocity and overkill that before
you even know what's going on, you're incapacitated. You cannot
defend a blitz attack all right, especially from the battle.
Many of the wounds would have caused death. And the
big red flag here that there are some wounds on
her body that did not bleed. If you get stabbed
(17:46):
and your heart is pumping, that means wherever you were stabbed,
there's going to be signs of blood in that area.
If you're already dead and your heart is stopped pumping
wherever you are stabbed, you're going to see a different
type of stab wound because there's no blood in that area.
She had stab wounds, which the coroner, an independent coroner,
(18:07):
stated that she was already dead. Her heart was already
stopped when she was stabbed. How can you stab yourself
when you're dead, You can't do it. That's interesting suicide first,
but before we get into that, depress people. People who
want to end their lives it will go to great
lengths to kill themselves. Some of the suicides that I've
(18:29):
been on, people will walk in front of trains, They'll
walk down the highway, how's are going eighty miles an hour?
They'll walk into a car. What a train or a
high speed motor vehicle will do to a body is
completely blow it up, be limbs all over the area.
People will hang themselves, people will shoot themselves, people will
(18:49):
cut off a limb, and people will stab themselves. You
can stab yourself in the leg five times. You can
stab yourself in the forearm and in the shoulder five times.
So now you have a person who's been stabbed ten
times by themselves. But the last time you stab yourself
is usually going to be the killing wound. Stab yourself
in the chest, in the heart, slice your throat. So
(19:13):
people will stab themselves ten or fifteen times. When you
say Ellen was stabbed twenty times, that's possible to stab
yourself twenty times, But not wish she was stabbed. Not
to the back of your head, back of your neck,
into your spine, into your skull. Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Angle doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
Yeah, she's not a contortionist. She wasn't on PCP, meaning
she had no pain threshold, and she had superhuman strength. However,
the theory ran with itself because it was based on
Sam's initial report and incompetent police work.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
You keep saying incompetent by saying competent, we may say lazy.
So the suicide theory, and this is based on medical
experts that were hired independently by Ellen's family.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Is that the wounds to the back of her net impossible.
You may be able to stab yourself one time, but
the other nine or ten just the sheer pain and
what's gonna happen to you when you insert the knife
into your brain. You're gonna lose bodily functions and to
go eight to nine or ten more times. Physically not
(20:17):
possible to have those wounds self inflicted by Ellen. That
means someone else did it, right, So you know the
bottom line with the suicide theory, from a rookie cop
to a first year medical student, the suicide theory is
an embarrassment to all good people and the law enforcement
and medical profession because it didn't happen that way. It
(20:38):
was physically impossible for Ellen to inflict those wounds on
herself based on independent medical evidence.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
All right, So now we look at opportunity and we
know that if it wasn't suicide, the only other way
that Ellen died was by homicide, either by somebody she
knew or by that stranger.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yes, spider Man that we talked. Absolutely, So let's look
at the stranger homicide possibility. Entry into the apartment could
only have been gained via the front door or by
scaling a six story building door in a snowstorm. As
for the scaling of the building, I mean, do we
really have to go there, Dave. The police report mentioned
inside of the apartment that there was no signs of
(21:19):
snow or wetness.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
They were ing out the stranger.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Absolutely, they're ruling that out. As for the front door,
the police and Sam are both sticking to their statement
that the door was locked from the inside. So the
police and Sam was saying, oh no, no one could
have came in because it was locked from the inside.
So that doesn't that doesn't help Sam's case because if
there's no stranger and it wasn't a suicide, then who
(21:45):
wasn't And there's no video evidence of an unknown person
in the building at the alleged time of the murder.
With that being said, Dave, a mysterious unknown killer is
really not even in the cards. And another thing that
I looked at I looked at that area of Philadelphia,
and you would think a sindistic overkill homicide like this.
(22:07):
If it was an unknown offender, if it was a stranger,
that person may strike again. There are no similar homicides
in that area that fit mo of how Ellen was killed. Now,
there are people in Philadelphia who were killed on the
street by knives during that time, but there were street
level crimes, crime, high crime, neighborhoods, gang type incidents, drug rips.
(22:30):
People were stabbed, but not like Ellen was stabbed. Like
I said, you would think razy psychotic offender like that
would strike again, but they heaven't.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
So this leaves who what do you think, Dave, I
know exactly what you think.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
It ci fiance. Well, it's the most logical explanation, because
someone killed her. It's the most logical explanation. Now, the
known offender. We talked about known offender in the last podcast.
We talked about that the last person to see someone
alive is usually at least top in the list as
a suspect. Who was the last person to see her alive?
Speaker 2 (23:04):
For as far as we know, the last person to
see her alive was Sam.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Now we don't know a neighbor could have come to
the door, not to the door.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
It's unfortunate. At this point the crime scene was mishandled
so bad you're not gonna ever know that.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Let me go one more step though us that neighbor
then would have had to lock the door, swing down
from his from his balcony to balcony below, and either
go from there to his own place.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
All these theories that were coming up with would just
they're they're almost comical because we're trying to we're trying
to explain what happened by filling in the blanks after
it happened, and it just makes no logical sense. But
like I said, you could theorize, but it always comes
back to who was the last person to see her alive,
and who set this whole thing in motion with the
suicide theory and the locked.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Door, and who had the opportunity and who.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Had the opportunity. And we're gonna get into motive very shortly.
Sam does have an alibi if we're going to go
on that Dave, he was at the gym, and that
can be verified through video. Like I said, it doesn't
mean he didn't kill her. My thought on this is
that he killed her, cleaned himself up, went onto her
computer for the last time. Now, when you come into
the crime scene and you look at the computer that
(24:15):
they got back from the uncle, and that just happened
to be there. Now you have somewhat of a timeline that, oh,
she was alive at four forty six, so there was
really only this half hour window that Sam could have
killed her. But in fact, he probably killed her prior
to going to the gym and did that little last
login on her computer.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
If you believe in the known offender theory.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Absolutely, and the non offender we're talking about is Sam.
Also the coroner's report, and this is the first time
we're mentioning it, Ellen had bruises on her body that
were not as a result of being stabbed to death.
They were older bruises on her body. Now that could
lead someone to believe that she was the victim of
domestic violence. And there's something that I actually missed early on.
(24:58):
The suicide theory was brought up by the least apartments
because Ellen was on some anti anxiety and depression medication.
Based on when you're on anti anxiety and depression meds,
one of these side effects is you could become suicidal.
Why was she on that? Did Sam lead her to
be to depression and anxiety? By being involved in a
(25:19):
domestic with her and abusing.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Her, let's put it this way, or she liked rock climbing.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
There's no evidence that she was involved in anything like
that that would lead her to have those bruises. So
how did she get them? And in law enforcement, it's
very simple. It's very simple. If you get rid of
any possibility, and the only other possibility is that you're
being abused by your husband, by your boyfriend, by your father,
(25:46):
by your mother, that's the logical explanation. It's not there's
no sustaining as a mystery. The mystery is when you
never have the answer, but something happened for her to
get those bruises. It's not a mystery. It's logical that
she probably got him from either Sam or if she
had another boyfriend. Who're going to get into that motive.
We're going to get into that motive.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
That's I was already. I was one step ahead of.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
On that one.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Now we're at motive Dave, all right, So motive is
why was Ellen kill? Why would somebody? Why would somebody
do this?
Speaker 3 (26:17):
So suicide that's out the window, stranger homicide. We strongly
believe that that is out the window. Based on the
simple fact that Sam said the door was locked from
the inside and there's no way out of that apartment.
All right, I got three motives. First one, did Ellen
(26:38):
find out that Sam was having an affair and she
told him that she was leaving him? Second one was
Ellen having an affair and Sam found out. That would
be a jealousy or a revenge motive. I'll give you.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I'll give you one more. Yes, takes both of those.
Maybe Ellen was having the affair and she said, yeah,
I'm leaving you. Absolutely, that could be another one.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
The last one, and this is like the hardest one
to try to comprehend in the average mind. Is Sam
just a complete psycho and he killed Ellen in a
crime of passion because he wanted out of the relationship. Now,
this could explain also the bruises obviously if he's abusing
or and you know, death isn't always it's a rare
outcome in a domestic situation, but it definitely happens.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
But I will say one thing. Sam got married three
years after this whole thing was over. Three years later,
he got married, is married again somewhere out there.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
But I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
I'm thinking that I believe it one hundred percent to
be him, that no girl around him is safe because
if he is a psycho or a closet psycho, meaning
he can just snap out of the blue, then no
one is safe around him. Final thought. A bottom line
on this case is that the offender probably will never
be determined unless there was a deathbed confession by either
(27:56):
Sam or someone else you know, you know. Originally, this
case wasn't particularly difficult to investigate or solve. In all appearances,
an innocent girl, Ellen and a loving daughter was brutally
murdered in her apartment. Cops showed up at the scene.
Everything spoke to them. If they had done a thorough investigation,
a proper investigation, an investigation that was sympathetic to the victim,
(28:22):
was sympathetic to the victim's family, they should have been
motivated to solve this case. They should have been motivated
to get this killer off the streets. Do some justice
for the family. Because the family, eleven twelve years later,
there's no closure here. They're still suffering. They don't know
what happened to their daughter. They know what happened to
their daughter, but ar enforcement isn't recognizing that some aspects
(28:46):
of the medical community, the ones that are affiliated with
the State of Philadelphia, and not recognizing that at this point,
the only justice Ellen's family can hope to achieve is
that the autopsy in the overall case is rightfully changed
to unsolved pompist
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