The Contending talks to director Nancy Schwartzman about the Hulu docuseries Death in Apartment 603: What Happened to Ellen Greenberg?
If you haven’t heard of the case behind Hulu’s docuseries Death in Apartment 603: What Happened to Ellen Greenberg?, you’re not alone: Director Nancy Schwartzman wasn’t familiar with the story either before taking on the project.
“But I related to Ellen so much,” says Schwartzman. “I related to her family. I’m from Philadelphia. I felt so connected to it, but in a way, I got to come at it fresh. So without bias, without memory, I think it actually served the project.”
27-year-old Ellen Greenberg was found dead in her apartment in January 2011 — with 20 stab wounds to her body. Investigators initially ruled it a suicide, when her fiancé Samuel Goldberg told 911 operators she stabbed herself (he discovered her after coming back from the gym).
But this story takes a lot of twists and turns, and while amateur true crime sleuths on Reddit may think they know the facts, Schwartzman’s docuseries includes a new element podcasts and books don’t have: CCTV footage.
‘The Family and Lawyers Had to Fight to Get the CCTV Footage’
“I thought it was really powerful to hear Phil Hampton, the concierge at the Venice Lofts, talk about that day,” says Schwartzman. “And so to hear Phil describe it and then watch Sam go to the gym and come back and just knowing either what happened before the gym or after the gym, it’s so dramatic. The fact the family and the lawyers had to fight to get the CCTV footage is super interesting. And I love how that’s revealed on the show.”
The police told investigators they didn’t have the raw video.
“And it was like, do you want to go under oath and say, you can’t find that footage? Or would you like to share that footage? You know, and then it’s only a portion of it.”
Ellen’s family and lawyers still don’t have the video of Ellen going into her apartment that day.
Schwartzman has encountered the withholding of footage before with her Netflix doc Victim/Suspect. A police department couldn’t “find” the footage until two weeks before her project was supposed to drop on the streaming network. She not only stresses the legal importance of it but also the visual element for the project.
“There are just certain things that as a filmmaker feel really tangible to work with, like surveillance footage, text messages, all that kind of stuff where you can timestamp them, you can look at them, you can read them.”
‘He Announces It’s a Homicide at the Funeral’
Ellen Greenberg’s story unfolds like a narrative film. Schwartman even describes it as a bit like The Godfather, especially at the shiva, when the Greenbergs and the Goldbergs collide.
“You’re just like, whoa, what if this thing happens in the midst of a family or two families? What does that feel like? What does that look like? It’s so intimate. And then there’s all this tension.”
Plus, since Ellen was Jewish, her body was ritually prepared.
“That scene is really powerful, where these women in the community, as part of a religious ritual, are cleaning the body. They’re not trained, they’re not law enforcement, they’re doing something they never should have to do to a 27-year-old girl, right?”
These women are some of the few people who would see Ellen post-mortem, and they see 20 stab wounds all over her body.
“And they know this isn’t right.”
Then, as if this situation isn’t dramatic enough, Ellen’s father, Josh Greenberg, learns that the medical examiner has changed the ruling from “suicide” to “homicide.”
“And yeah, he announces that it’s a homicide at the funeral.”
Being in Apartment 603 Where Ellen Died
Another visual element to ground Ellen’s story is seeing where she lived and died: Apartment 603.
“It was important to be in there,” says Schwartzman. “Like, oh my god, we’re in the apartment. And here it is.”
Schwartzman describes the apartment as looking like a happy place to live, in a really cool building, and that you could feel the energy of what it must have been like to have been a tenant there, ready to start your life with your person.
But she also needed to be there to understand the layout.
“It was helpful to understand where the neighbors heard Sam pounding on the door. It’s understanding the focal lengths and the actual distances from the elevator and who could have heard what. It was seeing that the lock was still kind of distressed on the inside — they hadn’t fixed that very well. With my filmmaking hat on, it was really important to be in there.”
That door has become an obsession with people on Reddit. Nearly 15 years on from Ellen’s death, Schwartzman says her Hulu series lays out the facts without pointing fingers, with careful corroboration of publicly available information — even if the doc addresses that big question mark.
“The bottom line is that that latch being locked, the door can close on itself. I don’t know how the door opened if it was latched. But we certainly know that you can walk out the door, close it hard, and have it lock behind you. That doesn’t mean that no one else was there. Reddit will go to town with the door latch, but we were not doing all the millions of different theories and options. What we did do was get really highly trained experts around the table, looking through all the materials in the files, having a healthy discussion about what was in front of them.”
Death in Apartment 603: What Happened to Ellen Greenberg? is streaming on Hulu.
