September 29, 2025
Provided image/ABC News
Ellen Greenberg, pictured above, was found dead in her Manayunk apartment on Jan. 26, 2011. Investigators ruled her death a suicide, despite her 20 stab wounds. A new docuseries, 'Death in Apartment 603,' questions this conclusion.
Fourteen years ago, investigators ruled Philadelphia teacher Ellen Greenberg's death a suicide — despite the 20 stab wounds covering her body, including 10 on the back of her neck. Her parents are still fighting to get her case reclassified and reopened, most recently through a docuseries now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
"Death in Apartment 603: What Happened to Ellen Greenberg?" examines its subject's suspicious death in three parts. The first episode introduces viewers to Greenberg, a bubbly 27-year-old woman teaching first grade at Juniata Park Academy and planning her wedding to fiancé Samuel Goldberg. Her family and friends remember she had grown more anxious in the months leading up to her death, though she never spoke of harming herself. She had seen a psychiatrist, who prescribed her anti-anxiety medication, three times.
The series then recounts the snowy night of Jan. 26, 2011, when Goldberg called 911. He told the operator that Greenberg had locked herself inside their apartment in the Venice Lofts complex in Manayunk. After he broke the door down, he said, he found her on the kitchen floor covered in blood. Photos from the crime scene show that Greenberg had a knife lodged in her chest — a detail that Goldberg seemingly discovered while on the call with emergency responders.
"Oh my god, she stabbed herself!" Goldberg says in the 911 call, which plays in the docuseries. "She fell on a knife! I don't know, her knife is sticking out."
Police called to the scene treated the case like a suicide from the start based on Goldberg's account and Greenberg's lack of defensive wounds. Since they did not believe Greenberg had been murdered, they did not consider her apartment a crime scene. So when the building's manager called to ask if she could let Goldberg's uncle into the apartment to retrieve personal items the next day, police approved the request — and gave her the number of a cleaning crew to scrub the unit.
The next installment delves into the bizarre events that followed. The medical examiner ruled Greenberg's cause of death a homicide on Jan. 28, spurring law enforcement to return to a crime scene with little evidence left. Even as police worked the case, they publicly contradicted the medical examiner, telling the press they were "leaning" toward suicide. Then, on March 10, the medical examiner's office reversed course, declaring the cause of death a suicide.
The Greenberg family never believed this finding. After a mutual friend connected Joshua and Sandra Greenberg, Ellen's parents, with a retired state trooper, the couple launched their own investigation and campaign to get their daughter's death reclassified so that a criminal investigation could be reopened — a yearslong endeavor that continues into the third episode.
The family's biggest break came last February, when the medical examiner who performed Greenberg's autopsy submitted a sworn statement that her death should be reclassified.
Nancy Schwartzman, the director and showrunner of "Death in Apartment 603," said she also struggled to accept the investigators' conclusions when she learned of the Greenberg case.
"I mean, just as a headline, it's so outrageous," the Bryn Mawr native said. "You can't exactly believe it. And then the more you dig in and learn, there were 10 stab wounds on her back. How is that a successful mode of suicide? The more you learn, it's harder and harder to believe that it's a suicide."
For the series, Schwartzman interviewed Greenberg's family and friends, lawyers, retired law enforcement officers and the Venice Lofts building manager and its concierge, who were there the night she died. Goldberg and his family declined to participate; a former co-worker provides brief perspective on how the media frenzy impacted him.
Schwartzman — who also directed the true crime documentaries "Red Roll Red," about the Steubenville High School rape case, and "Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order," about a group of women who investigate cold cases — said she was "a little more visceral about the wounding" than she has been on past projects due to the contested nature of Greenberg's death. Viewers see graphic photos of her body and blood spatter throughout the series.
"I felt like it was very important for audiences to actually see, with respect to Ellen and her family, what some of those wounds look like," Schwartzman said. "I would never normally do something like that, because what is the point of showing a victim like that if it's a murder or it's a cold case? She was killed. If you're calling this a suicide, I want audiences to visually understand what the wounding on the back of her head looked like, what the blunt force trauma looked like in her skull. So that was a choice."
"Death in Apartment 603" arrives as the Greenberg family awaits its next court hearing. In February, Joshua and Sandra settled a lawsuit with the city of Philadelphia on the condition that officials "expeditiously" review their daughter's case. That review was still pending at a Sept. 3 hearing, where a judge criticized the city for its continued delays; officials now have until Oct. 14 to wrap up their re-examination.
Schwartzman hopes that her docuseries shows audiences where Greenberg's investigation went wrong — and how similar cases can be avoided in the future.
"I always want to elevate a story to really look at all the factors and what contributes to violence and violence against women or crimes," she said. "Is it societal beliefs? Is it interpersonal violence? Is it police mistakes that snowball into something much bigger? It's always hard to know what are the causes, but I think the more we're able to look at all the factors, the more we can understand some of the signs — what we can do better as people, what we should expect from our institutions."
Follow Kristin & PhillyVoice on Twitter: @kristin_hunt
| @thePhillyVoice
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice
Have a news tip? Let us know.
