by The story of how officers managed to arrest and bring to justice the husband of a woman who was driven off an 800ft cliff after a four-year investigation has finally been revealed decades after her imprisonment.
Peter Bergna was found clinging to rocks shortly after midnight on a summer evening in 1998, his wrecked pickup truck and his dead wife hundreds of feet below. SFGATE.
He claimed the brakes on his Ford F-150 failed while he and his wife, Rinette Riella-Bergna, 49, were driving down Nevada State Route 878, causing them to crash through the guardrail of the road and taking them away from the cliff.
The couple in Lake Tahoe had parked there, according to Bergna, then 45, to discuss their marriage and his wife’s commute to work after he picked her up from Reno International Airport- Tahoe.
She had just returned from a 6 week trip to Italy for her new position as international travel director.
“It could be part of your job, but I’m at home, and I’m alone, and I don’t like it,” Bergna recalled telling his wife of 11 years.
He remembered her saying that she would cut back on her travels for the sake of their marriage, ending the discussion on a good note before the terrible events that followed.
Bergna, an appraiser at a prominent San Francisco art dealer, told police he hit the guardrail after realizing the breaks weren’t working, and was thrown from the vehicle as he fell because he was smoking a cigar out of the window while driving. .
Court transcripts show he was making advances toward women at work and planned to end his marriage while Rinette was in Italy, where she was looking at apartments.
Bergna claimed he woke up hanging on the side of the mountain, about 80 feet below the broken guardrail, before pulling out his cell phone to dial 911 and telling the operator his car had “rolled down the hill, my wife is in the car. .”
After police tell him to stay on the call and listen from the base, he can be heard shouting her name: “Rinette!”
He was eventually rescued from the cliff side, and Rinette’s body was found in the wreckage at the bottom of the mountain.
Sergeant Jim Beltron said he was suspicious of the scene from the start, noting that the car had a “T-bone” on the guardrail and how clean Bergna was – he only had a broken leg and back dirty
“When you get tilted out of a vehicle, you get dirty, you dive,” Beltron said. “The things I saw, dead or alive, you are dirty. You’ll look like Pigpen.”
Investigators determined that he was emotional about his wife’s death, with other curious details including the fact that Bergna was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the incident but Rinette was, and that her airbag was disabled.
“There was no scuff, no skid, no brake fluid, no debris, no tire marks of any kind,” Beltron said, explaining that his reflex is to stomp on the brakes and head toward some kind of impact.
Bergna 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, Beltron and other investigators questioned him at the Washoe Sheriff’s Station.
“There was some sadness when he told us, ‘I tried to stop, I tried to stop,’ but those were just the words,” Beltron said. “It 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,’ nobody asked you.”
Officers also used the legal but nonetheless controversial technique of getting their suspect to lie, telling Bergna that there was a “lookout” who wasn’t around at the time of his alleged conversation with his wife.
Looking at Bergna through a one-way mirror during a polygraph, Beltron said he appeared to be full of angst, but ruled the test inconclusive.
Justice for Rinette’s death would not be brought for years, despite investigators even going so far as to take vehicles like the one Bergna drove that night along the same road to see how they handled the turn.
Meanwhile, in the years between his wife’s death and the court case, Bergna traveled the world using her $450,000 life insurance payout. He also received $275,000 for Rinette’s share of 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 of them didn’t like police at all, one didn’t like the evidence, and one said it should be in God’s hands,” Beltron recalled.
In the second case the following year, a new jury heard about his financial motivation as well as his anger at his wife’s new international career and his desire not to have children.
The case was saturated with testimonies against him.
One of them was a neighbor, who told the jury they saw him pointing a snow blower “with full force” at Rinette a few months before she left for Italy.
Multiple women testified to Bergna “hitting on them” in the weeks before his wife’s death, including the night before she flew back from Europe.
Another said he invited her to his hot tub and had no feelings about his wife’s death.
She also said that he “stopped” when she rejected him when he grabbed her breast.
His first wife also took the stand, claiming she feared for her life during their marriage and recalled how he went “absolutely berserk” when she made hash browns incorrectly.
Bergna was eventually found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to 20 years to life.
Despite numerous appeals and maintaining his innocence, he is currently incarcerated at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, with his next parole hearing scheduled for 2025.
