📚 E-ARC BOOK REVIEW 📚
What Happened To Ellen?
By Nancy Grace and Benee Knauer
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Publisher: Post Hill Press | Regalo Press
📚MY RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
📚MY REVIEW:
If you're a fan of true crime and you aren't yet familiar with Ellen Greenberg, allow me to introduce you to the next rabbit hole you're about to go down.
Ellen was 27 years old, engaged to be married later that year, and a beloved schoolteacher to young children, when she was found brutally k*lled in the luxury apartment she shared with her fiance in Philadelphia on January 26, 2011. Ellen was stabbed 20 TIMES -- with wounds to her liver, her neck, her head, and her spinal cord -- and the knife was still in her chest when she was discovered. One of her stab wounds did not bleed, which means it was inflicted post-mortem -- after she was already dead. And the police and medical examiner ultimately ruled her death a suicide.
Ellen's parents have been engaged in a legal fight for more than a decade to have the manner of death changed to homicide or even undetermined, so that the police investigation can be re-opened. This book offers many more details about this case and the family's fight for justice in Ellen's name.
I've been aware of this case for years and have been disgusted by the lack of transparency and humanity from the local law enforcement, the district attorneys, and the medical examiners involved in this case. The evidence is limited because of the police's determination on-site this was a suicide, and then the crime scene was forensically cleaned before law enforcement could obtain a search warrant. The fiance's extended family was given permission to take personal belongings from the apartment the day after Ellen's death - which included some of Ellen's belongings. None of the typical reading testing was done by the medical examiner to determine the actual time of death. Forensic evidence doesn't match up with the manner of death being suicide. And we're expected to believe Ellen brutally stabbed herself 20 times - in places which were nearly impossible for her to reach and once after she was already dead - while holding a perfectly clean white dish towel in her dominant right hand, which she was still holding when her body was found?!
Okay. Sure. Seems plausible.
I think it's good to know that only about 35% of this book is a written narrative about Ellen, her family, and details about the case. The remaining 65% of the book contains legal filings and deposition transcripts. Nancy Grace's voice comes through loud and clear in the narrative within these pages, with phrases like "this stinks to high Heaven," and you can practically hear her voice as you read. Though the way this book shares information is a little all over the place and there are details that are repetitive, I'm grateful Grace uses her platform to bring attention to abhorrent miscarriages of justice like Ellen's case. Everyone should be DISGUSTED by the appalling way this case has been handled, and we need to shout from the rooftops until justice is served for Ellen and the Greenberg family.
I'll see you on the other side of the rabbit hole.
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