Governor Josh Shapiro was the presumed leading candidate to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. Reports listed that his main character energy and office's handling of a sexual assault case negatively impacted his chances. Ellen Greenberg's suicide case may have also come up in the truncated vetting process.
In 2011, when Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, 27-year-old Greenberg died in her Manayunk apartment. She’d received 20 stab wounds, several to the back of her head. Greenberg was found by her fiancee, Samuel Goldberg, with a 10-inch knife lodged in her chest. There was also a massive gash in the back of her head. Goldberg said he gained access to the apartment by breaking down the door.
Police investigators treated Greenberg’s death a suicide, citing that she had no defensive wounds and that the door was locked from the inside with no signs of an intruder. The Medical Examiner’s office declared it a homicide, pointing to the ten wounds to the back of her neck and 11 bruises in various states of healing. The Philly Police Department publicly objected to the findings, and after a closed-door meeting, the ME’s office reversed their decision to one of suicide. Greenberg’s parents, Joshua and Sonya, never bought suicide for a moment.
Ellen had been seeing a psychiatrist and was prescribed anxiety and sleep aid medications. Greenberg’s psychiatrist told police Ellen felt overwhelmed at work, but “there was never any feeling of suicidal thoughts.” The ME said there was nothing indicative of suicide on her computers. The police said there had been searches for “suicide methods, quick suicide, and painless suicide.”
After changing their mind, the ME said they relied heavily on the findings of an outside neuropathologist, Lucy Rorke-Adams, who allegedly determined Greenberg’s spinal cord wasn’t damaged by the wounds to the back of her neck, which would have allowed her to inflict the subsequent wounds on herself, including the final plunge to her chest. No copy of the report has been produced, nor has any invoice or record of payment for the report. Rorke-Adams previously told The Inquirer that she had no recollection of the case.
In 2012, the Greenbergs hired then-civil rights attorney Larry Krasner to investigate the case. They met with the District Attorney’s office to get the case re-opened but was unsuccessful. When Krasner became Philadelphia District Attorney in 2018. the Greenbergs reached back out to see if he would revisit the findings. Because of a conflict of interest, Krasner referred the case to the State Attorney General (Shapiro), which is how he got involved. Shapiro’s office held onto the case for over a year. When pressed for answers by the media, spokesperson Joe Grace said in a 2019 statement that the office had conducted a “thorough investigation” and that the “evidence supports ‘suicide’ as the manner of death” and the AG has “closed this investigation.”
When asked about the neuropathology exam, Grace said, “Dr. Rorke-Adams has no independent recollection of participating in the investigation, and we have not found a copy of the report.” Still, the office believed there was “ample evidence” that the neuropathology exam happened based on a line about it in the autopsy report and statements from two detectives.
Later in 2019, the Greenbergs sued the Medical Examiner’s Office and the pathologist who conducted the autopsy, seeking to have the manner of their daughter’s death changed back to homicide or undetermined. In late 2021, a lawyer for the Greenbergs delivered depositions and other records obtained as a result of that civil suit to the AG’s Office — which was still run by Shapiro — in the hopes it would reopen the case, spokesperson Molly Stieber said the information “brought to light no new facts in this case,” and the office stood by the suicide ruling.
Conspiracy theories abounded on the Internet and true crime podcasts. It came out that Shapiro had a relationship with one of the Goldberg (fiance’) family members, which gave the appearance of a conflict of interest. In 2022, the Attorney General kicked the case back to the Philadelphia Attorney General, citing a wish to avoid the appearance of a conflict.
“While the Office of Attorney General does not have an actual conflict in this matter, circumstances beyond our control have created the appearance of a conflict and our involvement is no longer serving one of the primary purposes of the District Attorney’s original conflict referral.”
While Larry Krasner was still the Philadelphia District Attorney, the case was sent to the Chester County District Attorney due to his conflict. When Shapiro was elected Governor in November 2022, he resigned as the District Attorney and has had no further involvement in the case.
In October 2021, a Philadelphia Court decided the Greenbergs had the right to pursue their lawsuit, which the City of Philadelphia appealed. A Commonwealth Court agreed with the City, finding the Greenbergs had no standing in the death of their daughter. The Commonwealth Court criticized the police investigation, calling it “deeply flawed.”
Shapiro’s involvement in the case may never be apparent, that it took his office two years to determine a “possible” conflict of interest will never be justifiable. What decisions Shapiro personally made as opposed to his office will be forever overshadowed by the statements of his political foes and right-wing media. The Harris campaign didn’t need Shapiro’s baggage, and several surrogates are out saying the selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had nothing to do with the negative publicity surrounding Shapiro regarding Ellen Greenberg’s death. I wish the Greenbergs luck with their appeal. I also wish the City of Philadelphia, the State Attorney’s Office, and the Philadelphia Police Department had more of an interest in finding the truth than covering their behinds.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of William Spivey's work on Medium. And if you dig his words, buy the man a coffee.
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