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Speaker 1: of things we simply don't know the answer too. Well.
Speaker 1: Here there, welcome to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I'm Joe,
Speaker 1: as always, joined by Devin and Steve. All right, and uh,
Speaker 1: this week we're going to talk about guess what, another
Speaker 1: unsolved mystery. Yeah we're out of those. Yeah, no, we're
Speaker 1: not quite out. We will be soon. Sorry about that, folks.
Speaker 1: But it's Cooking with Joe right exactly, show how to
Speaker 1: cook Raman the fifth Way. Actually, have you heard how
Speaker 1: bad Roman supposed toly is for you? Now? Yeah? Really? Okay,
Speaker 1: yeah really bad? Don't cook with it. Turns out like
Speaker 1: fish oil is not actually all that good for you either.
Speaker 1: We're already off topic and we're not a minute into
Speaker 1: the show, haven't even Yeah, I know, let's let's get
Speaker 1: let's going on with this. So this week we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about an interesting little mystery out of Ireland, which
Speaker 1: is a stranger of mysterious island. Uh, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about the case of Peter Bergman, who you guys people
Speaker 1: people may or may not have heard of. Before we
Speaker 1: go any further, I would like to give a shout
Speaker 1: out to our listener John who suggested this topic. Thanks John,
Speaker 1: and so let's get started. So who was Peter Bergman?
Speaker 1: Nobody knows. Uh, it's almost certainly was not this guy's
Speaker 1: real name. There might be somebody out there who does know,
Speaker 1: but they're apparently not talking. So our story began in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, Uh, specifically in June twelfth, two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: when Peter Bergman showed up in the town of Sligo, Ireland,
Speaker 1: and then four days later he was found add on
Speaker 1: a beach north of the town. You cut this one
Speaker 1: close under the five year wire, didn't you there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's only six years old. Six years in a couple
Speaker 1: of months. Yeah, al right. He was found dead on
Speaker 1: the beach. Uh. And autopsy was done, of course, and
Speaker 1: it turned up no signs of violence or foul play.
Speaker 1: It also showed that he had advanced prostate cancer, he
Speaker 1: had bone tumors, and it appeared that he had had
Speaker 1: a few previous heart attacks, so not in the greatest
Speaker 1: of shape. There was no evidence of pain killers in
Speaker 1: his system, although he did he had some aspir in
Speaker 1: his possession when he died, but he had he wasn't
Speaker 1: taking it apparently, which is like we should mention really
Speaker 1: really odd first time, he would have likely have been
Speaker 1: in an immense amount of pain, or at least some pain, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll disagree with that. Well, I I just everybody says, well,
Speaker 1: he had to be in such pain. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I don't know that. I mean, I know it was
Speaker 1: it was in his bones and everything else. But I've
Speaker 1: known people who have had massive amounts of cancer all
Speaker 1: through their body. They felt little off, that was it
Speaker 1: until they happened ago the doctrine figure out what was
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, so relatively Okay, So I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know that he necessarily would have been in really
Speaker 1: any substantial amount of pain. It might not have been.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say. I mean, I've seen video of him,
Speaker 1: and he didn't didn't appear to be over him pain
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Oh, there were two other strange
Speaker 1: things that were found in the autopsy. He had had
Speaker 1: one kidney removed and also even though he was found
Speaker 1: apparently washed up on a beach. He didn't die by drowning.
Speaker 1: That's a mystery. That's weird. How did he die? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Who was Peter Bergmann? What was he up to in
Speaker 1: Sligo in the days between he arrived on Friday and
Speaker 1: he died on the sixteenth of June. What brought him
Speaker 1: to the town, what brought him to the beach at
Speaker 1: Ross's Point which is where he died? And how and
Speaker 1: why did he die if he didn't drown? Really? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's intrigue. Yeah that sounds this is like the Tom
Speaker 1: and Trude case. Yeah, kind of. It's reminiscent of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah it is. Yeah, let's let's get to the last
Speaker 1: mystery first, which is how did he die if he
Speaker 1: didn't drown? Well, actually, it turns out he did drown,
Speaker 1: even yeah, even though yeah the Wikipedia, Wikipedia and web Sluice,
Speaker 1: etcetera say that he didn't drown, he actually did. How
Speaker 1: do you know that? I got this from the website
Speaker 1: of the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation in Germany, which
Speaker 1: is kind of their equivalent of the FBI. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: have what's called their unknown Dead section unidentified dead people,
Speaker 1: and he's got his own page on there with his
Speaker 1: description and his photograph and everything, and it lists the
Speaker 1: cause of death that's drowning. Yeah. So it was interesting
Speaker 1: to me because I did a fair number of actually
Speaker 1: spent this entire afternoon because it was two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: so there should be records of the you know, there
Speaker 1: would have been newspaper articles. In my mind, right, people
Speaker 1: would have been like, Wow, this guy washed up on
Speaker 1: shore dead, like that's weird, and there was a weirdness
Speaker 1: around the case anyway. And I couldn't find anything I
Speaker 1: found said he died of drowning. I found, I didn't
Speaker 1: find any I found one newspaper article was the only
Speaker 1: one I could find that was pre the release of
Speaker 1: the movie we're about to talk about. Um. It was
Speaker 1: from April, and it didn't say anything about the cause
Speaker 1: of death at all. It didn't address it. It actually
Speaker 1: didn't address any of the health anything's so I thought
Speaker 1: that was a little odd. But you know, you couldn't
Speaker 1: find anything about the autopsy. You couldn't find anything about,
Speaker 1: you know, anything from that actual time, even from that year,
Speaker 1: which I thought was weird. He didn't make the papers,
Speaker 1: he didn't make the news. It made it made the news,
Speaker 1: but it's one of those things very local, popped up
Speaker 1: and then died out again pretty quickly. Well, I like
Speaker 1: searched through the archives of like the local newspapers, the
Speaker 1: chronicle there, and it didn't have anything very odd. And
Speaker 1: it's possible that, you know, and as I said, it
Speaker 1: was just this afternoon, so it's possible. Had I, you know,
Speaker 1: given myself more time to do more digging, you would
Speaker 1: have cropped up. But I did a lot of googling
Speaker 1: and it didn't. There's not a huge amount out there
Speaker 1: about this one. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say, I know,
Speaker 1: I found a lot of repetition in what was available. Yeah,
Speaker 1: almost everything I found was more about the movie than
Speaker 1: it was about the case. And what it was about
Speaker 1: the case tended to be not not word for word
Speaker 1: copy paste like we find a lot, but very very
Speaker 1: lax rewritings. Yeah I noticed that. Yeah. Yeah, So but anyway,
Speaker 1: i'd luckily I did find that German website and so
Speaker 1: that clears that up. Yeah, which is I think what happened.
Speaker 1: I think I know how that got started because we
Speaker 1: mentioned the film in two thousand and thirteen, again named
Speaker 1: Karen Cassidy made a short film called The Last Days
Speaker 1: of Peter Bergman. And in this film, it's it's he
Speaker 1: actually splices together interviews with a lot of close circuit
Speaker 1: TV footage from the circuit TV all over that town.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, they've got it all wired up, but
Speaker 1: they ended you. Clive Killgallan, who was the medical examiner
Speaker 1: who performed the autopsy on Bergmann, and he stated in
Speaker 1: the interview, said that initially there were no outward signs
Speaker 1: of saltwater drowning. Uh. And my takeaway from that as
Speaker 1: that he meant at first glance, he didn't look drowned.
Speaker 1: That is all that he meant by it. That's as
Speaker 1: far as he went. And he didn't say there was
Speaker 1: no evidence of drowning. After the autopsy, he also didn't
Speaker 1: say drowned. He didn't say it either. Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know now, I mean I watched it. I watched it
Speaker 1: again this afternoon, and I'm just thinking, was his bit
Speaker 1: in the movie It ends almost immediately after that, doesn't
Speaker 1: it the only interview they had with him? Right? But
Speaker 1: I'm just saying he's on there for I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe a minute, But as soon as he says that bit,
Speaker 1: it cuts to something else, and I wonder if that
Speaker 1: intentionally got left out. I don't know. I don't want
Speaker 1: to point fingers. I'm just wondering. I don't think the
Speaker 1: film intended to mislead because like, for example, you here
Speaker 1: the detective who investigated the case saying after that that
Speaker 1: that he think he thinks that perhaps Bergman intended to
Speaker 1: be carried out to see and not washed back up
Speaker 1: on sure. So it seems to me that they just
Speaker 1: didn't even talk about the cause of death because it
Speaker 1: was just larteringly obvious, and so they didn't feel the
Speaker 1: need to talk about it. But it didn't come across
Speaker 1: as obvious as they wanted it, maybe, which we've been
Speaker 1: we've been guilty of a time or two. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I And obviously you can infer that he drowned,
Speaker 1: because if he hadn't drowned, then that would have been
Speaker 1: that would have added a huge bit of mystery to
Speaker 1: this whole thing. Why did he just go to go
Speaker 1: to the beach and will himself to die? You know?
Speaker 1: And they didn't bring up anything like that and also
Speaker 1: kill Gallen in his interview. That's again s a medical
Speaker 1: examiner said nothing about a missing kidney, and you think
Speaker 1: he did a pretty thorough autopsy. He found the cancer
Speaker 1: and then the bone tumors and the heart attacks and
Speaker 1: all that stuff, and he didn't notice it was a
Speaker 1: missing kidney. Yeah, it seems like he would have mentioned that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the only place I I looked around and I didn't
Speaker 1: find any mention of that other than the Wikipedia page,
Speaker 1: So I think we can discount. And I couldn't find
Speaker 1: I followed the links, I know, like sometimes we just
Speaker 1: read a Wikipedia page and go on our business, but
Speaker 1: I actually did my due diligence and tried to follow
Speaker 1: all the links, and the one where it said that
Speaker 1: he hadn't drowned. The in the autopsy section of the
Speaker 1: Wikipedia linked to that German website that you posted, um,
Speaker 1: which obviously they hadn't really I don't know, translated well enough. Really,
Speaker 1: they didn't do a good job of translate. It was
Speaker 1: just odd that, you know, on the Wikipedia page, the
Speaker 1: source that they cited for said the exact opposite of
Speaker 1: the thing that citing it. So there were some problems
Speaker 1: with that Wikipedia page for sure. Definitely. Yeah, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: happens anyway. So now we solved that mystery. Let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about the rest of it, because there's still still
Speaker 1: some remaining mystery here, lots of it. Yeah. Um, so
Speaker 1: our mystery begins June twelve, two thousand nine. As I said,
Speaker 1: Peter Bergmann, if that's his real name, we have to
Speaker 1: call him that because that's all we know him by.
Speaker 1: That's all we know him by. That's right. So he
Speaker 1: got on a bus in Dairy, Northern Ireland and wrote
Speaker 1: it to Sligo, which is also in Northern Ireland, but
Speaker 1: in Northern Ireland, in the north part of Ireland, now
Speaker 1: in Northern Ireland. Yeah, okay, just just so you know,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of capitals in that isn't there to
Speaker 1: the capital inn and I in the capital but lower
Speaker 1: case in. Is that how you're differentiating these slago is
Speaker 1: in the one with the lower case in. This is
Speaker 1: going to get confused. Oh yeah. And Sligo is a
Speaker 1: coastal town of about twenty people, so you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not a city, um of course. I've looked at it
Speaker 1: in Google Earth and the StreetView and it's a charming
Speaker 1: little town. Berg went arrived in Sligo and he went
Speaker 1: to the Sligo City Hotel and checked in. He didn't
Speaker 1: have a reservation, he was a walk in, and interestingly,
Speaker 1: the hotel didn't ask to see a passport or I
Speaker 1: D or a credit card or anything. He just paid
Speaker 1: cash up front. Yeah yeah, yeah. And so typically hotels
Speaker 1: usually want to see a driver's license, right something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that wants something to hold in case you philch out
Speaker 1: or you do a bunch of damage or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean they did, they didn't. They did,
Speaker 1: they did not. So when he away, when he signed
Speaker 1: into the hotel register, he gave his name is Peter Bergmann,
Speaker 1: and he listed an address in Vienna, Austria, which, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, was a vacant lot. Yeah. Yeah uh.
Speaker 1: And here's something interesting though, that is the bus station
Speaker 1: in Sligo is right next to a hotel, the site
Speaker 1: of the Sligo Southern Hotel, which basically charges about the
Speaker 1: same rates for room as a Sligo City hotel. And
Speaker 1: if Bergman had taken the route the most obvious easy
Speaker 1: route to go to the city hotel, he would have
Speaker 1: passed by the Clarence Hotel, which also charges about the
Speaker 1: same rates. So instead of going to those hotels, he
Speaker 1: went to the Sligo City hotel makes you wonder, well,
Speaker 1: it's out ahead of time. Yeah, it is. It's almost like,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe he went there because they wouldn't ask
Speaker 1: to see I d maybe, but how would he know
Speaker 1: that ahead of time? Yeah? Actually, well actually I had
Speaker 1: an email conversation with one of our listeners, Gavin, relating
Speaker 1: to this, and he he told me that there are
Speaker 1: actually a lot of German tourists like to go to
Speaker 1: Western Ireland. It's very pot there there among them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: between British people, Americans and Germans are the three heaviest travelers.
Speaker 1: So he was saying, it's it's it seems really possible
Speaker 1: that he went there. He'd been there before, so yeah,
Speaker 1: he might have been familiar with s but he might
Speaker 1: have also gotten this. He took a cab to the
Speaker 1: hotel from the bus stations, so he might have gotten
Speaker 1: this from his cab driver too. Maybe his cab driver
Speaker 1: told him. We will never know. Okay, now he's checking
Speaker 1: at the hotel. He's got a shoulder bag which is
Speaker 1: kind of like a laptop bag, and he's got a large,
Speaker 1: larger piece of luggage. You guys have seen it on film.
Speaker 1: It's like it's not really a suitcase. It's more like
Speaker 1: a really huge black bag, like a Duffel bag. Now
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: big open top bag. It's it's as big as a suitcase.
Speaker 1: But you know, imagine those shopping bags that they have
Speaker 1: to have just the two loop handles and they're kind
Speaker 1: of bags. Yeah, okay, yeah, So he had this really
Speaker 1: really great big bag and he had that than his
Speaker 1: laptop bag. That's what he had. According to the close
Speaker 1: circuit TV cameras. Uh. He had a heavy accent, probably
Speaker 1: German or Austrian, although there were some people who have
Speaker 1: said they thought he saided more Eastern European. He appeared
Speaker 1: to be sixty years old. He had short white hair,
Speaker 1: was wearing glasses, and also wearing a waist length black
Speaker 1: leather jacket. You guys have all you guys have seen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they're really He wouldn't have stood out in
Speaker 1: the crowd. No, not at all. There was nothing weird
Speaker 1: unique about him. No, not at all. Well, anyway, he
Speaker 1: spent the weekend. He checked it on a Friday afternoon.
Speaker 1: I spent the weekend hanging around the hotel. He ate
Speaker 1: in the hotel's restaurant, and he left quite often to
Speaker 1: go out for walks, didn't they to The woman at
Speaker 1: the front desks called him how she referred to him
Speaker 1: as a friendly face or a familiar face around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that she would always see him. Yeah, the whole weekend.
Speaker 1: She saw him a lot. He was around. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: he would he would actually would leave quite often too.
Speaker 1: And every time he left he was carrying a purple
Speaker 1: plastic bag. And by some accounts, he left with that
Speaker 1: bag thirteen times. And whenever we returned to the hotel,
Speaker 1: he didn't have the bag with him. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: he may have, like in a pocket or something, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't carrying it full of stuff anymore. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: because the stuff the context of the bag had disappeared.
Speaker 1: And it's not just when people get the idea. It's
Speaker 1: not a huge bag or anything like that. It's a
Speaker 1: plastic bag that I would say is kind of equal
Speaker 1: in size to what you would get from say a
Speaker 1: grocery store. It's not act full of stuff, but it's
Speaker 1: just a little one. Yeah, it's not a huge bag
Speaker 1: like the kid you get from Forever one when you
Speaker 1: just buy a shirt. Yeah, because I always shop it forever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not so if I if I shop there, can
Speaker 1: I be again? You are automatically they won't think you're
Speaker 1: just the creepy old man. Yeah, cool, I'm there. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I mentioned before the closed circuit TV cameras there not
Speaker 1: only is a town all wired up with this close
Speaker 1: circuit TV. I'm gonna call it CCTVs from now. And
Speaker 1: also the City Hotel has has got a lot of
Speaker 1: CCTVs in it also and the guard I that's that's
Speaker 1: what they called the police in uh in Ireland, the
Speaker 1: guard that I investigated this thing. Um. They got the
Speaker 1: CCTV footage from the hotel and from all around town
Speaker 1: and started going through it. And that must have been
Speaker 1: a job, yeah, really a lot of TV watching. Uh.
Speaker 1: They got all sorts of little little bits of video
Speaker 1: of Bergman. He was leaving and entering the hotel, always
Speaker 1: leaving with the purple bag and always returning without it.
Speaker 1: There were clips have been walking around Sligo with this
Speaker 1: purple bag and also clips of him without it. But
Speaker 1: you never see him actually doing something like emptying the
Speaker 1: bag and in a trash can, or handing it to
Speaker 1: somebody or throwing it over a wall. Or you know,
Speaker 1: you never see that, so you either see him with
Speaker 1: it or without it. Yeah, and that's I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's a random chance or if he actually was
Speaker 1: well aware of all the CCTVs around town and he
Speaker 1: deliberately avoided doing whatever he did with the contents of
Speaker 1: the purple bag when there was a camera around. The
Speaker 1: funny thing is about that is when you watch him
Speaker 1: on the footage, he looks like he's aimlessly wandering around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's not. He's not wandering around like a tourist.
Speaker 1: He's not looking at stuff. He's just walking around. Like
Speaker 1: there's a couple of scenes I remember in the movie
Speaker 1: that you see it and it's like, wait, that's the
Speaker 1: same street. He walked down one side and then later
Speaker 1: on up the other side and then came back down.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that they weren't all in the same walk,
Speaker 1: but it's like, do you just one around just ump
Speaker 1: and down? Yeah? Yeah, I don't, And I don't know.
Speaker 1: I was. I was too lazy to actually, like, you know,
Speaker 1: compare all those things to the actual Google street views,
Speaker 1: so I can thought you'd try to retrace his track
Speaker 1: now that it would be pointless to do that anyway,
Speaker 1: since the clips that are in the movie, you don't
Speaker 1: know what if they're even in chronological order, So you
Speaker 1: really can't racist movements that way. Yeah, plus that would
Speaker 1: be a huge job. So well, so we're the contents
Speaker 1: of the bat or the bags or the contents of
Speaker 1: the bag where they ever found? No, no, the well,
Speaker 1: I letna tell you a little bit about the investigation.
Speaker 1: Oh no, that's okay. Well, what they did is, after
Speaker 1: they discovered this, this whole thing about the purple bag,
Speaker 1: they started looking in all the garbage cans around town
Speaker 1: and all the dumpstairs. And he even went down to
Speaker 1: the city dump and dug around with the city dump
Speaker 1: looking for seeing if they could find the contents of
Speaker 1: what he'd been emptying out. And they found nothing because
Speaker 1: they've just found regular garbage. Well, but if he's if okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to run with the idea that he's just
Speaker 1: getting rid of his personal belongings, his underwear, his toothbrush,
Speaker 1: you know, shaving kids, kind of generic stuff. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: they're you're, oh, well, he always used Crest Sparkle, so
Speaker 1: this must be his tube of toothpaste. You have no
Speaker 1: idea it's amongst a whole bunch of other garbage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know they were just looking for something special, like
Speaker 1: a diary, maybe you know, for a wallet, I guess.
Speaker 1: But then you have to wonder, like why, Like I'm
Speaker 1: sure there was a dumpster just right outside of the hotel,
Speaker 1: Like why wouldn't he just go and like dump all
Speaker 1: of his stuff in that dumpster? Well, exactly why, Like
Speaker 1: why these like very meticulous it's it's it's it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh. Well, the police actually formulated a theory, which
Speaker 1: is that he was trying to erase his identity because
Speaker 1: I don't know if I don't think I mentioned this,
Speaker 1: but when they found the body, and they obviously took up,
Speaker 1: took him for the autopsy, removed the clothes. They also
Speaker 1: found the rest of his clothes down the beach little ways,
Speaker 1: and they found out all the tags from everything, every garment,
Speaker 1: all the tags have been cut out. So once it's
Speaker 1: more like Tom Tom and shoot again, um and so,
Speaker 1: And of course there was no idea in the body
Speaker 1: or anything like that. And so the belief was that
Speaker 1: he was trying to erase his identity by getting rid
Speaker 1: of every article of anything that he owned. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: still just I guess. Yeah, I hear that. I just
Speaker 1: still I'm not totally sure why I had to be
Speaker 1: in this like very meticulous like spread out around. Well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the thing about it is is, um, this is what
Speaker 1: I don't like about this theory is that he got
Speaker 1: on a bus and dairy and god knows where he
Speaker 1: was where he was before he was at dairy. But
Speaker 1: while it was in dairy, he could have just pitched
Speaker 1: everything into a dumpster. If he was really worried that
Speaker 1: slide open the guard I we're gonna trace its identity.
Speaker 1: He could have just pitched all the dunster there or
Speaker 1: wherever he was before then. Yeah, exactly. So that's that's
Speaker 1: that's the problem that I have with the GUARDI theory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but luckily we've got some other theories to work with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we were not eies. We'll talk about that. What
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, can we go back there real
Speaker 1: quick to the all the labels in his clothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I know that one of the things that they
Speaker 1: do in the movie is they show, you know, they
Speaker 1: put in front of the camera. Look, they're snipped out,
Speaker 1: and I think it's it's a tag in a shirt.
Speaker 1: It's the tag and his underwear, and it might be
Speaker 1: the tag in his pants, the tagging a speedo to
Speaker 1: that speed when Yeah, which are all tags that rub
Speaker 1: against your skin. And I don't know about you, but
Speaker 1: there are certain brands that I always have to cut
Speaker 1: the tags out because I swear to god they're made
Speaker 1: out of cardboard with barbed wire on, because they just
Speaker 1: scratched the heck out of you. Yeah, he may have
Speaker 1: been like weirdly sensitive. It's it's fair. But when you
Speaker 1: cut those tags out, do you just you just snip
Speaker 1: right down to the seam right, like as far as
Speaker 1: you can go right. Yeah, So on those they were
Speaker 1: kind of like haphazardly, like there was still enough tag
Speaker 1: that if it was irritating his skin, it would have
Speaker 1: continued to irritate his skin. That's truely didn't do that.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a great job. It wasn't a totally It
Speaker 1: wasn't like this is like scraping the crap out of
Speaker 1: my skin. I gotta get rid of it. It was
Speaker 1: like I will agree with I will, I will give
Speaker 1: you that. I mean, you know, it might be that
Speaker 1: he just needed to get most of it off, or
Speaker 1: maybe it is just it was a hat job, no
Speaker 1: pun intended. Yeah, yeah, so I don't know how much
Speaker 1: you can read into the whole tags removed and it
Speaker 1: looks a little funny. But anyway, I want to go
Speaker 1: back to the investigation a little bit. Uh. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: canvassed the town. They found everybody that could possibly find
Speaker 1: who could who could have talked to him or had
Speaker 1: any kind of contact, and they didn't get a huge
Speaker 1: amount of stuff. But they did find out that on Saturday,
Speaker 1: the day after he arrived, he went to the post
Speaker 1: office about eighty two cent stamps and airmail stickers. But
Speaker 1: if emailed letters, and he probably did the emailed any letters.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows because obviously there by the time they discovered
Speaker 1: the body that the letters were long gone, and they
Speaker 1: obviously don't keep a record of that. So well, some
Speaker 1: places do. Some places the mail is sorted digitally. It's
Speaker 1: a camera taking pictures of it. But if you don't
Speaker 1: know what post box he put it into to be
Speaker 1: able to trace it, and he didn't put you know,
Speaker 1: a return address, we don't really have a good example
Speaker 1: of his handwriting. Yeah, it's just it's a needle in
Speaker 1: a haystack. Yeah, it would disappear It would be very hard,
Speaker 1: and I don't know how long they keep those records
Speaker 1: for either, I don't know. Yeah, but it sounds like
Speaker 1: they figured this out pretty quick. I imagine that the
Speaker 1: all the postal services probably have to keep, you know,
Speaker 1: a month or five records some number for liability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there would be literally no way to know they
Speaker 1: were his or not. You'd have to canvass everybody in
Speaker 1: the town and all of the tourists and say, hey,
Speaker 1: did any of you send This would have been the
Speaker 1: only possible way that they could have got a break
Speaker 1: on that was if the Slago City Hotel had its
Speaker 1: own stationary and he sent some letters on that. That
Speaker 1: might have been But he seems like he was fairly
Speaker 1: throw to cover his tracks. Yeah, so you probably would
Speaker 1: have used just generic white envelopes, you think, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think so. Okay, So he bought the stamps and he
Speaker 1: mailed anywhere between one and eight letters to a bunch
Speaker 1: of people. I guess I assume those stamps coming sheets, probably,
Speaker 1: and that's why you bought eight. But maybe he did
Speaker 1: actually need exactly eight. I don't know. Nobody will never
Speaker 1: know that, or maybe will never know that. The next
Speaker 1: day on Sunday in the morning, he got in a
Speaker 1: cab and he asked the driver where a nice quiet
Speaker 1: beach was, and the driver recommended Ross's Point, which is
Speaker 1: north of town, and they drove up there. Bergman got
Speaker 1: out of the car, looked around, got back in the car,
Speaker 1: and they drove back to Sligo. So that was his
Speaker 1: day at the beach except for the next day, of course,
Speaker 1: Monday afternoon. Peter Bergman checked out of the hotel around
Speaker 1: one pm. He and he had intentionally asked for a
Speaker 1: late checkout rate. Yeah, yeah, he did. Yeah, he said
Speaker 1: he was. He was just heading out. He was like
Speaker 1: at loose and his bus wasn't leaving until next so,
Speaker 1: you know, could he stick around? Yeah yeah, I said yeah,
Speaker 1: they said fun. But when he checked out, here's the
Speaker 1: funny thing. He still had a shoulder bag, but the
Speaker 1: large bag was gone, and in his place he had
Speaker 1: a small piece of black luggage, which the police called
Speaker 1: a hold all. I think that's one of those small bags.
Speaker 1: It's got the draw stringing cinch on it. You see
Speaker 1: a lot of people using those for backpacks now, yeah,
Speaker 1: because when you see it in the footage, like those
Speaker 1: Nike Yeah, yeah, it is and you can wear it
Speaker 1: is the people wears a backpack with the strings. I
Speaker 1: think that's all that was. That's what I got the
Speaker 1: impression of looking at it. Yeah, I'm not sure. It
Speaker 1: looked to me kind of like one of those slim
Speaker 1: little bags that that zips across the top and then
Speaker 1: there's two loops for handles. Looks kind of like one
Speaker 1: of those to me, but it's hard to tell. It's low,
Speaker 1: it's kind of low rest foot and I thought I
Speaker 1: read somewhere that it was like a wrist bag, like
Speaker 1: it had a wrist trap on it, so it's like
Speaker 1: a like a shaved bag almost, you know, like a
Speaker 1: toiletry bag. It looked it looked kind of flatter and
Speaker 1: longer than that to Yeah, did to me too. But ye,
Speaker 1: so we had all kinds of stuff online this week
Speaker 1: on Luggage Tuck. Yeah yeah, yeah, And he also had
Speaker 1: a purple bag, the trademark purple bag, and so but yeah,
Speaker 1: the big bag was gone. He walked to the bus station.
Speaker 1: When he got there, the black hole doll was gone.
Speaker 1: So he had either disposed of it somehow, or maybe
Speaker 1: he put it inside his shoulder bag. I'm not really sure.
Speaker 1: That's he's the big disposer. Here the bus station. You've
Speaker 1: got a cheese sandwich and a capuccino. Um. And while
Speaker 1: he was sitting in this table, he pulled out some
Speaker 1: pieces of paper and looked at them. And it's hard
Speaker 1: to tell from the from the video, but it looks
Speaker 1: at one point like he's writing something down, and then
Speaker 1: at another point it looks like he could either be
Speaker 1: folding the paper back up or maybe tearing it and
Speaker 1: tearing it up to tell I thought the investigator said
Speaker 1: that he had torn it up. Yeah, it sounded like
Speaker 1: he said that, but you see it all over the
Speaker 1: internet that he's tearing it up. And when I looked
Speaker 1: at it, because it was folded into quarters when he
Speaker 1: opened it and it looked like he had folded it again,
Speaker 1: was almost folding rolling it back into the smallest ball
Speaker 1: of paper possible. Yeah, that's possible. It was really hard
Speaker 1: to tell. And his bust didn't leave until to twenty,
Speaker 1: so between the incident with the pieces of paper and
Speaker 1: to twenty, he apparently got rid of the shoulder bag
Speaker 1: and the purple bag because um well, he went to
Speaker 1: the beach after this, and the beach was where he
Speaker 1: was found dead. The next morning, and they weren't. Ross's point,
Speaker 1: they weren't. They weren't. Those items were not found on
Speaker 1: the beach. They also don't you see him boarding the
Speaker 1: bus on CCTV. Yeah, and he doesn't have Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he disposed of those things. Yeah, again without a camera
Speaker 1: seeing him, though with a camera seeing But here's here's
Speaker 1: the thing about it is it would be very easy
Speaker 1: to missay a pair of underwear that gets the city dump.
Speaker 1: But they had seen him multiple times with the purple bag,
Speaker 1: and then when they were at the dump going through everything,
Speaker 1: that purple bag should have really stood out like a
Speaker 1: sore thumb, but they didn't find it dump. It's well,
Speaker 1: he's at the bus depot, and it's very possible for
Speaker 1: him to have stuffed that stuff into the shoulder bag
Speaker 1: and then intentionally left it in the men's room, knowing
Speaker 1: that somebody's gonna go, oh, free bag of stuff. I
Speaker 1: wonder what's in here, because people do that garbage all
Speaker 1: the time and just wandered away. And the guy watching
Speaker 1: the footage isn't gonna go, well, that's weird. There's a
Speaker 1: there's a totally different guy with the same kind of
Speaker 1: He's not going to notice that at all. Yeah, although
Speaker 1: it's a very distinctive purple bag. I mean even but
Speaker 1: if it's jammed in the shoulder bag this other it's
Speaker 1: not going to stand. We're saying. Then that guy gets
Speaker 1: on a bus and like or wanders away or something.
Speaker 1: He's eventually going to throw it away, though, isn't he? Okay? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, there's this story is full of so many
Speaker 1: leaps of faith, and that I'm going to make the
Speaker 1: leap of faith that he left town with this other
Speaker 1: person's shoulter bag and then threw it away. It could be.
Speaker 1: It could but you know the problem is is that
Speaker 1: it's unpredictable, so somebody might find it in the men's
Speaker 1: room and uh and turn it into lost and found. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like a risk that he may not have
Speaker 1: been really willing to take. Yeah, so anyway, what happened
Speaker 1: to those things? I don't know. He flushed him, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so anyway, you gotta he caught his bus. He
Speaker 1: bought it one way to take it out to the
Speaker 1: beach that afternoon and evening. He was seen by lots
Speaker 1: of witnesses on the beach for as many a sixteen
Speaker 1: Nobody saw the bag, the purple bag, or the shoulder bag.
Speaker 1: But one woman reported that he had a newspaper under
Speaker 1: his arm. It's okay, I guess, And if he's getting
Speaker 1: rid of everything, it seems weird that he'd picked up
Speaker 1: a newspaper. Well, you know, yeah, he had some time
Speaker 1: to kill because I got a feeling like he didn't
Speaker 1: go for a swim until after dark. And it turns
Speaker 1: out so he didn't write because somebody saw him at something. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's and the sun doesn't even sit there until ten
Speaker 1: ten on that date. Yeah, um, And so yeah, he
Speaker 1: would have if he wanted to wait until after dark
Speaker 1: so nobody would witness it and maybe try to save him,
Speaker 1: then it would have been pretty late. And somebody did
Speaker 1: see him. They're quite late. Yeah. Apparently when they found
Speaker 1: the body the next day at six five am, he
Speaker 1: had apparently stripped down to his his underwear and a
Speaker 1: T shirt. That's still a modest guy, and he put
Speaker 1: on a speedo over the top of the shorts, which
Speaker 1: is weird. Yeah, also weird that he would put I
Speaker 1: mean weird in general, right, I mean, if he was
Speaker 1: trying to kill himself, why bother with a swimsuit? With
Speaker 1: a speedo, and so I think he was probably a
Speaker 1: modest guy. Yeah, but pis the modest guy. Why is
Speaker 1: he putting on a speedough? Well, also, like, why isn't
Speaker 1: he just wearing his pants? I mean, why isn't he
Speaker 1: just wearing his clothes? There? Actually it's that's a better
Speaker 1: way to drown, if you wear your clothes. Yeah. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll drown a lot faster that way. So they find
Speaker 1: the body about three meters done the beach. They found
Speaker 1: the rest of his stuff, which was his shoes, socks, trousers, sweater, uh,
Speaker 1: the black leather jacket. In his pockets they found some
Speaker 1: cash and a packet of tissues, some sheets of blank paper,
Speaker 1: aspirin tablets, a wristwatch, and some soap from a hotel,
Speaker 1: probably the city hotel. And that was all. No wallet,
Speaker 1: no passport, nothing, And that was one of the they discovered.
Speaker 1: The tags been taken out of his clothes. It's possible
Speaker 1: that he intended to be swept out to sea and
Speaker 1: then just disappear, although at the same time, I don't know,
Speaker 1: because then maybe he wouldn't have left all his clothes
Speaker 1: and stuff on the beach if he intended to just
Speaker 1: vanish off the face of the earth. Yeah, it's weird, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean if I if I had intended to
Speaker 1: have vanish, you know, by swimming out to see first
Speaker 1: of all, you gotta pay tention to the tide tables,
Speaker 1: and apparently he didn't. And also you gotta make arrangements
Speaker 1: for your clothes and stuff to go away, especially if
Speaker 1: you're like trying to get rid of everything. Right, that's
Speaker 1: my problem with he was trying to erase his existence, Like,
Speaker 1: then why didn't he just go with all his clothes on?
Speaker 1: Why leave anything? But yeah, well what I would have
Speaker 1: done is I would have taken the clothes off and
Speaker 1: I would have brought a plastic garbage bag from town
Speaker 1: and stuffed everything in there, squeezed all the air out
Speaker 1: of it, and and then all by the way, put some
Speaker 1: big rocks in there for wait, and then tie out
Speaker 1: all shut and take it out to sea with me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and when you drowned, you let it go. And yeah,
Speaker 1: but again yeah, it's it's that's that seems like an
Speaker 1: extra step, and it's an extra complicated step. But if
Speaker 1: you really truly wanted to vanish without a trace, that
Speaker 1: would be the way to do it. But you gotta
Speaker 1: pick the right time, you gotta you gotta jump into
Speaker 1: the water right at high tide and go to your
Speaker 1: drown and then and then then then then maybe he
Speaker 1: would not have been washed back up on the beach.
Speaker 1: As you know, we've already talked about the police's belief
Speaker 1: that he was disposing he was personal property, and they
Speaker 1: decided that the death was a suicide. And then he
Speaker 1: had come to Slow I Go specifically for this purpose,
Speaker 1: of course, because probably had terminal cancer. It appears he did,
Speaker 1: and he was disposing of his stuff. And again my
Speaker 1: problem with this is it's a lot of trouble to
Speaker 1: go to for something that's very easily accomplished in dairy
Speaker 1: by just throwing it all away. Yeah. The question is then,
Speaker 1: if his personal possessions weren't in the purple bag being
Speaker 1: distributed all over town, then what was in the bag? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I've put together a few theories. Yeah, oh boy,
Speaker 1: what was in the purple bag? Okay? Theory number one
Speaker 1: beer cans? Suppose he was a raging alcoholic and are
Speaker 1: he was celebrating his impending in and so he but
Speaker 1: he was embarrassed. Had the cleaning lady find all these
Speaker 1: empties in his room, so he trucked him out and
Speaker 1: got rid of the mil square. Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: about No, I don't think so either. Actually, if you
Speaker 1: look at if you look at the bags, you can't
Speaker 1: you can't. You obviously can't see what's in the bags.
Speaker 1: But what's outlined to me is more angular and not
Speaker 1: beer hand shaped or whiskey bottle shaped. So that's that,
Speaker 1: that kind of but I just thought i'd throw that
Speaker 1: theory in there. Yeah. By the way, did either of
Speaker 1: you noticed that there was a really particular bit of
Speaker 1: footage that I saw and it was just kind of
Speaker 1: strange of him. Stay, he pops out of a door
Speaker 1: when he's inside the hotel, and the camera catches him
Speaker 1: walking out of this door, you know, hallway against another
Speaker 1: door behind him, and he stands there and likes his cigarette.
Speaker 1: He's just sitting standing there smoking, Like it's weird that
Speaker 1: he is just randomly walking around and then hides in
Speaker 1: a hallway to have a cigarette. That that bit of footage, too,
Speaker 1: is like odd to me because it's clearly the same person,
Speaker 1: but he looks so different. I wonder if it's the
Speaker 1: angle of the camera it is the angle of the camera.
Speaker 1: But it's that, you know, you have that perception that
Speaker 1: you because he kind of looks like he's older, older
Speaker 1: and kind of maybe you know, a little a little
Speaker 1: slower and a little like hunch more like of a
Speaker 1: friendly neighbor, like like a little bit of like a Mr.
Speaker 1: Rogers type guy, right sweater. Yeah, and all of them
Speaker 1: except for that one bit of footage when he's like
Speaker 1: out there smoking, he looks like a totally different It's
Speaker 1: it was very weird to me seeing that bit. It
Speaker 1: was like I recognized that the same human being like
Speaker 1: in flesh, but it looks like it doesn't look like
Speaker 1: the same guy to me at all. Which, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that that's been struck. Yeah, he moved really fast. If
Speaker 1: he knows he was power smoking like he was take
Speaker 1: a drag exhale, Take a drag exhale, Take a drag
Speaker 1: exhale that fast. It seemed like in the footage which
Speaker 1: was just he was really moving really kind of rapidly.
Speaker 1: Where is you when you walk him everywhere else he's
Speaker 1: kind of trunned a little along. He pushes the doors
Speaker 1: standing there. Ye, maybe he was having an anxiety attack.
Speaker 1: He needed some nicotine to calm him down. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: Well there is that whole thing about the staff walking
Speaker 1: into his room when he was in there and surprising him.
Speaker 1: Maybe shortly after that, and he was whigged out for whatever, maybe,
Speaker 1: And I really want to talk about that very much,
Speaker 1: because I don't I don't think it really meant much
Speaker 1: of anything. I don't think it means much either. It's
Speaker 1: it's just another bit of oddness. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this this sort of she sort of implies like
Speaker 1: he was like really relieved it was her and not
Speaker 1: somebody else, like maybe his life was in danger. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing more it's he was relieved that it was a
Speaker 1: person he recognized and not some random person walking into
Speaker 1: his room. Could have been that, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: as far as as far as you know, if he
Speaker 1: was being pursued by somebody or his life was in danger,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't think so, because when you see
Speaker 1: him walking around town, he's not looking over his shoulder
Speaker 1: at all. Yeah. About the cigarette smoking incident, that makes
Speaker 1: me suddenly realized something, which is that in the in
Speaker 1: his pockets they didn't find any cigarettes or matches. They
Speaker 1: didn't weird. Yeah, maybe he gave up gave it up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could have been. I don't know, but he was
Speaker 1: walking on the beach for quite a while. Nobody reported
Speaker 1: seeing him smoking a cigarette there. Maybe that was his
Speaker 1: one cigarette of the week. They smoked him. Let's move
Speaker 1: on to our next theory. Uh, maybe he just stuffed
Speaker 1: random stuff in there and left the hotel and came
Speaker 1: back with the stuff random stuff gone because he just
Speaker 1: knew he was being videotaped and he thought he'd create
Speaker 1: a mystery. He deliberately created his own little unsolved mystery.
Speaker 1: You loved making this a theory and just about everyone
Speaker 1: you can, because he's going to do that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just that's what I gotta do. And my last thought
Speaker 1: is that perhaps what was in there was money. So um,
Speaker 1: and this splits into two theories, which is one, he
Speaker 1: was leaving the hotel with a bag full of money
Speaker 1: and every time he would and he had he had
Speaker 1: figured out somehow he had gone around town and figured
Speaker 1: out some very very good hiding spots that were safe,
Speaker 1: and he was stashing the money in these hiding spots.
Speaker 1: And then possibly that's maybe that's why he bought those stamps,
Speaker 1: just because he wanted to send letters to friends and
Speaker 1: relatives and tell him where to come to get the money.
Speaker 1: I also found there was a guy about eleven months later,
Speaker 1: a guy in Sluger named geles Ford was arrested in
Speaker 1: May two thousand ten, and he happened to have two
Speaker 1: thousand euros on him in fifth year old notes rolled
Speaker 1: up in his pocket. Uh. And he was, according to
Speaker 1: the police quote, never known to work. He was believed
Speaker 1: by the police to be involved in the drug business.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, if he had a lot
Speaker 1: of fifty year old notes, unlikely. Yeah. You're gonna have
Speaker 1: all kinds of denominations, right, You're going to have small denomination.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, lots of that. And as it happens, the
Speaker 1: apartment where he lived at the time of his arrest
Speaker 1: is just right around the corner from the hotel. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I wonder did giles Ford stumbled across the stash
Speaker 1: of Bergman's cash. Yeah, I don't know. Of course, this
Speaker 1: is all this is all sheer speculation. But I still
Speaker 1: like my theory better than the police theory. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: reason you know he might have the Bergman might have
Speaker 1: done this is that he might have been the kind
Speaker 1: of guy that would enjoy leading his relatives and friends
Speaker 1: on an Easter egg hunt. You know who knows. Maybe
Speaker 1: he maybe he planned a whole series of clues for
Speaker 1: people to find the hidden treasure. Hidden. Yeah, a play,
Speaker 1: And if if those guys managed to miss any of them,
Speaker 1: there might still be some big wads of cash laying
Speaker 1: around South Sligo somewhere. Let's go to money number two.
Speaker 1: So it was nice. The second thing thought is that
Speaker 1: he brought it to Sligo to maybe park it with
Speaker 1: an attorney or as they call him over there, solicitors
Speaker 1: or barristers. I'm thinking the reason he might have done
Speaker 1: this would have been to perhaps avoid inheritance taxes, which
Speaker 1: in some countries and the in Europe can be rather high,
Speaker 1: like the UK and France. So if he was planning
Speaker 1: on on dying, uh, And let's say he had a
Speaker 1: house and a lot of money and savings and investments,
Speaker 1: he might have just left the house as is, but
Speaker 1: cashed out everything else and then brought it in a
Speaker 1: big suitcase to look down like Sligo where perhaps, as
Speaker 1: I said before, he perhaps he had been there before,
Speaker 1: perhaps he already had himself an attorney there, so he
Speaker 1: shows up, he shows up kind of late on Friday.
Speaker 1: When he showed up on Friday was I think about
Speaker 1: six dirty sligo time, and so it might have been
Speaker 1: too late to go visit his attorney, but he probably
Speaker 1: contacted him maybe on Saturday and started. And obviously he
Speaker 1: doesn't want to walk out of the hotel carrying his
Speaker 1: whole big suitcase full of money, so he takes it
Speaker 1: out in the small batches in his purple bag. This
Speaker 1: also has a security component to it too, where as
Speaker 1: if against rob or if he loses it, well, he's
Speaker 1: not losing the entire kiddie, He's just losing part of it.
Speaker 1: That's true. Yeah, well but my but my question is
Speaker 1: if he's got a bag full of cash, so well,
Speaker 1: let's say it was all in the bigger piece of
Speaker 1: luggage that he had. That thing would have been really heavy,
Speaker 1: which you would imagine we would see him kind of
Speaker 1: struggling with that bag as he walks around. And I
Speaker 1: never got that impression, you know, as he would kind
Speaker 1: of get pulled off balanced by its way here there
Speaker 1: that I never saw that. Yeah, No, I agree, it
Speaker 1: didn't look like a weight a time, but I mean
Speaker 1: it might have been at the bulk of the cash
Speaker 1: was in there, but the rest of it was in
Speaker 1: the shoulder bag. And also waste length leather jacket has
Speaker 1: tends to have lots of large pockets in it. So
Speaker 1: I mean he could have had the money distributed all
Speaker 1: over the play. True, he could have worn the money.
Speaker 1: You could yeah, I mean you could. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: mean he could have had large sums of money on them.
Speaker 1: But okay, But of course for the solicitor that he
Speaker 1: leaves all this money with, this would seem a little fishy.
Speaker 1: And I think that I a solicitor, upon finding that
Speaker 1: Bergman has died, would realize that probably what Bergman was
Speaker 1: doing was trying to evade inherance taxes. So next question
Speaker 1: is is would he be in any obligation to report
Speaker 1: this to the authorities? And it turns out now, so
Speaker 1: I want to take this. I want to take a
Speaker 1: moment to thank our listener Gavin, who is in the
Speaker 1: legal profession in the UK, and you gave me lots
Speaker 1: of good information regarding attorney client privilege there and it's
Speaker 1: very similar to what it is in the US. If
Speaker 1: I hire you, you're supposed to keep my secrets. So
Speaker 1: if you suspect wrong doing, you can report it, but
Speaker 1: there's a good chance that you'll be sued. And it's
Speaker 1: just not something that's not a path that most lawyers
Speaker 1: are going to choose to go down. You just you
Speaker 1: need to keep your clients secrets. Do you keep your
Speaker 1: mouth shut? You need to keep your mouth shut. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. But again, this is all speculation on my part.
Speaker 1: It might be also that he just knew somebody who
Speaker 1: was a trustworthy person in Slago and left the money
Speaker 1: with them. It could be he knew somebody in Slago
Speaker 1: he wanted to give the money to. Or it could
Speaker 1: be that that there was not money in the purple
Speaker 1: bag to begin with. I don't know. I like I
Speaker 1: just like the money idea, of course, did yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, okay, So that's the money theory. You guys
Speaker 1: have any more thoughts on that, the money theory. The
Speaker 1: money theory wasn't money, Yeah, last theory. It was his
Speaker 1: Barbie doll collection. And you can see why he didn't
Speaker 1: want to get rid of that. That's the weirdest you
Speaker 1: and your theories. Yeah. So, anyway, which of all the theories,
Speaker 1: which one are you guys are gonna go with? You're
Speaker 1: gonna go with personal possessions or money. Well, I'm surprised
Speaker 1: that you didn't bring up the possibility of foul play. Um.
Speaker 1: I know that the autopsy didn't show that he was
Speaker 1: strangled or anything like that, but it doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: somebody didn't drown him. Um, it's entirely possible some of
Speaker 1: a couple of guys could have grabbed him and hauled
Speaker 1: him out to see and drowned him. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: mean I mean, would they have they have like stripped
Speaker 1: him and then dressed him as a speedo before or
Speaker 1: after they drowned him. I don't know. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but I don't think that's what happened, but I've seen
Speaker 1: speculation of that. I mean, this, this story is just
Speaker 1: full of so many possibilities, and people seem to just
Speaker 1: get on fire about each and every one of them.
Speaker 1: Do you want to hear a ridiculous one that I
Speaker 1: stumbled upon. It's it's super super dumb, it's a really
Speaker 1: weak But I stumbled on this when I was looking
Speaker 1: for information about Peter Bergman's obituary, because I was thinking, Oh,
Speaker 1: they found a dead guy, they'll be an obituary. Not
Speaker 1: so in Ireland, however, on April eighteenth of the same year,
Speaker 1: a fifty nine year old man named Peter Bergman died
Speaker 1: in New York City. Yeah, maybe it's him. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, like, of all of the tenuous like threads, like,
Speaker 1: was the Bergman spelled the same with winds at the end? Okay,
Speaker 1: I think I saw the same one. I came across
Speaker 1: an obituary for the other Peter Bergman who was eight
Speaker 1: seven when he died, the guy who worked with Einstein. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not this, but this guy died what a month? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a few months before. That's one of the
Speaker 1: things that made me wonder about that is, um, I
Speaker 1: thought for sex for a moment occurred to me that like, well,
Speaker 1: was this guy related to this Peter Bergman? Did you
Speaker 1: know this Peter Bourbon and take his name? So obviously
Speaker 1: he's not the same guy, but maybe he somehow had
Speaker 1: some connection with this Peter Bergman who had died more recently,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was Peter Bergman was like there was
Speaker 1: some final business to take care of. He got ill,
Speaker 1: he baked his own death, went over there, tried to
Speaker 1: like even more cover up who he was by affecting
Speaker 1: a very deep accent giving a place of different I
Speaker 1: don't know. Again, like I said, super dumb, but I
Speaker 1: like it. But there's there's somebody actually put that theory
Speaker 1: out there. Did you make okay? Cool? Yeah? You know,
Speaker 1: here's another thing that that I've couldn't believe that nobody
Speaker 1: has looked into, and I we don't hear have the
Speaker 1: resources to do it. But that address that he gave
Speaker 1: in Vienna, it's an empty lot. Chances are good it
Speaker 1: was not always an empty lot, and so it would
Speaker 1: be interesting to find out what was there before two
Speaker 1: then maybe you know, if it was a house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's weird to like just pull out of thin
Speaker 1: air say oh, yeah, this is my address and it
Speaker 1: just happens to be an empty lot. Well, it's possible.
Speaker 1: It's it's entirely possible, just by random chance, random chance.
Speaker 1: Or it could be that he knew that address from
Speaker 1: some point in time. You could try and pin things
Speaker 1: backwards that way, you might, you know. The The thing
Speaker 1: about it is, too is we still don't know for
Speaker 1: certainty that he was totally trying to conceal his identity
Speaker 1: and disappear, but apparently it was. But he might have
Speaker 1: actually owned that vacant lot. Yeah, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know if anybody's bother to check land ownership records.
Speaker 1: I think they would have. Yeah, you could also check
Speaker 1: adjacent properties to and and you can almous as you say,
Speaker 1: go back, I mean last stuff change his hands. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I personally think that was probably mostly randomness. That's probably
Speaker 1: as we could have done what I would have done,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, go out, go to Google street
Speaker 1: view and wait till you go and find an empty
Speaker 1: lot and then grab the address off the street view.
Speaker 1: Street view wasn't a thing, probably not quiet, it wasn't
Speaker 1: mean yeah, yeah, but online maps were a thing, and
Speaker 1: he could have gone and figured out what it was. Yeah. Yeah, Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: that's it for the theories. I'm going to go for
Speaker 1: the money, um, just because I like it better, but
Speaker 1: also because if you look at the contents of the
Speaker 1: bag when he leaves with most of his personal possessions
Speaker 1: would have been closed almost you know, almost all of
Speaker 1: them would have been closed, and so the bag would
Speaker 1: have had a nice round you look to it, and
Speaker 1: instead it looks like he's carrying angular something some corners,
Speaker 1: you know, what, something that's got corners. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: that's the other reason. Almost every time you see that bag,
Speaker 1: it's got something kind of kind of squash it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, it could be. It would also
Speaker 1: help explain why he was kind of startled when somebody
Speaker 1: came in. Yeah. Maybe he was busy stuff in his
Speaker 1: purple bag for the cash. Yeah, or maybe he was
Speaker 1: up to something worse, you know, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: it could have been up to something embarrassing that happens sometimes.
Speaker 1: That he did say that felt you just say he
Speaker 1: was he had this look in his face like he
Speaker 1: was doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. So,
Speaker 1: you know, you never know. Yeah, I'm I'm undecided on this.
Speaker 1: I do not think that the whole thing was a
Speaker 1: giant suicide set up. I don't. I don't think that
Speaker 1: that was the plan. But what happened really I think
Speaker 1: So you think his death, his death was an accident,
Speaker 1: then well I don't think that he went there with
Speaker 1: this grand built up scheme to then swim out to
Speaker 1: see and disappear. I think I don't know that he
Speaker 1: you know, that he died on purpose. It's entirely possible
Speaker 1: that he wanted to go swimming and was a weirdo
Speaker 1: about swimming at night and went too far, swam out
Speaker 1: to see too far. I mean, I don't know if
Speaker 1: either of you had done this, but it's very easy
Speaker 1: to be swimming and not realize how far you've gone
Speaker 1: and then suddenly realize how tired you are. And I
Speaker 1: have thought I was going to drown before because I
Speaker 1: was positive I wasn't gonna make it because I don't float.
Speaker 1: I think like a rock. And there's there's there's such
Speaker 1: things as reptides and currents and stuff like that too.
Speaker 1: You know, there's there's all sorts of ways. But I
Speaker 1: don't I don't think he intended to come back to
Speaker 1: Shore alive, my personally, because I mean he was out
Speaker 1: there really late, you know, and a long, long walk
Speaker 1: from town that was miles from town, and you're gonna
Speaker 1: go for a swim. He didn't bring a towel with him,
Speaker 1: by the way, gonna go for a swim, and then,
Speaker 1: by the way, good luck getting transportation back to town. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, it's sad too because the poor
Speaker 1: old guy I wandered around town for for days, you know,
Speaker 1: just with his purple bag. Hardly talked to him, talked
Speaker 1: to staff, and I that really is kind of hit. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and he didn't he didn't interact much with anybody. And
Speaker 1: then he went out to the beach that afternoon and
Speaker 1: just walked up and down the beach for hours and
Speaker 1: because but he talked to him then either no, not
Speaker 1: really like he said hi, and he never really said
Speaker 1: anything back. He did not politely and move on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but of course he had to. He had if he
Speaker 1: was planning and killing himself, he probably had bigger things
Speaker 1: on his mind. Yeah. A tough, a tough thing. And
Speaker 1: I feel bad for the guy. But obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: he made if he did indeed commit suicide, obviously he
Speaker 1: felt the alternative, which was you know, agonizing death by cancer,
Speaker 1: was worse, you know, And I guess I can't blame him.
Speaker 1: It's just too bad that he had to make that choice. Yeah, agreed. Well, okay, anyway,
Speaker 1: after that ray of sunshine, I know, I know I've
Speaker 1: got you all depressed. If you guys have any thoughts
Speaker 1: on this, any theories of your own, or if you
Speaker 1: happen to have found a big chunk of cash and sligo,
Speaker 1: we would love to hear it. From you. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we would totally like to hear from you. So you
Speaker 1: can reach us at our email address at Thinking Sideways
Speaker 1: podcast at gmail dot com. We also have a website
Speaker 1: where you can download our episodes and listen to them.
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Speaker 1: entirely optional, but if you feel like doing that, that
Speaker 1: would be great. Anyway, that's it for this week. You
Speaker 1: guys have any last I think we've we've run this
Speaker 1: one dry, yeah, I think so. Okay, bye everybody. By guys,