Posts Tagged → hair
Sweet Ellen Greenberg’s last two minutes alive
On a cold winter evening in January, 2011, pretty, sweet, gentle, tiny 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg was brutally murdered, stabbed to death in her back and chest twenty times with a kitchen knife that only moments before she had been using.
In addition to the homicidal wounds, one of which severed her spinal cord and rendered her body completely limp, which meant subsequent stabs must have been done with real rage, the autopsy of her body also showed deep bruising on her legs, torso, and arms, old and new. Marks around her neck showed that she had been recently strangled. Her body showed the signs that physically abused people typically carry. Ellen had probably been physically abused for a long time.
So when Ellen was making herself a small meal in the kitchen in which she was about to be attacked, she had already packed up her personal things, including her makeup. She had locked the apartment door, including the inner latch, because she wanted to be left alone. She had made up her mind to move out of the apartment she shared with her fiance, Sam Goldberg, either going home to Harrisburg, or moving in with one of her friends. Ellen had not yet made up her mind where.
For the past fifteen minutes, Sam had been texting Ellen, asking her to unlock the inner door latch, so that he could get into the apartment. Apparently Ellen had been ignoring him, because his last text said “You have no idea.”
Apparently Sam was in a rage.
Seconds later Sam kicked in the door, which broke the inner latch, and the rest of what happened seems clearly obvious to everyone except the corrupt Philadelphia Police, the corrupt Philadelphia DA’s office, and now a formerly corrupted or confused medical examiner, Dr. Marlon Osbourne, all of whom said sweet Ellen’s death was a suicide.
The man who conducted Ellen’s autopsy, who saw the bruises and the stab wounds from behind, who saw the photo of a large clump of Ellen’s hair on the kitchen floor, who initially ruled her death a suicide, Dr. Osbourne, has now changed his official opinion to “death not by suicide,” which sounds a hell of a lot like a line from a purposefully ridiculous Monty Python skit.
In other words, Dr. Osbourne now says Ellen was murdered, to which everyone around the world who has a heart and a brain says “No sh*t, Sherlock.” We already knew this years ago. It only took a lawsuit against Dr. Osbourne by Ellen’s parents and a pending court appearance to finally elicit his honest opinion, again.
Minutes after Ellen had slumped to the floor, Sam Goldberg called his uncle and his cousin, both of whom are criminal defense lawyers who live near the apartment Ellen shared with Sam. Only after Sam spoke with his lawyer relatives did he call 911, and tell the dispatcher “She fell on a knife.”
Now that Dr. Osbourne has changed his opinion about Ellen’s death, the law demands that a real criminal investigation be conducted. There is no statute of limitations on murder. And Ellen’s personal journal can finally be released from Dr. Osbourne’s office to her parents and to whomever is going to be investigating her murder, and whomever is going to be investigating the blatant coverup.
I mean, surely someone in law enforcement wants to know how Sam’s uncle, who is both a criminal defense lawyer and a former judge, was allowed full access into the apartment right after Ellen’s death. We know that the lawyer uncle left the apartment with some of Ellen’s personal belongings, including her computer.
Other glaringly obvious questions come to mind: What did Sam’s uncle take from the apartment? Why did he take them? What did he do with them?
Why has Dr. Osbourne’s office clung to Ellen’s personal journal all these years, unwilling to release it? If no murder happened, then why not release it, right? Why say Ellen suicided herself, but then act like you know she was murdered, Dr. Osbourne? Wonder what that journal says!
Why did the Philadelphia Police behave so casually about Ellen’s death? Her blood was splattered all over her kitchen, and her battered body showed the usual signs of a homicide. Her clump of hair on the kitchen floor was from someone grabbing her hair and violently pulling it (probably to bend her over to be able to stab her in the back of her neck).
Why did the Philadelphia DA’s office send representatives to an early 2011 meeting with the Medical Examiner and the Philly police, and have them ask that Ellen’s death certificate be changed from homicide to suicide?
What is the connection between the 2011 Philadephia DA’s office and Sam’s family? Obviously both were “in the business” together, and probably knew each other. Did that relationship somehow color the medical examiner’s decision to change his office’s initial finding of homicide?
Even more bizarre was the decision by then – PA AG Josh Shapiro to let stand the suicide ruling just a couple years ago, despite lots of new evidence that said otherwise. Shapiro also had a personal relationship with Sam’s family, and a political relationship, too.
Just so, so many tangled relationships in this whodunit murder, and not enough transparency about them!
Justice for Ellen demands that some outside professional outfit conduct the subsequent investigation into who murdered her. Who can do it? Josh Shapiro is now the governor, and he oversees the PA State Police. That means he could influence any investigation they would do. The FBI is completely corrupt, infiltrated, politicized, and untrustworthy, so they are out.
I don’t know who can investigate who murdered sweet Ellen Greenberg, but at this point, there is so much physical and circumstantial evidence out in public already that all we really need is an outdoor court room with split rail seating, a horse, a rope, and a tree.
I volunteer to slap the horse in the ass.
Remembering neat people, Part 1
A lot of neat, interesting people have died in the past year or two, or ten, if I think about it, but time flies faster than we can catch it or even snatch special moments from it. People I either knew or admired from afar who changed me in some way.
There are two men who influenced me in small but substantial ways who I have been thinking about in recent days. One of them died exactly ten years ago, and the other died just last year. Funny how I keep thinking about them.
It is time to honor them as best I can, in words.
First one was Charlie Haffner, a grizzled mountain man from central Tennessee. Charlie and I first crossed paths in 1989, when I joined the Owl Hollow Shooting Club about 45 minutes south of Nashville, where I was a graduate student at the time.
Charlie owned that shooting club.
Back before GPS, internet, or cell phones, the world was a different place than today. Dinosaurs were probably wandering around among us then, mmm hmmmmm. Heck, maybe I am a dinosaur. Anyhow, in order to find my way to the Owl Hollow club, first and foremost I had to get the club’s phone number, which I obtained from a fly fishing shop on West End Avenue. Then I had to call Charlie for directions, using a l-a-n-d l-i-n-e, and actually speaking to a person at the other end. You’d think it was Morse Code by today’s standards.
After getting Charlie on the phone, and assiduously writing down his directions from our phone conversation, I had to use the best map I could get and then drive way out in the Tennessee countryside on gravel and dirt roads. Trusting my directional instincts, which are good, and trusting the maps, which were pretty bad, and using Charlie’s directions, which were exactingly precise, I made my way through an alien landscape of small tobacco farms and Confederate flags waving from flagpoles. Yes, southcentral Tennessee back then, and maybe even today, was still living in 1865. Not an American flag to be seen out there by itself. If one appeared, it was either directly above, or, more commonly, directly below the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag shared equal or nearly equal footing with the American flag throughout that region.
Needless to say, when I had finally arrived at the big, quiet, lonesome gun range in the middle of the Tennessee back country, the fact that I played the banjo and was as redneck as redneck gets back home didn’t mean a thing right then. Buddy, I was feelin’…. Yankee, like…well, like black people once probably felt entering into a room full of Caucasians. I felt all alone out there and downright uncomfortable. And to boot, I was looking for a mountain man with a deeeeep Southern drawl, so it was bound to get better. Right?
Sure enough, I saw Charlie’s historic square-cut log cabin up the hill, and I walked up to it. Problem was, it had a door on every outside wall, so that when I knocked on one, and heard voices inside, and then heard “Over here!” coming from outside, I’d walk around to the next door, which was closed, and I would knock again, and go through the process again, and again. Yes, I knocked on three or four of those mystery doors before Charlie Haffner finally stepped out of yet one more doorway, into the sunshine, and greeted me in the most friendly and welcoming manner.
Bib overalls were meant to be worn by men like Charlie, and Charlie was meant to wear bib overalls, and I think that’s all he had on. His long, white Father Time beard flowed down and across his chest, and his long, flowing white hair was thick and distinguished like a Southern gentleman’s hair would have to be. And sure as shootin’, a flintlock pistol was tucked into the top of those bib overalls. I am not normally a shy person, and I normally enjoy trying to get the first words in on any conversation, with some humor if I can think of it fast enough. But the truth is, I was dumbfounded and just stood there in awe of the sight before me.
Being a Damned Yankee, I half expected to be shot dead on sight. But what followed is a legendary story re-told many times in my own family, as Charlie (and his kindly wife, who also had a twinkle in her eye) welcomed me into his home in the most gracious, witty, and insightful way possible.
Over the following two years, I shot as much as a full-time graduate student could shoot out there at Owl Hollow Gun Club, which is to say not as much as I wanted and probably more than I should have. Although my first interest in guns as a kid had been black powder muzzleloaders, and I had received a percussion cap .45 caliber Philadelphia derringer as a gift when I was ten, I had not really spent much time around flintlocks. Charlie rekindled that flame in me there, and it has burned ever since, as it has for tens of thousands of other people who were similarly shaped by Charlie’s re-introduction of flintlock shooting matches back in the early 1970s, there at Owl Hollow Gun Club.
Charlie died ten years ago, on July 10th, I think, and I have thought about him often ever since: His incredible warmth and humor, his amazing insights for a mountain man with little evident exposure to the outside world (now don’t go getting prejudiced about mountain folk; he and many others are plenty worldly, even if they don’t APPEAR to be so), his tolerance of differences and willingness to break with orthodoxy to make someone feel most welcome. Hollywood has done a bad number on the Southern Man image, and maybe some of that negative stereotype is deserved, but Charlie Haffner was a true Southern gentleman in every way, and I was proud to know him, to be shaped by him.
The other man who has been on my mind is Russell Means, a Pine Ridge Sioux, award-winning actor, and Indian rights activist who caught my attention in the early 1970s, and most especially as a spokesman for tribal members holed up out there after shooting it out with FBI gunslingers.
American Indians always have a respected place in the heart of true Americans, and anyone who grew up playing cowboys and Indians knows that sometimes there were bad cowboys who got their due from some righteous red men. Among little kids fifty years ago, the Indians were always tough, and sometimes they were tougher and better than the white guys. From my generation, a lot of guys carry around a little bit of wahoo Indian inside our hearts; we’d still like to think we are part Indian; it would make us better, more real Americans…
Russell Means was a good looking man, very manly and tough, and he was outspoken about the unfair depredations his people had experienced. While Means was called a radical forty years ago, I think any proud Irishman or Scottish Highlander could easily relate to his complaints, if they or their descendants stop to think about how Britain had (and still does) dispossessed and displaced them.
Russell Means played a key role in an important movie, The Last of the Mohicans. His stoic, rugged demeanor wasn’t faked, and he was so authentic in appearance and action that he easily lent palpable credibility to that artistic portrayal of 1750s frontier America by simply showing up and being there on the set. Means could have easily been the guy on the original buffalo nickel; that is how authentic he was.
Russell Means was representative of an older, better way of life that is disappearing on the Indian reservations, if that makes any sense to those who think of the Indian lifestyle that passed away as involving horses and headdresses. He was truly one of the last of the Mohicans, for all the native tribes. Although I never met you, I still miss you, and your voice, Mr. Means.
[Written 7/23/14]
PA AG Kane: The Breck Girl
Pennsylvania’s attorney general is Kathleen Kane.
Pennsylvania citizens deserve much better than Kane. We deserve more than what she brings to her public job.
Kane acts like the silky models who showed off their long hair with pirouettes and head tosses for Breck Shampoo. One is reminded of the song “I’m Too Sexy.”
Based on her carefully groomed public appearances that coincide with an honest-to-goodness inability to grasp or articulate the issues of her office and the public, she is henceforth dubbed “The Breck Girl.”
Kane’s flippant, vacuous approach to serious public policy and legal issues, emphasized by a physical appearance crutch, complete with slow-motion hair tosses and giraffe-like Cheshire Cat radioactive radiant grins, have earned her this nickname.
Breck Girl, you are not up to the job. You are incompetent. If Pennsylvania had a recall provision in our constitution, you’d be recalled by now.
Hopefully, you will be impeached soon. If Pennsylvania must have a Democrat as AG, I personally know several men and women attorneys in that party who would qualify much better than you, Breck Girl.