3. The Black Notice

Atlantic, the unsolved mystery of Peter Bergman, an Irish Times original podcast, episode three, The Black Notice. We make so many assumptions about so many things. Everyone connected with this case initially assumed Peter Bergman had died by drowning. It's the obvious assumption to make. At Sligo Garthestation, I saw a photograph of Peter Bergman lying dead on the beach face down. Everything about it suggested drowning, but the body has its own internal secrets that only a scalpel can reveal. This is Clive Kilgallen, the pathologist at Sligo Hospital who performed the autopsy. It is possible they had suffered an acute cardiac event during the process of disrobbing. And is that for people who would normally call a heart attack? Yes, and we could call it a heart attack. I interviewed Clive in his office at Sligo Hospital. In preparation for my visit, he had got out the samples of blood and tissue he had taken from Peter Bergman's body so that he could show them to me on his computer. Because there was more he had found out when he performed the autopsy. In the histology, what we find in the prostate? So what is histology? Histology is microscope slides. We take tissue sections and those tissue sections are made into microscope slides and then we look at the microscope slides under the microscope. Clive then put Peter Bergman's tissue samples under a microscope and we could see them greatly magnified on his computer screen. The screen looked like a modernist painting, a deep pink background with doves of white throughout. Clive took a viral and pointed out tiny dark dots to me. These were cancer cells. Even I, with my untrained eye, could see how they were scattered everywhere across this one tissue sample. This showed mildly differentiated prostatocatinocarsinoma and this tumor infiltrated into the surface of the capsule of the prostate. In other words, that was clearly locally widely invasive that had gone through the capsule. So he had prostate cancer? Yes. And do you think that he would have been aware that he had prostate cancer? In my opinion, he must have, because for the following reasons, there was metastatic tumor, metastatic prostatocatinocarsinoma seen in his bone marrow. In the lymph nodes in his chest, there was also metastatic carcinoma into the lung and those spread of the tumor into the lymphatics. So he had advanced cancer? Very advanced cancer is the answer. And it had spread to his bones as that. Yes. Right. His bones is chest, his lungs. Clive told me that he could see no evidence of Peter Bergman having sought medical treatment for his cancer. Giving a very rough estimate how many months or years do you think he may have lived? What is life expectancy would have been? Very short is the answer. It could be weeks at most. Weeks? Yes. I don't know what state of mind a person goes into when they are facing terminal illness. We are all going to die, but most of us are thankfully ignorant of whatever date on the calendar will be our last. Clive said that Peter Bergman could not have been unaware that he was dying, that he had only weeks to live, weeks. You are unthinkingly alive for years, for decades, for more than half a century, and then your time in the world is suddenly counting down to weeks and days and hours. How do you cope? Peter Bergman's way of coping was to go far away from his home and from everyone he knew. And you think it would have been really impossible for him not to know that he was ill and perhaps terminal ill? I would think he must have known he would have noticed the way it goes. He would have noticed the difficulty in breathing. He would have had bone pain for sure because it was in his bones so there would have been pain there. So he would certainly, in my opinion, have known that he had an advanced malignancy or at least an advanced very serious illness of some nature. The biggest question I have about the whole scenario on Ross's point beach is everything pointed towards Peter Bergman entering the Atlantic and allowing it to take his body far out. He knew he was dying. He appeared to have so carefully planned his exit from life, covering all traces of his identity and getting rid of all the possessions he came to Ireland with. It seemed as if he was going into the ocean at high tide in darkness to let the waves take him where they would but he didn't drown. Isn't a fatal heart attack a random unforeseen event, something you can't plan and why would you wish to plan one anyway? Yet the timing of his death is so to me anyway suspiciously convenient. I discussed this with Karen Cassidy who made his documentary the last days of Peter Bergman back in 2013. You can't plan to die of a heart attack. No you can't. That could be really confused. I felt it was highly unlikely that he was going to be able to trigger a heart attack himself so he may have taken something that may have triggered him. It is part of the mystery. How did he bring on the heart attack when he was going into the water? Clive did do toxicology tests on Peter Bergman but not the kind that would show up for instance some kind of poison. Is it far fetched to speculate that he deliberately poisoned himself? Of course we don't know if he did take poison and we will never know but the circumstances of his death are so bizarre that I couldn't stop my speculations. There was another tantalizing element to Peter Bergman's activities in Slygo that we know a little about but not enough. On Saturday afternoon the 13th of June Peter Bergman walked around the corner from his hotel and went into Slygo's main post office. CCTV recorded him buying 10-82 cent stamps which were given to him along with a number of air mails stickers. He handed over a 20 euro note and was given 11 euro 80 cent in change. I've been into Slygo post office. The interior layout is the same as it was a decade ago. There are mailboxes to the left of the entrance boxes which have a CCTV camera over them. Outside the post office there are slots where you can mail letters when the post office is closed. There's no camera over those external mail slots. Here's John O'Reilly, the former detective inspector of Slygo Leetrim, talking about what happened when they tried to follow up that footage. We got the CCTV footage from the post office and when we went to look at it it was downloaded by a staff member and we went to look at it for some strange technological reason that a footage hadn't actually gone on to the USB stick and when we went back to the post office it was gone after a system. Had we had that it's a possibility and a stress only a possibility. We might have been able to determine if he posted letters. We cannot say with any degree of certainty he actually posted 8 to 10 letters anywhere. I did some research on the stamps. There was a time in Ireland when the cost of postage depended on what part of the world a standard letter was going to, i.e. a letter to Europe cost less than one to Australia. Back in 2009 it cost 55 cents to post a letter to an address in Ireland and it cost 82 cents to post one anywhere else in the world which told me exactly nothing about their possible destination as it literally covered the entire world. There is nowhere my imagination didn't go about those 10 stamps. Who post 10 personal letters in one go these days or even 10 years ago? Were there 10 people out there somewhere Peter Bergman was writing to? About what? Was he telling them he was dying? That he didn't want anyone to come looking for him, that he was on his holidays in Ireland? If he posted the letters the recipients would have figured out immediately by the postal Frank, the date and town he posted them from and the Irish stamps would have told their own story. Everyone connected to this case has a theory on whether he posted items or not. Here's Arthur Kinsler who found Peter Bergman's body on Ross's point beach. They taught me that if he wasn't seen post in the letters that he probably had some small items to take care of such as a passport or diary or jewelry that he wanted to put into a small package or parcel and have them sent off. Arthur thinks he was perhaps putting a number of these stamps on one small package but even if he did load all the stamps onto one or two two items. They still had to have been addressed to someone. Someone who never came forward. Here is Terry MacMahon, who found Peter Bergman's clothes on Ross's point beach. If it was a gentleman who was considering taking the final step of his life, he may have had people who were important to him that he wanted to let know or leave a message with. Personally, I believe if he went in buying the stamps, I think he did actually send documents away to various people but that we just haven't heard back from them in relation to it. And here's Ray Mulgeric. The letters could have gone anywhere. I could have gone anywhere in the world. We have nobody has contacted us and said they've received a letter from an individual in Saigo, providing them with presumably some degree of information. Of course, his intentions may have been or that he was doing something or intended to do something to those people. Those people have never contacted us. So, firstly, we don't know what's in the contents of the letters. Peter Bergman's body remained unclaimed in the morgue at Saigo Hospital the entire summer of 2009. The Saigo guards kept hoping that someone out there would get in touch so that his body could be repatriated to wherever it was home for him. But nobody ever did. Here's John O'Reilly again. Unfortunately, we had to make a decision in consultation with the coroner that Poor Man had to be buried locally and he was buried in the cemetery in Saigo. Now, again, we were assuming that he was a Catholic bus. That's again an assumption which this investigation has quite an amount of. I suppose I was anxious that he would have a Christian burial. You know, because while I had to assume he had a Christian background. My job is an in charge of Saigo Cemetery. We have roughly about 160 internments every year. I do everything in the cemetery from open gates in the morning to closing in the evening to keeping records to check impermits from Hetzel and people to open and closing graves and I do a lot of genealogy to work in the summer. Brian Scanlon has been working at Saigo Cemetery for 30 years. He talked to me in a break between digging a new grave or opening a grave as the correct expression goes. Peter Bergman was buried in this cemetery on the 18th of September 2009. And have you buried many people who's identity is unknown? I buried two people who we had no name for. That's so one of those would have been the person who gave his name as Peter Bergman, but we know that his name was not in fact Peter Bergman. Yeah, yeah, the Jennifer man as we refer to him here, the Russis point man that was washed up in Russis point or drowned in Russis point. Yeah, that I buried him. And are there other people in that grave with him? The grave belongs to the headquarters in Saigo and when they have used a grave to put three people in it at a time. So there's someone who's buried. I think there's one more very below. He was the second and there's no one on top of him yet. When I've been instructed not to add anyone else in case he has to be assumed. And do you remember burying the man called Peter Bergman? I do. I think there was about six people at the funeral. I think one was two was, there was a guy to check on about the Wharton in uniform and I think there was a headboard person and it was me and the undertaker and another guy to what's redundant. I think there was about six people together. For me, who's the person walking in the cemetery for 30 years, it doesn't matter if there's six people at the funeral or six hundred. It's a box comes in to get and has to fit in the whole of the ground. And that's the way it's been with me for a long time. I don't really have any emotions or views. I've seen too many of them. So I haven't given any reach to all to what his man was. Brian walked me through the large graveyard to show me where Peter Bergman is buried in the plot that was bought by the local health service executive, Ireland's public health service. When nobody comes forward to claim a body, the state has to step in and provide the plot and the funding for a burial instead. There's a small unmarked wooden cross on top of the grave meant for three unclaimed bodies. It's not there for Peter Bergman. Brian told me it was there for the first person buried in the plot. Here's Karen Cassidy again, the documentary maker. I think whatever happened, I don't need the key plans to be in a pauper like in the discursive which two order strangers in Slido. I don't think like all the bill is up and all the power bags and all the planning and all the clutching of labels and all of that. I don't think that he wants to end up in the grave. And that was just the one thing that kind of told me that something had gone wrong. That something whatever he was planning, whatever he was doing, that something had gone wrong. And I always feel it was like around the beach and around the tide that he probably would have worked to get sucked out with the tide and disappear into the sea maybe. Then instead he was there to explore and when people came to use the beach. There is absolutely nothing to tell any passing member of the public that this is the grave of the man who called himself Peter Bergman. If I hadn't had Brian guide me to it, I would never have found his grave on my own. It made me feel desperately sad. I know Brian had said funerals to him were a box that came in the gate that had to be lowered into the ground. But don't we all want to be remembered? To have people care about us and the lives we lived? To know that we mattered in some way during the time we spent on earth. Standing there looking at this anonymous, unmarked piece of grass, all I could keep thinking and wondering was, would his body be zoomed someday and returned to another country? To people he knew? Or even would this grave someday have Peter Bergman's real name on it? Over the course of making this podcast, some people question me on the ethics of telling the story of a man who had so clearly wanted to disappear. Should I not just have let a story be and respect what seemed to have been his wish to vanish? Why was I trying to find out who Peter Bergman really was when he had taken such purposeful care to conceal his identity? Here's Paul Ella Hiff who wrote the story The Golden Man. "I want to be identified. I mean there is a school to thought that things would if the man went to such trouble to cut all the labels off his clothes and throughout all the things. Maybe he didn't want to be identified and do we have the right to take that from it even in death?" I thought a lot about this question. It's complicated because our lives are complicated and so is the society we live in. We don't exist in isolation. We're connected with so many others in all kinds of ways. Whoever Peter Bergman was, he was definitely someone's son. He could have been someone's brother, uncle, father, husband, cousin. He could have had friends, colleagues, neighbors. There must be people out there in the world who knew him, who loved him even. People whom he sat at dinner tables with or in bars or went on holiday with or shared jokes with or confided secrets to. Someone must have missed him when he went away from wherever his home was and never came back. Someone must have noticed an absence. Do the people left behind of ethical rights too? Rites to know what happened to someone who was part of their family or community? I don't have any answers. I just know the question is worth asking and thinking about and that everyone will have a different opinion. At the very least the Sleigel Gar thee had a responsibility to try and identify the man who had been found dead in a public place. They are still responsible for trying to find out who he was so that his body can be repatriated to whoever may be missing him. And they also hope they can finally put a real name to the person John O'Reilly and others working on the Peter Bergman case have been thinking about for a decade now. Thousands of hours of police time went into trying to solve this case and at one point there were ten guards and Sleigel on it. John O'Reilly, who worked on it originally, explained to me how the investigation had proceeded. It's the first time I'd ever heard the expression "black notice". Black notice? Yes. It's just a term used in law enforcement circles for a situation such as what we find yourself in where we're trying to identify an individual. Switches sent out by Interpol to police forces all over the world where we would have given a background, his picture, his DNA profile, fingerprints, dental records. All that is available and we still have that. So we just threw a blank. Do you think that he is a person who might have had past training in police or military in that he was seemed to be incredibly meticulous about making sure that he concealed his identity? Everything he did appeared planned, deliberated, planned and carried out. So yes, that is a distinct possibility, but he certainly was a very methodical man in how he went about his business. From the very start, considering he paid cash, gave a name, that there isn't a passport anywhere in the world, issue two, with the address that he provided that doesn't exist in Austria, he would have had to know the area to know that no such address existed. So yeah, he definitely planned out a lot of his actions. There's not a shadow of a doubt about that. As well as hearing from John about the black notice for the first time, it was also my first time to learn that there is such a thing as a tumour registry. And I didn't know it until then that such a registry is maintained, particularly within the HSE and the NHS in the UK, that there is a tumour registry, in other words, any patient that has a tumour, they're entered and their details are retained on this database. And we did that through the HSE and did check with the health services both in the UK and in Ireland and in Europe to see if we could possibly find some inroads there. So your counterparts in those countries where the black notice goes to, you would only have success in identifying somebody if another party had come forward to say that ex-person was missing? Or they had gone through the justice system in that jurisdiction, because we would have provided them with fingerprints and DNA also as well. Okay, so their identity would have been loved in that way if they had ever had any interaction with law enforcement. So other than that, the only way of trying to find somebody would be depending on another person, another party to come forward and say this person is missing, he's my friend or father or cousin or whatever. Yes, but we also checked there's missing persons bureaus in each of those countries as well. So that information would have also gone there through the black notice. Like we have our own missing persons bureau, there's an alert on that system if somebody of that description even is notified to ourselves and the same extends all over through the black notice notification process. Now there have been a number of people that have made contact in the intervening years of nominating people that they believed could have been him. And we've checked every single one of them out and we've actually found the people themselves still alive on each occasion. I think there was. UK, there was another one in Germany, there was another one in Austria, there was a gentleman who worked in a car manufacturing plant in the UK, it took us quite some time to find him, we eventually found him retired in Wales, it's just one of those cases that's there on the back of your mind and every so often you say to yourself, I go back and have a look at that, see where we can go, we'll send the notice again to Interpol to see if anything has come in in the intervening period and no matter how many times I've done it it still comes back blank, that we just can't seem to identify the man. There is so much we don't know about Peter Bergman, but we do know one thing, although the Slago guards don't know what nationality Peter Bergman was, they are absolutely certain he was not Irish, this is what Ray told me. With the affinity the Irish have as culturally of death, recording deaths, burying people having a place to grieve, it is likely if he was Irish that somebody would have come forward and said that look we're missing a family relative from Kerry, Carc, Limerick or wherever, that could be that particular person, it would be easier, but we're looking for whatever the population is of Europe and of the 60 million people in Germany alone, whether that person had paid or had either family members or a major family members or whatever, for example the naughty child and parents died, we don't know, but Ireland is different, Ireland is how would I put it, Ireland is a small country and a very small population, somebody went missing from somewhere and there was a party found in another person's country, it creates talk and it creates conversation and it creates questions. I talked to Ray about what had happened with the case in the time he had been detective and specter at Slago. What happens is we keep a file open and then anything that comes to Dorothy's either in the course of another investigation or a request from another country or a contact from the member of the public who wishes to impart information, we will follow up on those. So we have Peter's DNA, so from time to time, my time here we've had two requests from countries outside of Ireland who have missing people and have DNA and soft to cross reference at half-patriots, farting in both instances, they were not, the missing people were in Peter. Recently as well, we saw in which those countries were, Croatia been won and from memory again France. There were in my time, Baltimore in my time here, so we're talking between 2016 and 2018. The CCTV images that were captured of Peter Bergman are remarkably clear. You can see that he was tall and thin, that he wore glasses, that his hair was short and grey, that he was a smoker. The Slago dentist who took an impression of his teeth after the autopsy recorded that he had a gold tooth in the upper back right side of his mouth, a distinctive and memorable physical feature in anyone. His photograph and physical description was widely circulated throughout the world and yet not one person has ever come forward in 10 years who has positively identified him. That to me is perhaps the most puzzling mystery of all. Are you surprised that nobody has ever come forward to say they know who he is? It's absolutely astonishing considering the amount of media interest that this particular case has generated and the documentary in itself which was broadcast and is available online. Not to mention the circulation through media outlets all over Europe and the world over with this man's picture in particular and it's just incredible that nobody anywhere has given or provided a firm identification of him. Would we be that lucky? You hope. There has got to be people out there in the world who know this person. Whatever the shadow of it out as I said he may not have had any siblings but he certainly had friends somewhere in the world. Here's Jerry Moilan who showed me Peter Bergman's clothes. As I said to you previously I think it wasn't regularly. I have a look at the fellow in relation to Peter as I know and it's just one of those great mysteries and I'd love to bring it to a conclusion or I'd love to hear that it could be brought to a conclusion. Well as I explained earlier 10 years ago one of the ideas behind trying to solve this mystery was that we went so far as to put his photograph on Bill Carton which was one of the ideas behind it at the time and thankfully a decade later we're now at the era of podcasts and hopefully if this is circulated fire and white somebody may have something interesting to put up. Ray Mulderig who in a hurry to the case when he took over as detective inspector at Slago Garthestation is hopeful that someone out there will finally positively identify Peter Bergman. It's very difficult to operate today in the world without somebody or even in 2009 to somebody knowing it. If you got on a bus, if you were a member of any farm for club, society, sporting club, family members, cousins, etc. It is unusual. We don't give up all, and we certainly don't give up trying. In the main we have the opposite and that we have people who go missing and we can't find them. And despite all our best efforts, those people remain missing for a significant period of trying. This is the direct opposite. This is where we have somebody somewhere in the world. There is a very interesting possibility that there is somebody wondering what ever happened to an individual that we know is Peter Bergman. And it will be to reunite Peter with that individual or individuals or at least those individuals will know that Peter is now has been cared for by the Irish state, remains been recovered and he's been given a very interesting his body is in a definitive place. So yeah, it would be it would be born that it be to me is solvable. I don't know what happens next in this story of the man who came to Slygo in 2009 and called himself Peter Bergman and died on Ross's point beach, the man who set out to disappear. I leave the last word to John O'Reilly. It has created so much curiosity and speculation in so many places over the years including my own mind and there are so many unanswered questions that would probably never be answered but the one I would love to get answered is who was Peter Bergman. In the weeks and months I spent working on this story, of course I kept wondering, might someone listening to the podcast recognize the person who called himself Peter Bergman? If anyone does get in touch with solid information after listening to the podcast, we will pass on all information to the Slygo Guards and come back with another episode. I would love to make one more episode to solve this mystery that has obsessed me and so many others who worked on the case. You can contact me at our [email protected]. Anyone affected by issues raised in this podcast can contact the Samaritans at its helpline 116-123 or contact the Pieterhaus helpline at 1800-247-247. Atlantic was reported by Rosita Bolland edited by Brian Kilmartin, produced by Declan Conlon, with sound by J.J. Vernon. Thanks to everybody who participated in this podcast and who helped to create it.