Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two of our series about the
death of an unidentified deceed known only as Peter Bergmann. Robin, do you
want to catch everyone up of what we talked about in our previous episode.
Well, this case takes place in two thousand and nine in the town in
Ireland called Sligo, and Involl was a middle aged man who showed up there
and decided to check into a local hotel under the name Peter Bergman, but
he did not provide any identification and it turned out that was not his real
name. He spent three nights at the hotel and CCTV footage captured his movements
during that time period. It appeared he would exit the hotel caring personal items,
and then they would be gone whenever he returned, so it almost appeared
like he was gradually disposing of all clues to his identity because he didn't want
anyone to find out who he was. And after he checked out of the
hotel, he traveled to a beach in a village called Ross's Point and numerous
witnesses saw him hanging around the beach for about eight hours or so, but
the following morning he was found dead. His body had gone into the water,
he was wearing limited clothing, but it turned out that his exact cause
of death was actually cardiac arrest rather than drowning, and when a medical toxicology
report was performed, it turned out that he had prostate cancer and likely would
have only lived for a couple more weeks if he had not died on that
date, But it showed no trace of drugs in his system, and it
did show that he had a history of three previous heart attacks. But some
of the personal items of his like his clothing, were found on the beach
to him. A lot of his items that he was shown carrying on the
CCTV footage was never found, so there's a lot of mystery surrounding his death.
People have speculated that he traveled to this place in Ireland because he wanted
to end his own life on his own terms, but he didn't want anyone
to find out what happened to him, which is why all form of identification
was disposed of. All the people who spoke to him said that it sounded
like he had an Austrian or German accent, and when he signed into the
hotel, he provided the address for a place in Austria which turned out to
not even exist. So they've spent the last fifteen years or so trying to
figure out who he is, but they haven't had any success, even though
there's actual CCTV footage of him and actual photographs that have been released to the
public, but no one has ever come forward to say that they recognize him,
and that's why this case is still unsolved to this day. So in
October of twenty nineteen, one of the investigators on this case, Detective Inspector
Ray Mulderigg of the Sligo Guardee, was interviewed for an article in Vice magazine.
He expressed his belief that Peter Bergmann had chosen to travel to Sligo for
a reason, stating quote, there seems to have been a purpose to it.
Everything he did seem to have had a purpose, from cutting the labels
of his clothes and all the rest of it. The question you have to
ask is why Sligo. If you want a scenic place to die, you're
spoilt for choice across the west coast of Ireland or even Scotland for that matter.
Something must have brought him here. Even if we've never been able to
say what that was end quote. Indeed, the consensus seems to be that
Peter was definitely not a native of Ireland, unlikely hailed from Austria or possibly
even Germany, So what made him travel the county Sligo. Another complication in
this case is that even though Peter's actions suggests that he had planned an elaborate
suicide, we can't even be one hundred percent certain how Peter died. I'm
going to make a comparison to a case which we once covered on a path
went Chile Bonus Patreon Minniesote, and that's the twenty fourteen death of Alan Jeel.
Alan was a sixty four year old man whose nude body was found washed
up on Parentporth Beach in England, and he was not carrying any identification.
In fact, the only reason Alan was identified was because he had been carrying
an old photograph of himself as a toddler, and his siblings recognized it when
it was circulated throughout the media. It turned out that Alan lived in another
town located twenty five miles away, and much like Peter Bergman, CCTV footage
would tract Allan's movements in the hours prior to his death, but no one
could figure out why he traveled to Parentport or if he died by suicide,
homicide, or accidental drowning. And to make another comparison to Peter's case,
Alan's clothing and a lot of his personal items he had been carrying around were
never recovered. Alan was pretty much considered to be a loner and he may
have planned to travel to a location which he found comforting in order to end
his own life. You get the sense that this was the same situation with
Peter and that for whatever reason, he decided that the beach in Ross's Point
would be his ideal final destination. What's really intriguing about this, though,
is that he asked the cab driver, can you take me to a beach
nearby? Right? Can you take me over to a beach? And he
goes to multiple locations to these beaches, so he's not super familiar with them.
If it was me, I would think I would do exactly what you've
said. I would go to a place that had some kind of nostalgia,
that had some kind of dream moment for me. And even the detectives and
investigators are saying this is not really the place I would have picked. When
you think about all of the beautiful locations around where he could have gone,
even from this point where he was at, why this location it doesn't seem
to be a place that he's familiar with, It doesn't seem to be a
comforting area unless he literally part of the plane is just I'm going to go
on a whim in the moment when I feel right, I'm going to find
a place in the moment that feels safe and peaceful, and it happens to
be this random beach. But it's really interesting that there's really no tie.
There's no way of knowing what it would have meant to him, But we
know he wasn't familiar or he wouldn't have asked the cab driver to take him
to this random place. And then to add on top of it that he
died via cardiac arrest. It makes you wonder was he really going to this
elaborate measure to complete suicide and then his body gives out right at the end
that this cardiac arrest is what takes him and not his plan to end his
life with dignity. It's very very interesting the cause of death and in the
momentary plans that were leading up to being on that beach in that moment.
Yeah, going back to the Alan Jill case, it was established that the
town where he died parentpoor that was a place where he spent his childhood and
had probably some of his happiest, fondest memories. So if it was a
suicide, you could understand why he chose to travel to that location. But
for Peter Bergman, he has no ties to Ireland that anyone could know of.
He did not know about this particular beach beforehand, since he asked the
cab driver to recommend a place, and he also did not seem to have
too much familiarity with Sligo. So it's still a big mystery like why if
he would travel to Ireland, and if he wasn't planning a suicide, would
what would it be his reason for going here to begin with? Maybe it
was just so simple as he had absolutely zero connections in Ireland and he thought
the potential for his identity being discovered if his plan was to complete suicide,
would be slim to none. And perhaps all he really required was the ocean.
Maybe he was a big ocean lover, or he was drawn to water
like so many of us are, and just the idea that he would be
able to end his own life in water could have been enough for him to
go, I've got no connections to Ireland, no one's going to find out
who I am there. I'm going to dispose of any personal identification or things
that could lead back to my true identity, and then I've got the beach
here, and then that's all I require moving forward with the plan to complete
suicide. If that was indeed what he was doing. If it was what
he was doing, it does seem very serendipitous that before he was able to
do that, he would be struck down by a heart attack at that exact
moment. The timing seems just so bizarre and uncanny that it's just such an
interesting element to this case. Yeah, it's just why this story stood out
so much because it is just so bizarre and unique. And if that was
his plan to travel to a place where he had no connection so that no
one would identify him, then it technically did work, because no one has
ever come forward who recognizes him. It's been theorized that Peter may have wanted
to drown himself and hope that his body would be washed away in the Atlantic
Ocean forever. But it sounds like there was just not enough salt water in
his lungs for his cause of death to have been drowning. I really don't
get the impression that there was any foul play involved, and the medical examiner
seemed to believe that Peter died of an acute cardiac arrest, suffering a fatal
heart attack at the exact same time you're planning to unlive yourself. Seems like
one hell of a coincidence. But given how the autopsy indicated that Peter likely
had a prior history of heart attacks, I suppose it's not impossible. On
our last episode, we mentioned that this story was featured in a short documentary
titled The Last Days of Peter Bergman, and if you go on YouTube you
can find handheld footage of a Q and A with the director Kieran Cassidy following
it screening at the Sundance Film Festival in twenty fourteen. Cassidy says that the
coroner told him he suspected Peter may have taken a fatal dose of cyanide to
end his life, but we have not seen this information corroborated by any other
sources. However, even though no medication or drugs were found in Peter's system,
I guess he could have ingested something which caused his death and it was
never detected during the autopsy. And I think you have to step back and
say what did the autopsy actually test for? Because there's so many levels of
testing you can do for substances that could be so in somebody's body, and
that's how you see these cases where someone has poisoned someone and because they weren't
looking for that chemical, because there wasn't a test for that specific drug or
whatever is going on, it is missed. And so if it's this idea
that this is a person who's very clearly sick, they have cancer riddled throughout
their body, they have other issues where you can see his heart has struggled
and he's had multiple heart attacks, then maybe they're not looking as carefully as
possible, saying hey, listen, are we going to run all of the
toxicology reports? Are we simply going to do these basic tests, therefore missing
something like cyanide I mean, I think it is a possible ability that they
simply didn't run the test given what his body was already telling them. The
standard panel's pretty basic, right, It's going to be testing for like alcohol,
marijuana, cocaine, methampheta means all those types of things. So unless
they know what to test for, it's so hard to pinpoint it. Like
look at the case of like Alexander Livinenko, the one who was the Russian
who was poisoned in the UK with their radioactive isotope. I can't remember exactly
which one, and it took them so long to figure out exactly what happened,
how it was administered, and what was causing this rapid deterioration. But
do either of you know that in the case of the ingestion of cyanide,
is cardiac arrest the first thing that it causes A good question. I'm going
to look that up. It says at Wikipedia at least that early symptoms of
cyanid poisoning include headache, dizziness, fast heart rate, shortness of breath,
and vomited and this phase mean and this phase may then be followed by seizures,
slow heart rate, low blood pressure, loss of consciousness, and cardiac
arrest. So that is one of the symptoms. Yeah, it says that
suicide attempts are the primary cause. This is from a medical journal or the
suicide attempts with the primary cause of a cyanide intake, and the majority of
these attempts are fatal. Cyanide induced cardiac arrest or hypotension is one of the
most common causes of death through the ingestion of cyanide. How easy do you
want to check? How easy it is to see the effects of cyanide,
Like would a medical examiner upon doing an autopsy think, oh, there's something
strange here, there's been this cascade of effects, or would it simply pass
for a heart attack unless you specifically did a panel testing for cyanide, Like
with something in the autopsy indicate that they should test for cyanide. Let's see,
Like it says it can be detected in an autopsy, but it depends
on if you're looking for it. And I am reading that detection of cyanide
poisoning can be difficult, so it's possible that And it says that a lot
of the effects of ingestion are similar to the effects of suffocation, so as
possible it could be missed if they're not looking hard enough. And what I
think here is you have to look at if you were the medical examiner and
you found this body washed up on shore and you start to explore his body
and you see a heart that is sick. Right he's supposedly they were able
to tell you had multiple heart attacks. So right there, you're going,
my gosh, this is a sick heart and it looks like it actually stopped
and that was the cause of death based on the fact that there wasn't water
in the lungs and things like that, and then you see that he has
an advanced stage of prostate cancer, which means cancer could have spread to other
parts of the body. I think it would have been one of those where
you very quickly say, given that he was found in the water, there's
no water in his lungs, and his heart clearly stopped, and we have
this cardiac arrest present in his heart and a sick heart. On top of
that, we're able to see that it has multiple histories of issues. Then
I don't know that you would dig much further. There's no sign that drowning
caused it. And then you see that he's very sick, and then his
heart stopped, and I bet he may have if that is the case he
may have bet on that. Why would they test for sinide poisoning? They're
going to see a very sick man who's in advanced age of prostate cancer with
a weak heart, who has a history of heart attack, So why would
they dig any further and why would they assume anything other than he was just
struck down by a heart attack. But then when you have the director Tacidy
Caring Cassidy saying that there was potentially cyanide adjusted, then the serendipitous timing of
this heart attack is called into question and you go, okay, well did
he just attempt to ingest something that wouldn't have been tested for at a regular
drug panel. And if we look at his behavior leading up to what could
have been his suicide or just you know, a medical cardiac event that led
to his death, then we have to think, like the cutting off of
the labels and the disposing of identification or anything linked to himself, then it
is very possible that he would have chosen a substance like sinide. But then
the other question is what would he have been doing in what type of a
line of work would he have been in to have had access to cyanide,
because you can't just go out and buy it. I want to say you
can get it on I mean the dark Way. Yeah, I was going
to say, I feel like if I wanted it, I could get it.
But what year was, like, uh dread Pygriate, Roberts and the
Silk Road. What year did that start? Because before that it would have
been a lot harder. Oh it was twenty eleven and this take took place
in two thousand and nine, so I don't know if it would have been
more difficult to obtain cyanide at this point. Also, think about this,
if you knew I'm dying I wanted to, I would dig I don't want
to be a burden on my family anymore. And he really is going to
end his life. He buys that one way ticket. He says, take
me to this place that's a peaceful beach, and he scopes a mound and
he goes back the next day. If that's the case, can you imagine
the fear of drowning to death. That seems like one of the most brutal,
horrific moments that could ever happen. So if I knew that I wanted
to end my life, it is a much more ideal situation that I ingest
something that's going to cause me to die, and then I would be taken
out to see after I knew that I was either unconscious or deceased. So
I think that could very well have been part of his plan as at Cyanide.
Who knows, but if there was an ingestion of something that would have
caused cardiac arrest to a weak heart, that makes a lot of sense versus
saying I want to drown myself. That seems like a very scary, painful
way to end your life. And I know people who were very determined to
end their own lives can indeed drown themselves in small amounts of water. But
it's that survival mechanism that kicks in. And I don't necessarily think that you
yourself, unless you've attempted it, are going to know if that's going to
kick in and that you're going to pull yourself out or you're just you're going
to pull yourself out of the water like not being able to complete it.
But I think with Cyanide, there's that no turning back type of a thing,
and it's very very quick. I mean, I'm not an expert,
You too did just do some googling, But the amount of time from ingestion
to death is pretty short, no, I think so. Yeah. Like
you remember, we did another case, the William L. Toomey case.
That was another decedits who did jest cyanide in a church in nineteen eighty two
and he was waiting to go into the confession booth. But it sounds like
he gest died it before he got his turn because someone else was in there
and die before it can happen. And in that case, we still don't
know how he obtained his cyanide. But before we talk more about Peter's death,
let's go back to the beginning and track his movements. The first CCTV
footage of Peter showed him at the bus depot and Dry before he made the
one hundred and thirty five kilometer trip to Sligo. Since it seems very unlikely
that Peter was an Irish citizen, he had to travel from somewhere else,
possibly Austria, in order to arrive in Dry. This would have required the
usage of a passport, but he probably got rid of it at some point,
and since we don't know his real name, that makes it very difficult
to track down when he originally entered the country. Now, in spite of
all the theorizing about how Peter chose Sligo for a reason, his actions when
he first arrived there give off the impression that he wasn't all that familiar with
the city. The bus station was only about a fifteen minute walk from the
Sligo City Hotel, so there was really no need for him to take a
taxi. It seems like he didn't have much idea where to go. He
never made a reservation anywhere and only wound up staying at the Sligo City Hotel
because the first hotel he tried was full, and much like with the Jennifer
fairgate case, it's very frustrating that the desk clerk did not ask Peter for
identification when he checked in, even though it was supposedly standard policy in Ireland
for all hotels to require ID from their guests. If Peter had been asked
to produce ID, who knows how you would have reacted and if things might
have turned out differently. Instead, he was allowed to provide a fake name
and address, and there has been endless speculation about their potential significance. What's
interesting is I do think that Peter was looking for a place that probably wouldn't
have asked for identification. Like we mentioned in episode one, you know,
the hospitality industry and law enforcement have protocols in place to help with things like
human trafficking, fraud, all of these different things, drug networking, and
so because now you are required to produce an ID, you are produced,
you have to produce a credit card that matches the ID on file, and
that's how you have to book your room. I think Peter we're out in
the car and specifically said I want a cheap hotel and I don't really care
where it is, and he goes to a place, assuming that the cheaper
the hotel, the less likely they would stick to those protocol It's two thousand
and nine. I'm assuming in Ireland they had the same rules, and he
found a place that wanted the money, they didn't care what was happening in
their rooms. And that's one of the issues that we run into. I
don't think it matters what country you're in if there's a rule in place,
and yet I'm the kind of establishment that just cares about the bottom line of
my money. I don't care what age the people running my room are.
I don't care who they are, and I don't care what they came for.
I just want their money. Then why would they care who Peter actually
was, because you even mentioned our last episode that, for all you know,
Peter could have provided a fake story just saying, oh, I forgot
my identification, I'll show it to you at a later time. And they
just went for it. They said, well, we want your money,
and that's why they decided to let him check in. And they probably never
guessed that this would become the centerpiece of a huge mystery. Yeah, and
I guarantee you had he been staying at a place like you know, Jules
said to like if it was the Hilton, or if it was a bigger,
a higher end hotel chain that does care about the protocol being followed.
I remember just losing my room key and needing to get back in, and
I was like, hey, here I am on the internet, Like here's
my face, here's my school ID, here's these things. I just don't
have my driver's license and credit card with me. They're in the room.
They had to have security escort me to my room, produce the documents before
I could be, you know, back down at the front desk and get
a copy of the key. But it was a very serious thing. They
said, no, no, I don't care what else you produce with your
name on it. I don't care what pictures you show us. It has
to be your government issued idea and it has to be the credit card that
matches it. And I went, goodness, okay, So I mean it
is a it's serious for them. That's something that you know a lot of
higher end hotel chains. I don't think you're going to bend. And Peter
won, if he was ending his life, doesn't want to pay a lot
of money. But I think he knew that he could probably get away with
saying this is my name, I'm Peter, and I can write down a
fake address and it doesn't really matter. And Robin, one question for you.
I think you'd mentioned it in episode one and I forgot to ask,
and you'd said that they never asked him to produce ID. Do we know
for a fact that they never asked him to produce ID or did the person
ask him to produce ID? And he said that he wasn't able to at
that moment, and they just let it slide. It's never been clarified.
I don't think that they've ever asked the desk clerk to confirm it, so
that is kind of a mystery in this case. I know that's one of
the big controversies in the Jennifer fairgate case, because apparently the desk clerk at
the hotel there like has given conflicting stories about why they did not ask Jennifer
for her ID and why she was allowed to check in, So who knows.
Maybe the clerk was no longer working there by the time this became a
mystery, and they just were never able to track them down and get their
side of the story. I could almost understand in the Jennifer fairgate case because
it's in nineteen ninety five, but with Peter Bergmann, it's two thousand and
nine. It just seems so inconceivable that somebody wouldn't ask for identification. Now
there's been differing accounts from different sources about whether the address he provided from Vienna
led to a vacant lot or just never existed in the first place. I
know that if you type the supposed street name in Stetterson into Google, the
only matches you're going to get are sources related to this case, so I
wonder if it might have been a misspelling or of some sort, and if
Peter just made the name up. The thing with the postal code he provided
four four seven two is that even though Vienna's four digit postal codes only begin
with one, there is another section of Upper Austria which it does use that
particular number. But it doesn't sound like investigators ever found any significance to it.
And of course you have to wonder if there's a reason why he shows
the name Peter Bergmann. Bergmann is spelled with two ends, not one,
and if you type that name into Google, you'll find a Wikipedia page for
a prominent German American physicist named Peter Bergman, who work with Albert Einstein and
publish a couple of textbooks on such topics as general relativity before his death in
two thousand and two. But it's possible this connection is nothing more than a
coincidence and the name provides no clues about the man's true identity. It's interesting
that the people who have talked to Peter and who have actually interacted with him
can identify this Austrian accent. But then when he makes up this address,
there seem to be bits and pieces that'll match, but things like the postal
code doesn't match a place in Vienna. He does have a street that could
be real, but it actually traces back to more of an abandoned lot instead
of an actual home where he would live. So is Edmund to confuse people?
Is he taking bits and pieces of reality and trying to put some pieces
down or is this all just simply made up, like his name. Well,
to make another comparison to Jennifer Fairgate, when she checked into her hotel,
she provided the name of a village in Norway, and they did check
this out, but cannot find anyone who recognized or knew who she was.
So it seemed apparent that she might have just just chosen this place at random
and it had no real connection to her. So, for all you know,
maybe Peter did that. Maybe he chose a location that just didn't even
exist because it just popped into his head and said, well, if anyone
tries to track me down, they'll never find me because I'm not giving them
any information. So, unlike the aforementioned Jennifer Fairgate and Lyle Stevick cases,
Peter did not die until after he checked out of the hotel, so you
have to wonder about his reasons for staying in Sliego for three nights. In
the Last Days of Peter Bergmann documentary, the hotel manager shared a story about
an incident in which she visited Peter's room and knocked on the door but received
no anas, sir. When she decided to unlock the door and go inside,
she saw Peter standing in the doorway with a startled look on his face,
and he almost appeared like he had been caught in the middle of doing
something. But then he apparently gave off a look which almost seemed to indicate
he was relieved that it was only a member of the hotel staff who was
visiting him. So I don't know if this can be seen as a sign
that Peter traveled to Sligo to hide from someone. Of course, you can
understand why Peter might have valued his privacy, as the CCTV footage captured him
exiting the hotel no less than thirteen times while carrying a purple plastic bag,
and then returning out a later time with nothing in his hands. This is
why investigators believe that Peter spent his entire three night hotel stay, gradually disposing
of most of his personal possessions and taking steps to ensure that no one would
ever be able to figure out his true identity. We saw another example of
this when Peter was shown checking out of the hotel with three bags in his
hand, but he was only carrying two of these bags when CCTV footage captured
him arriving at the bus station less than thirty minutes later, so I'm guessing
he had some additional items in that bag he wanted to get rid of.
The authorities were unable to recover any of the possessions that Peter supposedly disposed of,
but the problem is that they really didn't have any idea what they were
looking for, and I'm not sure if these items would have had any distinctive
characteristics to prove they belonged to him. Since Peter was never shown getting rid
of any personal items on CCTV, it's been theorized that he knew the camera's
blind spots and went out of his way to avoid them. This is why
we've seen online sleuth speculate that Peter might have been in the police or the
military, or had experience as a spy because he had the necessary skills and
training to avoid security cameras. However, this seems to contradict the assertion that
Peter did not have much familiarity with Sligo, as they seemed to know so
little about the downtown area that he had to ask the taxi driver to find
him at Tell when he first drived. So how would he have known where
all the CCTV cameras were. I have a feeling that Peter not being captured
on camera disposing of any possessions was do more to luck than anything. Yeah,
I have to lean more towards it that a luck thing. He seemed
very unsure of a lot of things in this area, like, Hey,
is there a cheap hotel I can go to? Hey? Is there a
nice beach I can go? To? Take me to any of those?
Hey, I got on the wrong bus a few times. I mean,
we see him make decisions and actions that show that he's not familiar with his
surroundings. It doesn't seem like he's actually at this stage where he's planned out
so carefully that he can avoid these cameras. Yes, he's doing some careful
planning. If he's disposing of items. But is it also the fact that
I don't know about you guys, but anytime I've been with law enforcement in
like pulled security camera or you were looking for camera coverage of a certain business
or businesses, it's like it's very purposely placed on one segment of the building,
the doorway right or the front desk or things like that. Possibly not
in the areas where the receptacles are, where the trash cans are located.
Maybe they're simply not priority areas in these establishments where he's visiting, and they're
focusing on places like where the cash register is located, where the front door
is located, where other potential large gathering areas might be, but that they're
not in these smaller locations or these more corner obscure locations where someone might go
to dispose of something. And so I think it's more luck or placement of
the cameras versus saying he was able to elude them. We caught him on
CCTV. You just didn't see him disposing of the items. But they also
don't place trash cans in the middle of the room. They don't place the
trash can right in front of the front desk at the hotel, So I
think it could just be the placement of these items. I don't think he
was familiar with where he was, therefore, I don't think he was at
the point of being able to elude ude the recordings. Yeah, that's a
good point. If he was going to, say a dumpster in a back
alley to dispose of items, that's not a place where you're going to find
a security camera. So I think he probably just lucked out and just went
to locations that just didn't happen to have any cameras. Now, one thing
we do know about Peter's stay and Sligo is that he stopped by the post
office and purchased airmail stickers and ten eighty two cent stamps. Well, it's
never been officially confirmed that he mailed any letters, the fact that these stamps
and stickers were not found on him when he died would imply that he did
well. It's easy to believe that Peter was some loner who did not have
any family or friends, why would he have felt the need to mail out
any letters. But if he did have family and friends, then these actions
do make sense, especially if he knew he was going to die sometime in
the near future. However, not one person has ever come forward to say
that they received any letters from Peter, which would be all the more surprising
if he mailed them to ten separate people. At that time, the postage
to mail a letter to someone in Ireland was fifty five cents, and it
was eighty two cents to mail something outside the country. So the fact that
he purchased eighty two cent stamps obviously suggests that any letters he had sent had
an international destination, right. And also you have this idea that maybe he
was sending information for work, maybe he had to mail in time cards,
or maybe he had to mail in receipts, or maybe he was mailing in
I don't know, bills for his medical expenses, so his partner wasn't burdened
with him. I mean, we really have no idea where these were going.
I really would have assumed that they would have found them on his person,
except for the fact that it seemed like he did have a plan for
either getting rid of his things preparing for the end of his life. There
was a meticulous decision made when you see the actions of him trying to check
things off the list, right like minimizing on his person getting these postage stamps,
and then we assume subsequently mailing letters. So either it was sent to
someone like you said earlier, where he's trying to say, I'm not here
anymore. I ended my life. Please don't worry about me. I wanted
to die with dignity. I mean, it is possible people receive letters and
weren't connected to the Peter Bergmann case, but that they know that their loved
one was dying of cancer. Didn't want them to have to see him at
the end of his life where he wasn't able to have all of his faculties
about him, and he wrote the truth, I'm taking my life with dignity.
Please let me be I love you with all my heart. This is
the way I want to do it. Please honor and respect that. And
they were at peace with that, and therefore when they don't link themselves to
Peter countries away, then it's kind of the end of that story. So
I don't know. I think the fact that you didn't find the postage stamps
likely he did send them to some one, or he was doing something more
practical where you wouldn't have really had anyone paying attention, like paying a bill
or sending something to his workplace. I just don't think that we can operate
under the presupposition that everybody in his life, if he did have these close
relationships or relationships at all, that they were aware of his councer diagnosis,
because if he wanted to end his own life, he may have been dealing
with this on his own without the supportive family, because they might not have
known that they had to support him if he didn't disclose his diagnosis, which
some people don't, especially if they find out about the disease in the end
stages, and then he may say, well, I don't want to burden
people with this and watching my rapid dissent, so I'm going to take it
upon myself. But I don't want to make people sad. And so if
that is the case, we can't assume that he disclosed the truth, which
would be I'm ending my own life, I'm going to be at piece.
Well, then I would think that one of those people would have heard about
the Peter Bergman case because their antennas would have been up and somebody would have
contacted the authorities. I just think that if he did send letters, there
would have been an element of misdirection involved. One of the big complicating factors
with identifying Peter Bergmann is that, even though his story got extensive coverage in
Ireland, it's very unlikely that he was an Irish citizen, and I'm not
sure how well known his case is and other countries. If Peter hailed from
Austria or Germany and his friends and family received some letters there, they may
have had no idea that he became an unidentified John Doe in Ireland. According
to a twenty fifteen article in the French newspaper Le Mont, the Austrian authorities
claim they were never contacted by the Guardee about this case, so I don't
know how much effort has been spent attempting to match Peter with missing persons in
Austria. There is also no official interpoal notice for Peter Bergmann because their only
two categories are missing person and wanted person, and as far as anyone can
tell, no one has ever reported this guy missing. It would be the
responseb of his home country to do so, but we don't even know which
country's from. On the other side of the coin. It's also possible that
the people who received Peter's letters are well aware of his story, but he
gave specific instructions for them not to come forward and claim his body, and
they've decided to respect his wishes. But of course we still can't be one
hundred percent certain that Peter mailed any letters in the first place. That's right,
I mean, we have no idea that he You didn't take those postage
stamps in that purple bag and discard of them somewhere. You could just as
easily throw the postage stamps away as you could mail them. It. Just
because I wasn't found with his belongings doesn't mean that he actually used them.
The only other significant movement we know about from Peter Stan's lago was when he
asked a taxi driver to take him to a quiet beach and they took a
brief trip to Ross's Point. It doesn't sound like Peter was aware of this
location beforehand, but it made a strong enough impression for him to travel back
there when he decided to check out of the hotel. We know that Peter
subsequently took the bus to return to the beach the following day, and while
we don't know the exact time he died, Several eyewitnesses placed him on the
beach at various times between four and eleven fifty pm. Most of them described
Peter as introspectively pacing and walking through the water in his bare feet. But
why would he remain at that same location for eight straight hours if he was
planning suicide by drowning himself in the ocean. Perhaps he wanted to wait until
the middle of the night and then there was less chance of someone coming along
and rescuing him. But for a guy who liked to keep to himself and
was going out of his way to erase all traces of his identity, he
still managed to leave an impression on all the people who saw him. Most
of the witnesses who spotted Peter on the beach would later say they distinctly remember
him because he seemed at a place there and something about him really stood out.
While it's not uncommon for people to end their life by jumping into a
body of water, walking into the ocean to intentionally drown yourself is a lot
more complicated way to die. Even though it's been theorized that Peter hoped to
be swept out into the Atlantic Ocean and lost forever, part of me wonders
if he actually wanted his death to be as mysterious as possible so that he
would be remembered. In fact, I'm genuinely curious to know if Peter might
have been familiar with the Somerton Man case, because both men went to the
trouble of removing all the labels from their clothing, and this could also be
the reason that Peter intentionally chose a beach as his final destination. So are
the similarities between these two mysteries just a coincidence or did Peter orchestrate the whole
thing intentionally. Well, if Peter did want to be forgotten about after he
died, then it's truly ironic that his actions have led to him becoming the
subject of endless discussion in the media and on the internet. Yeah, exactly,
I mean this idea. I think it's a coincidence between the cases in
my personal opinion. But one of the things that really caught my eye when
I was listening to this is that he went to the beach so early in
the afternoon, right, it was around what two thirty or three o'clock When
he gets there at four o'clock, four o'clock and then we know for a
fact that there's people who are saying they see him well into ten eleven,
eleven thirty at night. You would think if you were going to the beach
to end your life, you would go at dusk at the you know,
as the evening's rolling in, or even later, so that there aren't other
people on the beach. But you also feel this sense that if he did
take a substance to render himself unconscious or to cause cardiac arrests before being swept
out, that's all of this is a huge decision, right, And so
I could see going and having thirty minutes an hour where you're pacing back and
forth and saying like, Okay, this is it, this is it,
this is it. That's a to me, a horrifying thought that I'm about
to dictate exactly when my life ends. So I could see the delay in
actually executing that plan. But the hours upon hours upon hours that he's there
is odd. It opened him up to being talked to by multiple people by
being identified, you know, later down the road, And in my mind,
it's like, is that part of that kind of delirium psychosis that he
could have been experiencing where he says, I'm going to go down there,
I'm going to wait till it's dark, But he's not really factoring in how
long this takes. I don't know. It's sad if he's if he's waiting
to end his life, that seems like a very sad, drawn out to
me scary circumstance that you would be there for eight hours waiting to end your
life, contemplating, though, you know, pacing back and forth thinking about
your life. Because once, if we are to believe he did take Seinid,
or even if he was just going to walk out into the ocean,
the finality of it, it could take a lot of nerve. Even if
you're sure exactly what actions you want to take and your hell bent on taking
the actions, I think getting the courage to actually take that action that will
end your own life and not knowing what awaits you on the other side is
a truly scary endeavor for anybody who's going to be in a position such as
that. So eight hours does sound extreme, but I think given the gravity
of a situation, if we're to believe that was his objective, then I
can completely understand. In addition to the unanswered questions, about how exactly Peter
died. There's also some mystery about the items he did and did not leave
behind. Various witnesses from the beach saw him with the small black bag slung
over his shoulder and the purple plastic bag in his hands, but neither of
these bags were recovered. It's one thing for him to dispose of items like
this in the middle of town, but there would have been a limited amount
of places to get rid of them on the beach unless he carried the bags
into the water and the tide took them out to see. His glasses also
disappear, though I suppose he could have lost those in the ocean as well.
And even though he was found wearing a navy T shirt, he had
been seen wearing a long sleeved pale blue shirt when he left the hotel,
and it was not on the beach either. It's also odd that Peter was
wearing underwear over top a speedo if his plan was to drown himself all along.
I wonder why he even removed any of his clothing to begin with,
because wearing all those heavy articles into the water would have made it easier for
him to sink the way the clothing was neatly folded, almost gives off the
impression that Peter was legitimately planning to go for a swim before he unexpectedly succumbed
to a fatal heart attack. That's also very possible that this was not a
place to go in his life. That maybe he had a sensory issue where
he's cutting the labels out of his clothing right where he doesn't want the tags
on his clothes, or maybe he you know, it was part of his
mental health that you know, where he's going. I don't want the name
brands on here. I don't want the label on my clothes. My daughter
can't have labels touching her body. So who knows if Peter had something like
that as well, But it is possible that he was going just for a
swim. I don't know as a man, why you would put undies over
your speedo. I mean, it feels like just two layers of an undergarment,
So that seems very odd to me. If you were going with the
intent to swim, why not just wear the speedo under your clothes. Why
put the pair of underwear on top of it. You also have a bag
with you, why not put the extra pair of underwear in your bag for
when you're done swimming, you can just change from the speedo to the underwear.
That seems a little bit odd to me. Yeah, as a man,
I can tell you that's not normal. So I can't think of anyone
who's going a sweeto with underwear or obnet while going for a swim. But
now let's explore the personal items which were left inside the pockets of Peter's clothing.
Many of them, such as the envelope containing money, were not unusual,
but the two items which seemed a bit odd were the aspirin and the
wrap bar of hotel soap. Under normal circumstances, the aspirin wouldn't be weird
at all, but the toxicology report showed no traces of any medication in his
system, including aspirin, even though Peter's cancer likely would have been causing him
great pain. I mean, if he were one of those people who didn't
believe in drugs or painkillers, that would be one thing, But then why
would he be carrying around aspron to begin with? These particular aspirin tablets were
distributed in Germany by the country's pharmaceutical company, Bayer. So I don't know
if this could be seen as a clue that Peter originally hailed from there.
The soap in Peter's pocket wouldn't be unusual if he had taken it from the
Slago City hotel, but the rapper had the words Mild Soap Hotel Care printed
on them, and this particular brand is not made or stalked by any hotels
in Ireland. So obviously Peter must have stayed at a hotel in another country
and carried the soap into Ireland with him. But after Gwen is so much
trouble to dispose of all of his personal items, why did he still have
this soap on him at the time of his death. And it's the soap
on him, it's not in his possession like in one of his bags.
Like we teased earlier. A lot of us take the free soap from the
hotel right just in case, but I never have it on my person.
I don't have it in me in my pocket when I'm discovered, right when
I've been out at the beach, I don't have it sitting in my pocket.
It was just a very odd location to have a bar of hotel soap
on you. Overall, the one thing about this case I'm fairly certain of
is that Peter was not the victim of foul play, so it's not like
we're looking for some unknown killer here. I do believe his death was either
suicide or natural causes. But even if he was a loner, you still
have to think there must be someone out there who misses this guy and is
wondering what happened to him. In a lot of the more recent cases in
which John or Jane does have been identified, it turned out they were living
a transient lifestyle and had no fixed address at the time of their death,
which is why they were never officially reported missing and it took so long to
figure out who they were. But I do not get the impression that that
Peter Bergman was a transient So if he resided in another country, did he
not have a house or an apartment under his name somewhere which suddenly went unoccupied
and left people asking questions? He was in the advanced stages of prostate cancer
and had bone tumors, so were there no medical professionals who were treating him
at that time? And why ed why he just stopped showing up for appointments
hell, Peter was missing one of his kidneys, so unless he sold it
on the black market, there have to be records somewhere of an operation where
that kidney was removed. There had to have been, and there had to
be. The teeth records are the ones that really bother me where you say
there were specific things like bridges made for his mouth, there were rude canals
performed in his mouth, Like, there had to be dental records that said,
this is so obviously this person and having those very clear health issues,
knowing he had hard issues, know any had the prostate cancer, it seems
like his body gave keys to who his identity was. Yeah, that's the
thing, Like they could use his teeth and match them to dental records if
they could figure out where he was from. But that's the issue is where
do you start, Which country do you go to, which city you go
to to start checking dental records? And I just have a feeling if they
can narrow it down a bit that even if they do not use DNA,
those distinct dental records could be used to identify them. Again, the key
to uncovering Peter's true identity is figuring out if he mailed any letters from Sligo,
and since he purchased ten stamps, there could have been as many as
ten recipients who heard from him. It's unlikely he would have referred to himself
as Peter Bergman and these letters, so you can understand why these recipients have
never put two and two together. But you also have to wonder if there's
anyone out there who recalls receiving a letter postmark from Slago, Ireland in June
two thousand and nine and never heard from the writer again. Like we mentioned
earlier, there are CCTV images of Peter Bergmann plastered all over the Internet,
and his Wikipedia pages even has an actual post mortem photograph of him. So
unless Peter's friends and family have their own reasons for not coming forward, there
may be a day where someone comes across one of these images of Peter and
recognizes him. During our episodes, we've made mention of this. Somerton Man
another case in which an unidentified John Doe died under such strange circumstances that many
people speculated that he was a spy involved in espionage, but now he's likely
been identified as Charles Carl Webb. We know that these spy theories were nothing
more than smoke and mirrors, and the decedent was an ordinary guy who lived
an unhappy life and suffered from serious mental health issues. So the same logic
might apply to Peter Bergman, as he was also probably not a spy with
a larger than life backstory, but was simply an ordinary man who traveled Slago
for his own personal reasons. That is exactly what I think happened. I
think if Peter had been some kind of larger than life entity and there had
been this huge romantic story as to how he got there, there would have
been more attention. There would have been more links to him to external places
other than just the location where he was discovered. So I for me,
the prayer would be that someone would be able to see Peter and know,
for their own sake, this is what happened. He is at rest,
They have his body, we can actually bury him with a headstone, we
can cremate him and have him back in our care, those kinds of reasons.
It's my prayer that they recognize Peter. But I don't think there is
some huge international spire espionage happening with Peter. I just don't think it's the
case here. I mentioned in our last episode that the Guardie have confirmed that
they do not use websites like ancestry dot com, as I think the rules
for using genetic genealogy and criminal investigations might be a lot different in Europe than
North America. So even though the authorities do have Peter Bergmann's DNA, I
do not believe identifying him will be as simple as submitting his DNA into a
genealogical database. But of course, if they manage to find anyone who seems
like a promising candidate to be a biological relative of Peter's, they can still
use his DNA to make a genetic comparison and positively identify him. While I've
already addressed the potential ethical issues of identifying Peter if it goes against his final
wishes, I still hate the idea of this man having loved ones out there
who are suffering because they don't know what happened to him. And that's why
I believe every investigative possibility should be explored. So if you happen to have
any information about the identity of the man known only as Peter Bergmann, please
contact the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley, any final thoughts on this case?
This one for me, it's more about the family that there is a family
summer saying I wonder what happened to my loved one. He was sick,
And the reality is that when you have a person who makes a decision to
end their life, that is a very personal, very big decision that that
individual is struggling with. Yet they still have a family who is waiting to
understand what happened where they are and just having their body to say that this
is a closed part of our life that he passed away. He was sick.
We want to honor him and have a place where we can go and
honor him as a final resting place. There's a family that doesn't have that.
And there's still the potential that Peter did not complete suicide, that he
did go, let's say, to get away and left. He was having
a mental health crisis and just needed to get away and clear as mind,
knowing that he was not going to live much longer. This might be his
last chance to travel. Maybe he was going to go home and had that
cardiac arrest on the beach. Still again, there's a family wondering what happened
to our loved one if he had not left detailed plans of where he was
going, which he likely did not. When he's using false names and things
like that, then someone's wondering, where is my brother, where is my
uncle, where's my cousin, where's my coworker, where's my husband? So
it's just sad. And my prayer is that the authorities who say the DNA
and genetic genealogy would do nothing to help this case, that they step back
and they rethink that there's too much progression in terms of genetic genealogy. I
believe it is being practiced very heavily, and databases are being used heavily.
In Europe. This would be the prime case to say who is this John
Doe and give that family some answers. I agree. I think genetic genealogy
absolutely should be used in this case, but like we mentioned throughout, I
am completely unaware of what the laws are in Europe with regards to using it,
and Robin had said that it's only used in Canada and the US.
So I really hope moving forward, as you know, the technology continues to
improve, and there's so many different Jane and John doe cases that are solved
through genetic genealogy that countries in Europe get on board as well. But if
they are unable to do so, even something so simple as radiocarbon dating could
allow them to figure out potentially where Peter Bergman grew up, where he's lived,
you know, in the last few years of his life, and it
might narrow down this zone. And as far as what his objective was,
I mean, I personally think that there's a strong likelihood or probability that his
intention was to complete suicide. And since Kuran Cassidy, the director of that
fourteen minute short that showed at Sundance and I think won in a word at
Melbourne International Film Festival, Robin is that right, Yeah, that's correct.
Yeah, that Cassidy had said that there was a potential that cyanide was used,
and I think that for me, that makes a lot more sense than
just a random heart attack just before one could complete suicide. But I think
that I can't discount any possibility in this case. And as Ashley just mentioned,
I really really hope that moving forward they can figure out the identity because
somewhere out there there's friends and family who are missing this man, and who
wonder what happened to him, And it's just so heartbreaking that he died while
staring down this insidious disease all alone on this beach. Just it really breaks
my heart. Yeah, Like we've talked about how in recent years, identifying
John or Jane Does and giving them their names back has pretty much become a
weekly and sometimes a daily thing because there are literally hundreds of decedents who have
gotten their identity back thanks to genetic genealogy. And I remember when they started
using it in twenty eighteen. One of the first John Does who was identified
was Lyle Stevick, which was a very similar case, like we said to
Peter Bergman, where he checked into a hotel under a false name and then
took his own life, and they couldn't figure out who he was until they
submitted his DNA into a genealogical database. And it seems inevitable that the vast
majority of these cases will be solved someday in North America. But there is
kind of a gray area here where genetic genealogy does not seem to be implemented
much in Europe or in many other foreign countries or continents, and The two
prime examples of this are the Jennifer Fairgate case and the Peter Bergmann case,
about two mysterious folks who checked into a hotel under a false name and then
died under very strange circumstances. And I think if these cases had taken place
in North America, they would already be solved now because they would just enter
their DNA into a deep database and try to find some relatives. But here
things are a lot more complicated. I mean not only taking into account what
potential laws there might be in Ireland, but also potential laws in other countries,
because it seemed like Peter was from Austria or perhaps even Germany, and
that just makes the whole situation all the more complicated. I do think that
he probably traveled to Ireland with the intention of ending his own life because he
probably did not want to suffer from the cancer he was facing anymore, and
he was in so much pain that he wanted to end things before he died
of natural causes. And maybe he just picked out Sligo randomly on the Internet.
He said, this seems to be a nice place where I can die
peacefully, and then just decided to get rid of all clues to his identity
before he went out into that beach. I mean, we may never know
what was going on in his mind. Perhaps he was lucid and he chose
that place for a reason. But like we said earlier, perhaps his cancer
was just causing a lot of mental health issues or delusions and he was just
not thinking rationally. Maybe he thought people were after him. Maybe he was
just not in his sound mind. But it sounds like even if he was
planning suicide, a severe coincidence could happen and he just died of cardiac arrests
before that took place. But all that being said, I do think that
this is one of the cases we covered that has one of the best chances
of being solved sometime down the line, because even if they do not use
genic genealogy, they still have Peter's photograph and images of everywhere all over the
internet, So there is always a chance that the right person might see those
images and recognize them and come forward, and that's how they'll be able to
positively identify him. And in spite of the fact that he may have wanted
to die under these circumstances, he may not have wanted to be identified.
I still think we should figure out who he is because he probably does have
a family or friends out there who are wondering about what happened to him,
and they definitely deserve to get some answers. Robin, do you want to
tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon? Yes, The
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