Parents’ $500,000 probe points to murder, they say

Civil lawsuit transferred to Chester County

Some cases are a prosecutor’s dream. Then there’s the Ellen Greenberg case.

More than a nightmare, her death investigation became something of a hot potato. It was tossed around to several prosecutors in different jurisdictions. There’s no indication any made much progress.

Seth Williams was Philadelphia’s district attorney when Ellen was found stabbed inside her Manayunk apartment on Jan. 26, 2011. The Greenberg family, whipsawed by changed rulings on Ellen’s manner of her death, eventually sought an attorney of their own to dig into what had happened.

That lawyer was Larry Krasner. He’d go from looking into the case from the outside for Joshua and Sandee Greenberg to being elected Philadelphia’s DA in November 2017.

Because of the conflict of interest created by his private work for the Greenbergs, the new DA handed Ellen’s case and all the government files that Philadelphia police, prosecutors and medical examiner officials had generated on it over to the state attorney general’s office.

Heading that office at the time was Josh Shapiro, who’d become governor five years later.

The Greenbergs have little good to say about Shapiro’s four-plus years of handling their daughter’s case. They accuse him and his lieutenants of “sitting on” the case the entire time.

A statement released by the attorney general’s office in 2022 defended their work. It says the office under Shapiro conducted what it called an “exhaustive review,” including “new forensic analysis,” over “four years of work.”

Despite this, the office said it “regretted” those efforts could not bring more closure. Then, citing the “appearance of a conflict of interest,” the AG’s office washed its hands of the matter and returned the case to Philadelphia.

In other words, back to square one.

Conflicted out

The Ellen Greenberg case had come full circle. But it wouldn’t remain there.

Philadelphia was now defending two civil lawsuits filed by the Greenberg family. One seeks to overturn the official ruling of suicide. If granted, this would re-open the death investigation and open the door for all the evidence collected by the Greenbergs’ and their private detective to be aired in court.

The second suit seeks monetary damages and accuses members of Philadelphia’s police, district attorney’s and medical examiner offices of “individual and willful misconduct and participating in a conspiracy to cover up the murder of Ellen R. Greenberg.”

When the Greenberg case was returned by the AG, it was quickly re-assigned to Chester County. The neighboring county has jurisdiction to this day.

Amid the many prosecutorial handoffs, forward progress has been virtually non-existent. There have been no public updates on the case since the attorney general’s statement last year. The Greenbergs said they’ve heard nothing from Chester County.

Ellen’s death remains designated a suicide, and frustrations for the Greenbergs and their detective have never been higher.

“There’s been a lot of passing the buck in terms of the investigation,” said detective Tom Brennan, a veteran of the Pennsylvania state police and Dauphin County, who’s worked privately on the Greenberg case for the past decade.

If the truth about Ellen’s death was to be found, Brennan would have to find it.

Do-it-yourself investigation

A veteran of scores of homicide investigations, Brennan has one golden rule: The crime scene is sacrosanct. He dwells there until every possible detail can be absorbed.

In Ellen’s death, police and the assistant ME at the scene ruled it a suicide that very night, as indicated by the Jan. 26, 2011, incident report. After the autopsy the next day, the case was ruled a homicide, and police returned to her apartment Jan. 28 to collect evidence. But in the intervening period, the apartment had been cleaned and sanitized.

The only remaining documentation of Ellen’s death scene is a limited number of photos taken by police and the assistant ME on the evening of her death. Brennan began with these and saw enough to tell the Greenbergs at his initial meeting with them that he believed Ellen’s death was a homicide.

He would take the case — but not his usual hourly fee.

“I don’t make money on somebody else’s grief,” Brennan said. Instead, he limited the Greenbergs’ costs to his expenses. A decade and thousands of hours of investigation later, the deal remains in place.

From the start, Brennan honed in on the decision that shut down the original homicide investigation. That was the April 4, 2011, manner of death reversal by pathologist Marlon Osbourne, who switched the case from homicide to suicide.

Why did the doctor who performed Ellen’s autopsy do a complete about-face less than three months later?

That was the question Brennan sought to answer.

A Sept. 13, 2013, conference call placed from the Dauphin County coroner’s office to medical examiner officials in Philadelphia began supplying some answers.

Present on the call in Dauphin County was Brennan, pathologist Dr. Wayne Ross, whom the Greenbergs hired to review the autopsy and forensic findings, and county Coroner Graham Hetrick, who according to Brennan’s memo of the call, didn’t speak.

At the other end of the line was Osbourne and his boss, then-Philadelphia Medical Examiner Dr. Samuel Gulino.

Here are excerpts of Brennan’s written memo of the call. Brennan said he reviewed the memo with the call participants in Dauphin County and they agreed with its accuracy.

“Dr. Ross began the conversation by asking Dr. Osbourne a number of questions related to Dr. Osbourne’s findings in his autopsy report. Osbourne responded to all Dr. Ross’ questions. Although Dr. Ross did not agree with a number of Dr. Osbourne’s responses, the call remained congenial.”

The tone of the call changed markedly, however, when Brennan posed the one question he’d been waiting to press ever since taking the case seven months before.

“I then asked Dr. Osbourne why he changed the cause and manner of death from homicide to suicide. Dr. Osbourne responded, ‘I changed it at the insistence of the police because they said there was a lack of defense wounds.’”

Brennan then asked: “Since when do the police have anything to do with making a medical decision regarding the cause and manner of death?”

“Dr. Osbourne did not respond to the question,” Brennan wrote in his memo.

The call was terminated shortly thereafter.

Brennan said he knew he was on to something.

Police, prosecutors seek suicide ruling

The next time the Greenbergs’ team questioned Osbourne and Gulino, both were under oath at April 2021 depositions taken for the family’s lawsuits against Philadelphia officials, including the pair of pathologists.

They were asked about the previously undisclosed meeting among Philadelphia police, a prosecutor and the two ME officials that preceded Osbourne’s decision to amend Ellen’s death certificate to reflect suicide, not homicide.

“It occurred in the medical examiner’s office, in one of our conference rooms,” Gulino said.

Gulino said he couldn’t recall the exact date nor who from the police attended. He did say the meeting occurred before Ellen’s death certificate was officially changed on April 4, 2011, and it included the DA’s deputy chief of homicide.

“I don’t recall who it was that asked me to take part in this meeting,” Gulino said. “I did not initiate the meeting. What I recall being discussed is that the police wanted to present additional evidence that they felt showed that the death of Ellen Greenberg was a suicide and not a homicide.”

Asked what evidence police presented, Gulino said: “The two topics that I remember from that meeting were the absence of defensive cuts on Ellen Greenberg’s hands or forearms and the fact that the door was locked — or the lock was engaged from inside the apartment.”

Osbourne’s deposition went further, with the pathologist saying he’d been asked by a police investigator on at least one other occasion prior to the meeting to change the manner of death. He did not recall the officer’s name nor the names of two officers he said attended the meeting.

Osbourne said he’d never participated in a similar meeting with police and prosecutors to discuss changing the manner of death in any of his other cases.

Osbourne now works as associate medical examiner in Palm Beach County, Fla. He did not respond to PennLive’s emailed questions about the Greenberg case.

Osbourne was the only person with power under Pennsylvania law to change Ellen’s death certificate, according to the Greenbergs’ attorneys.

After the meeting, he did just that, effectively ending the homicide investigation with the stroke of his pen.

But the Greenbergs wouldn’t allow it.

Subpoena power

It would be nearly nine years between the time Brennan first learned of the meeting and when the Greenbergs and their attorneys filed the second of their civil suits.

Filed in June 2022, this legal action accusing officials of a cover-up is just getting started, especially in terms of the relatively slow process of preliminary motions and discovery. Brennan said he expects they’ll learn the names of more people who attended the meeting once more records and officials are put under subpoena by the Greenbergs’ attorneys.

Meanwhile, the result of that meeting — Ellen’s death being officially changed to suicide — is what the Greenbergs’ other lawsuit, now before the Commonwealth Court, is out to overturn.

But the meeting wasn’t the only thing Brennan unearthed from the medical examiner’s office.

Unbeknownst to the Greenberg family, the office kept a key specimen of Ellen’s knife-stabbed spinal tissue.

What might it prove?