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The story of how officials managed to catch the husband of a woman driven off an 800-foot cliff after a four-year investigation, and bring him to justice, has finally been revealed decades after his incarceration.
Peter Bergna was found clinging to rocks shortly after midnight on a summer’s evening in 1998, his wrecked pickup truck and dead wife hundreds of feet below him, according to SFGATE.
He claimed the brakes failed on his Ford F-150 while he and his wife, Rinette Riella-Bergna, 49, were driving down Nevada State Route 878, making them crash through the road’s guardrail and sending them hurtling off the cliff.
The Lake Tahoe couple had parked there, according to then 45-year-old Bergna, to discuss their marriage and his wife’s travelling for work after he picked her up from Reno-Tahoe International Airport.
She had just returned from a 6-week trip to Italy for her new job as an international travel director.
“It might be part of your job, but I’m home, and I’m alone, and I don’t like it,” Bergna remembered telling his wife of 11 years.
He supposedly recalled her saying she would reduce her travel for the sake of their marriage, ending the discussion on a good note before the horrific events that followed.
Bergna, an appraiser at a prestigious San Francisco art dealer, told police that he hit the guardrail after realising the breaks weren’t working, and was thrown out of the vehicle as it fell because he had been smoking a cigar out the window while driving.
Court transcripts reveal that he had been making advances towards women at his work and planning to end his marriage while Rinette was in Italy, where she had reportedly been looking at apartments.
Bergna claimed he awoke to find himself hanging on to the side of the mountain, about 80 feet below the broken guardrail, before pulling out his cellphone to dial 911 and informing the operator his “car rolled down the hill, my wife is in the car.”
After police told him to stay on the call and listen out of sirens, he can then be heard shouting out her name: “Rinette!”
He was eventually rescued from the cliffside, and Rinette’s body discovered in the wreckage at the bottom of the mountain.
Sergeant Jim Beltron said he was sceptical of the scene from the start, noting the car had “T-boned” the guardrail and how clean Bergna - who had only a fractured foot and a dirtied backside - was.
“When you get pitched out of a vehicle, you’re dirty, you tumble,” Beltron said. “The ejections I’ve seen, dead or alive, you’re dirty. You’re gonna look like Pigpen.”
Investigators found him unemotional regarding his wife’s death, with other peculiar details including the fact that Bergna wasn’t wearing a seat belt at the time of the incident but Rinette had been, and that her airbag had been disabled.
“There was no scuff, no skid, no brake fluids, no debris, no tire marks of any kind,” Beltron said, explaining that it’s a reflex to stomp on the brakes while headed towards an impact of some sort.
Bergna had also left two five-gallon plastic jugs full of gasoline, supposedly for a trip to Las Vegas, unsealed in the bed of his Ford.
The morning after the incident, he was questioned by Beltron and other investigators at the Washoe County Sheriff’s Station.
“There was some grief when he told us, ‘I tried to stop, I tried to stop,’ but it was nothing more than the words,” Beltron said. “He looked like he was hyperventilating, but he wasn’t.”
“He spontaneously said, ‘I don’t cheat on my wife,’” Beltron added. “It was like ‘ding ding ding,’ no one asked you.”
Officials also used the legal but nonetheless controversial technique of lying to their suspect, telling Bergna that a non-existent “caretaker” was nearby at the time of his alleged conversation with his wife.
Watching Bergna through a one-way mirror during a polygraph, Beltron said he seemed full of angst, but the test was ruled inconclusive.
Justice would not be served for Rinette’s death for years, despite investigators even going so far as to drive similar vehicles to the one Bergna drove that night along the same road to see how they would handle the turn.
Meanwhile, in the years between his wife’s death and the court case, Bergna travelled the world using her $450,000 life insurance pay out. He also received $275,000 for Rinette’s share in her family’s Manteca ranch where she grew up.
The first trial brought against him, in 2001, ended in a hung jury when three chose not to convict.
“One did not like policemen at all, one didn’t like the evidence, and one said it should be in God’s hands,” Beltron remembered.
In the second case the following year, a new jury heard of his financial motivation as well as his anger at his wife’s new international career and desire not to have children.
The case was saturated with testimonies against him.
One was a neighbor, who told the jury they saw him aim a snowblower “with full force” at Rinette a few months before she left for Italy.
Multiple women testified to Bergna “hitting on them” in the weeks leading up to his wife’s death, including the night before she flew back from Europe.
Another testified that he invited her to his hot tub and was not emotional over his wife’s death.
She added that he “snapped” when she rejected him after he grabbed her breast.
His first wife also took the stand, claiming she feared for her life during their marriage and remembered how he had gone “absolutely berserk” when she made hash browns incorrectly.
Bergna was finally found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years to life.
Despite numerous appeals and maintaining his innocence, he is currently incarcerated in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, with his next parole hearing expected to take place in 2025.
