Wife Dies After Being Pushed Off 800-Foot Cliff, It Took Detectives Years to Bring Her Husband to Justice

The story of how officers managed to catch the husband of a woman who was thrown off an 800-metre cliff after a four-year investigation and bring him to justice has finally been revealed, decades after his imprisonment.

Peter Bergna was found clinging to rocks shortly after midnight one summer evening in 1998, with his wrecked van and dead wife hundreds of feet below him, according to SFGATE Gateway.

He claimed the brakes on his Ford F-150 failed while he and his wife, Rinette Riella-Bergna, 49, were driving on Nevada State Road 878, causing them to hit a guardrail and fall off a cliff.

According to Bergny, then 45, the couple from Lake Tahoe had parked there to talk about their marriage and that his wife was traveling on business after he picked her up at Reno-Tahoe International Airport.

She has just returned from a six-week trip to Italy, where she took up a new position as director of international travel.

“This may be part of your job, but I’m home, alone, and I don’t like it,” Bergna recalled telling his wife of 11 years.

He reportedly recalled her saying she would limit her travel for the good of their marriage, ending the discussion on a good note before the tragic events that followed.

Bergna, an appraiser for a prestigious San Francisco art store, told police he hit a guardrail when he realized the brakes were not working and was thrown from the vehicle as it was falling because he was smoking a cigar through the window while driving.

According to court records, while Rinette was in Italy, where she was reportedly looking for an apartment, the man made propositions to women at work and planned to end their marriage.

Bergna claimed he woke up to find himself dangling on the mountainside, about 80 feet below the damaged guardrail, then pulled out his cellphone to dial 911 and inform the operator that “a car rolled down the hill and my wife was inside.”

After police told him to continue talking and listen beyond the sirens, they heard him shout her name: “Rinette!”

Eventually he was rescued from the cliff side, and Rinette’s body was found among the debris at the foot of the mountain.

Sergeant Jim Beltron said he was skeptical from the start, noting the car had “slammed sideways” into the guardrail and how clean Bergna was, with only a broken foot and a dirty butt.

“When they throw you out of the vehicle, you’re dirty, you’re rolling,” Beltron said. “I’ve seen throws, dead or alive, you’re dirty. You’re going to look like Pigpen.”

Investigators said he showed no emotion over his wife’s death, and other unusual details included the fact that Bergna was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash, while Rinette was, and that her airbag was disabled.

“There were no scratches, no skidding, no brake fluid, no debris, no tire marks,” Beltron said, explaining that hitting the brakes is a reflex action as you drive toward an impact.

Bergna also left two five-gallon plastic cans filled with gasoline in the bed of his Ford, ostensibly for the trip to Las Vegas.

The morning after the incident, he was interviewed by Beltron and other investigators at the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office.

“There was a little bit of regret when he told us, ‘I tried to stop, I tried to stop,’ but those were just words,” Beltron said. “He looked like he was hyperventilating, but he wasn’t.”

“He spontaneously said, ‘I’m not cheating on my wife,’” Beltron added. “It was like, ‘ding ding ding,’ nobody asked you.”

The officers also used a legal, if controversial, technique by lying to the suspect, telling Bergna that a nonexistent “caregiver” was nearby at the time he supposedly spoke to his wife.

Beltron said that when he watched Bergna through a one-way mirror during the polygraph examination, the man appeared anxious, but the test results were inconclusive.

Justice has not been served for Rinette’s death for years, even though investigators went so far as to use similar vehicles to the one Bergna was driving that night on the same road to test how they would handle a bend.

Meanwhile, in the years between his wife’s death and the trial, Bergna traveled the world, enjoying a $450,000 life insurance payout. He also received $275,000 for Rinette’s share of the family ranch in Manteca, where she grew up.

The first trial against him, held in 2001, ended in a hung jury after three judges disagreed with convicting him.

“One didn’t like police at all, one didn’t like evidence, and one said everything should be in God’s hands,” Beltron recalled.

In the second case the following year, a new jury heard the man’s financial motives, as well as his anger over his wife’s new international career and desire not to have children.

The case was saturated with testimony against him.

One of them was a neighbour who told the jury he saw him swing a snowblower “with full force” at Rinette a few months before she left for Italy.

Multiple women testified that Bergna had been “hitting on” them in the weeks leading up to his wife’s death, including the night before she returned from Europe.

Another testified that he invited her to the jacuzzi and was not concerned about his wife’s death.

She added that he “broke down” when she rejected him and he grabbed her breast.

His first wife also testified, saying she feared for her life during their marriage and recalled her husband going “completely crazy” when she prepared hash browns incorrectly.

Bergna was ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

Despite numerous appeals and protestations of his innocence, he is currently being held at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, with his next parole hearing scheduled for 2025.