The story of how authorities managed to catch the husband of a woman who fell from a 250-metre cliff and bring him to justice after a four-year investigation has finally emerged, decades after he was jailed.
Peter Bergna was found clinging to rocks just after midnight on a summer evening in 1998, his wrecked pickup truck and dead wife hundreds of feet below. SFGATE.
He and his wife, Rinette Riella-Bergna (49), claimed that while they were driving on Nevada State Route 878, the brakes of their Ford F-150 failed, they hit the road barriers and rolled down the cliff.
According to Bergna, who was 45 at the time, the Lake Tahoe couple had parked there to discuss their marriage and his wife’s departure for a business trip after being picked 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.
“This may be part of your job, but I’m at home, alone, and I don’t like it,” Bergna remembers telling his wife of 11 years.
She allegedly recalled saying she would cut back on her travels for the sake of their marriage and ending the meeting on a good note before the horrific events that followed.
Bergna, who works as an appraiser at a prestigious art gallery in San Francisco, told police that he hit the barrier after realizing his brakes were not working and that he was thrown out of the car as it crashed because he was smoking a cigar out of the window while driving.
Court documents revealed that Rinette was reportedly looking for apartments in Italy, while the man had been harassing women at work and was planning to end his marriage.
Bergna claimed that when he woke up, he found himself hanging from the mountainside, approximately 25 metres below the broken guardrail, then he took out his mobile phone and called 112, telling the operator that “his car rolled down the hill, my wife is in the car”.
After police tell her to continue the call and listen for sirens, she can be heard shouting “Rinette!”
He was eventually rescued from the cliff and Rinette’s body was found in the rubble at the foot of the mountain.
Sergeant Jim Beltron said he was skeptical of the scene from the start, noting how the vehicle had “T-boned” the barrier and how clean Bergna was, with only a broken leg and a dirty rear end.
“When you’re thrown from a vehicle, you’re dirty, you’re falling,” Beltron said. “The throws I’ve seen, dead or alive, you’re dirty. You’re going to look like a Pigpen.”
Investigators found Bergna to be unemotional about his wife’s death, along with other interesting details such as the fact that he was not wearing a seat belt during the incident but Rinette was, and the airbag was disabled.
“There was no scraping, no sliding, no brake fluid, no debris, no tire marks of any kind,” Beltron said, explaining that it was a reflex action to hit the brakes as he was heading for some kind of collision.
Bergna also left two five-gallon plastic drums of gasoline open in the trunk of his Ford that he had saved for a trip to Las Vegas.
The morning after the incident, he was questioned by Beltron and other investigators at the Washoe County Sheriff’s Station.
“When he told us, ‘I tried to stop, I tried to stop,’ there was a little bit of sadness, but it was just words,” Beltron said. “It looked like he was hyperventilating, but it wasn’t.”
“He just spontaneously said, ‘I’m not cheating on my wife,'” Beltron added. “He was like, ‘Ding ding ding,’ nobody asked you.”
Authorities also used the legal but controversial technique of lying to the suspect, telling Bergna that a non-existent “caretaker” was nearby during the alleged conversation with his wife.
Beltron, who watched Bergna through a one-way mirror during the polygraph, said he appeared to be in great distress but that the test was not conclusive.
Justice in Rinette’s death went undetected for years, with investigators even testing how similar vehicles to the one Bergna used that night would behave by driving them on the same road.
Meanwhile, in the years between his wife’s death and the lawsuit, Bergna traveled the world using his $450,000 life insurance payout. He also received $275,000 for his share of his family’s Manteca ranch where Rinette grew up.
The first trial against him, in 2001, ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict after three defendants were not convicted.
“Someone didn’t like the cops at all, someone didn’t like the evidence, and someone said it should be in God’s hands,” Beltron recalls.
In a second trial the following year, a new jury heard the man’s financial motivations as well as his anger at his wife’s new international career and her reluctance to have children.
The case was filled with testimony against him.
One of them was a neighbour who told the jury that he had seen Rinette aiming a snowplow at him “with full force” a few months before he went to Italy.
Several women testified that Bergna had “hit on them” in the weeks before his wife’s death, even on the night before his return flight from Europe.
Another said he invited his wife to the jacuzzi and was not emotional about her death.
He added that he “went crazy” when she rejected him after he grabbed her breast.
His first wife also testified that she feared for her life during their marriage and recalled how her husband would “go completely crazy” when she got his fries wrong.
Bergna was eventually found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
Despite numerous appeals and his defense of his innocence, he is currently incarcerated at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, with his next parole hearing expected in 2025.