2. The Golden Man

Atlantic, the unsolved mystery of Peter Bergman and Irish Times' original podcast, Episode 2, The Golden Man. The 15th of June 2009 was a Monday. The forecast was good. It was to be 17 degrees that day with patchy cloud from midnight to 6am. It was one high tide that day, at six minutes past noon. The next high tide was after midnight, 25 minutes into the 16th of June. On that Monday, Peter Bergman took the 240pm bus from Salago to Ross's Point, a journey of 20 minutes. The bus stop is outside the area's only hotel, the 8th country hotel. He didn't have a booking there. Nobody at the hotel or at any cafes in Ross's Point village ever remembered serving food or drinks that day to the tall, thin man with a black leather jacket and two bags, one purple, one black. So where was he all that time until Arthur Kinsler found him washed up on rocks, early the following morning? Here is John O'Reilly, who was the detective inspector at Salago Garthestation back in 2009. We only know from what witness accounts we have. We say later afternoon, the memory says me right, the weather was quite good at that time. So he may well have been on the beach and if there were a significant number of people in the beach, he may have well blended in just with the general people moving around the beach. It was only when late evening, when people were out for a walk either with family members or with a dog or whatever, that he became more obvious due to the small number of people who were on the beach. Two people who saw Peter Bergman on the beach that day were a couple, Dermott and Paul Ailehiv. They had driven over to Ross's Point to watch the sunset and were parked at the upper car park where I myself had parked the first day I had visited the beach. In that kind of half circle of beach and sea the sun was beaming right in and we noticed a man half a shoulder is bent forward with some kind of a Nanarack jacket and his trousers rolled up to mid calf, the water, some out above his ankles and stepping very deliberately one foot than the other followed by another and another until he reached the beam of light. He was in a sharp silhouette and it was quite an amazing view but struck me briefly how strange his movement was and that it was appeared to me to be some kind of a ritual in his procedure from right to left. Very deliberately stepping. Do you think that he was aware that he was being watched? I think he was totally in his own space. Paul Ailehiv was sitting in the car with her husband and also watching the tall, thin man's silhouette against the setting sun on the beach below them. As it happens, Paul Aileh was in a creative writing workshop, a workshop that was to meet the following evening. The image of the man outlined against the sunset stayed in her head when she went home. The next evening at her writing workshop, she wrote a short piece about the previous day's visit to Ross's point beach and the distinctive looking man she had seen framed against the sunset. The piece is a part fiction but I inserted a part in my story that the man who was walking along the beach stepped into the sunbeam of light and that he came as one with the sunbeam. So he was, he became a golden man and when I looked around for him later on he was gone. This is Paula reading from the golden man the piece she wrote in her creative writing group. A middle aged man was walking in the water parallel to the beach. He appeared to be fully dressed in a black jacket with his trousers rolled up above his knees. He came from the second beach around the rocks and plotted through the shadow rippling waves. The man seemed to walk somewhat stooped, hands clasped behind his back. A man on a mission perhaps? He kept walking his feet throwing up water at each step through the shadows and when he reached the golden sunbeam he stopped and hesitated. Then took that next fateful step and he too turned to gold becoming part of this miracle of light. He stood there a magnificent golden man at one with nature. And when I had finished reading it there was a kind of a deathly silence in the group and I said oh my god it wasn't that bad and they said did you not hear? And I said hear what? Her friends in the writing group told her that the body of a man had been found that morning washed up on Ross's point beach. That had seemed as if it was the man she had seen on the beach at sunset the previous evening, the golden man. The Le Hiffs were not the only people to have seen Peter Bergman walking on the beach that June afternoon and evening. In statements later taken by the Sligo Guards nine other members of the public also reported having seen him in and around the beach area. The bus from Sligo arrived at the eighths country hotel at 3pm by which time he was carrying the purple plastic bag and the black shoulder bag. After that these are the times he was seen. At 4pm he was seen on the beach with the black shoulder bag. At 5pm he was seen near the yacht club. Soon after 9pm he was seen on the beach carrying something. There were three more sightings at 9.30pm 9.45pm and 10.20pm. At 10.30pm he was seen on a path near the beach wearing his glasses and carrying the purple plastic bag. At 11pm he was again seen with the plastic bag. Shortly after 11pm he was seen sitting on one of the benches that overlooked the beach wearing his glasses. At 11pm he was seen standing on the beach. The last person to see Peter Bergman saw him at 11.50pm on the 15th of June 2009. He was carrying the plastic bag and walking along the edge of the water. He was fully dressed. In exactly half an hour it would be high tide. Sometime after 11.50pm Peter Bergman got rid of the plastic bag in his contents. It seemed he had already got rid of the black shoulder bag and what if anything was in it. Then he took off his socks and shoes, his glasses, his black tank top, his dark trousers and leather jacket. He kept on his waterproof quartz watch which he wore on his left wrist. He also kept on the short-sleeved navy t-shirt, his purple and violet striped swimming trunks and his underpants which were worn over these. It's not clear what he did with the long-sleeved pale blue shirt he'd been wearing when caught on CCTV when leaving the Sligo City Hotel earlier that day and at the bus station. This was not found among the clothes he took off and neatly folded in the dark and left on a rock to be found by the Sligo Guards the following day. The first sight that we have here is casual pair of genital trousers. Jerry Moilin is currently the sergeant in charge of Sligo Guard the station. He was working there back in 2009 and was one of several staff members assigned to help work on the case. The possessions found on the beach belonging to Peter Bergman are kept in storage by the Sligo Guards. Jerry opened up a large cardboard box which had this written on the lid. Clothing, personal items of an identified body found at Ross's point on the 16th of the 6th 2009. One by one he lifted them out and laid them on the table. The next item we're coming to today is this is a black leather jacket. These black leather shoes are made by Finn Comfort in Germany. We contacted the shoe manufacturer and tried to backtrack to find if they were in the position to identify the bathroom or from which it came what they were unable to do. And then finally we come to the bag of the personal undergarments that were taken from the body following it's removed from the tube. Slig the generic hospital to the morgue there. Now what we'll have here is we have a navy top and we'll see the remnants of the sand on it and when we look on the inside on the side you can see that the label has been either cut off or the scissors are removed using some sharp blade and that's removed. And actually as Jerry is showing me these pieces I can see sand falling into the mag. Yes so the remnants of the sand on Rossis Point Beach. This sand was now scattered across the desk between us. Jerry kept talking but I found myself distracted by the sand. I couldn't stop staring at it. This sand that had clung for a decade to the close of a man who had died wearing them. Tiny grains of what had once composed part of Rossis Point Beach, now falling out of the bag that hadn't been open for years, falling from the close of a dead man I had spent so much time in recent weeks and months thinking about. I felt so unexpectedly moved that I actually wondered for a moment if I might cry. The moment passed and I went back to focusing again on the items that Jerry was now taking out of the box. And could you show me the items that were found in his pockets? Of course since we have a watch, that watch is Q and Q, black. The next item we have then is the Pack of the Tissues, Name, Soft and Sisher, S-I-E-C-H-E-R. The next item we have is a small little bearer of salt. It wasn't from the hotels in Ireland but we've never been able to try it down. Are you surprised that it's maybe not in a language other than English? There's not much on it. There's just on the packet it says "Miles" so I would still care. Then we have 140 euro in cash and that's made up in notes and we have 9 euro made up in coins. And then finally tablets which are aspirin and we try to check that batch number back but we had no success with it. Where the glasses found? We've never found the glasses in all. It's the absence of his glasses that puzzled me the most. In all the many clips of CCTV footage he's in, he's wearing his glasses which clearly suggests to me that he was short-sighted. He was seen wearing them as late as 11pm that June day on the beach but they were not left carefully in one of his pockets to be put back on again when he came back. They were nowhere to be found and they were not on him when he was discovered on the beach the next morning by Arthur Kinsler. Apart from the missing glasses there are other questions I have about his last day. If Peter Bergman wanted to wait to go swimming until he got dark and when everyone had left the beach which he did, why hadn't you taken a later bus from Slygo? He had made it clear to Vincent Dunbar the bus station that he didn't want to miss the 240pm service out. Was it that he wanted to get to Ross's point early for some reason? Was he meeting someone there or did he just want to get out of Slygo? Peter Bergman was pronounced dead at 8am on the 16th of June by Dr. Valerie McGowan. The undertaker who had been called to the scene then left with the body at 8.20am. It was brought to the morgue at Slygo Hospital. Clive Kilgallen is the pathologist attached to Slygo Hospital and the person who subsequently carried out the autopsy. The autopsy was performed on the next day on the 17th of June. We did not have a name at the time so we called him on our mail. Is he the only person that you performed an autopsy on that you subsequently discovered you had no idea of the person's identity? Absolutely. Yes, that's the answer. So talk me through the findings of the autopsy that you conducted. The body of that was of a mail, we put unknown age because we did not have the age in the middle age to build us thin and there was sand in the years and the arms, there was no vocal abnormalities seen. There was some wasting of the small muscles of the hand suggesting recent weight loss. In other words, the muscles here, the joints of your fingers were shrunken and reduced and again that's a clinical sign of recent weight loss. Clive went on to talk me through the internal findings of the autopsy. It was very complex and a lot of the medical terminology went over my head but one detail that pulsed out for me was about Peter Bergman's heart. It weighed 449 grams. I had never known before how much a human heart weighed and it's so strange to me that I know how much Peter Bergman's heart weighed even though I don't know what his real name is. Clive would later tell me something unexpected about what he found. I spent quite a lot of time in Sligo while I was reporting this story and quotes from Yates poems, sometimes entire poems, are painted on walls all over the town. One of the many things we don't know is why Peter Bergman chose Sligo as the place he wanted to come to for what were to be his last days. As I walked to various interviews crossing and re-crossing the Garovog River that bisects the town, I kept wondering if he'd been familiar with Yates's work, if there had been an element of literary pilgrimage in his journey to Sligo. On one wall is the text of Yates's most famous poem, The Lake Isle of Inner Shree. This is a recording of W.B. Yates reading from his poem. At Peter Bergman ever read this haunting incantation of a place that promised peace and called to something deep and innate within, the part of us that constitutes our soul, an entity that no autopsy will ever locate. I asked everyone I interviewed why they thought Peter Bergman had deliberately chosen Sligo as a destination. This is what German and Polo Le Hiff suggested, the couple who saw Peter Bergman walking on the beach while the sun was setting. It was on the western seaboard perhaps, or perhaps he was of a literary frame of mind and knew of W.B. Yates might have been into literature. I honestly don't know. There is somebody who told me that one of Yates's novels, I think he wrote the only one novel that he wrote was about a man called John Sherman who wanted to die without anybody knowing who he was. I haven't read it, okay, but it's a conspiracy theory. I hadn't known Yates had written fiction and I studied his work at college. John Sherman and Joya are the titles of a very obscure companion novella and short story collected together in the one publication, originally published in 1891. Could there be something in his pages to indicate that the character of John Sherman, as Polo Le Hiff's conspiracy theory went, wanted to die without anybody knowing who he was? It's long out of print and hard to find, but I tracked down a copy by an Irish publisher called Lilliput Press who had put out an edition in 1990. They had photos of the front and back cover on their website. This is what I read. John Sherman is autobiographical exulting a yearned for a sligo in the west of Ireland. Sligo, a yearned for a sligo. Of course, so much of what Yates wrote is set in sligo or influenced by it, but still. Lilliput loaned me one of their two remaining copies of John Sherman and Joya, which it had published 29 years earlier, when Yates came out of copyright. There was no illustration on the cover, just the title in large print. John Sherman, Peter Bergman, Sherman Bergman, was it just coincidence that the two surnames were kind of the same? The preface said that the setting was sligo under the name Bala. I opened the first page of the first chapter. In the west of Ireland, in the town of Bala, in the imperial hotel, there was a single guest, and now he was thinking of going away. He had packed his portmanteau, his stockings, his clothesbrush, his razor, his dress shoes were each in their corner, and now he had nothing to do. By the second page, the guest in the hotel who had packed his bag and was thinking about leaving town, went out into the sligo night to walk by the Garovog River. Like Peter Bergman, he too was a smoker. And if there had been any to witness a being of a different kind, the inhabitants of this have deserted town. How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made him, when he thought how he and not those whose birthright it was, felt most the beauty of those shadows and this river. To him, we would read much seen operas and plays, known religious experiences and written verse to a waterfall in Switzerland, and not to those who dwelt upon his borders for their whole lives, did this river raise a tumult of images and wonders. I got a bit carried away by John Sherman for a while to be honest, between the Slygo setting and the hotel guest on page 1, not to mention the portman 2, all packed and ready to go. Who knows what all this means? It's probably another rabbit hole, one with no rabbits in it. But this is what working on a story for a long time does to you. You start to think you see connections in the most unlikely places, but without solid proof, without material facts, these connections are as insubstantial as dandelion clocks once they're blown and have dismantled themselves into the air. The facts are the only possessions the Slygo guards ever found belonging to Peter Bergman on Ross's point beach or anywhere else, where the clothes on the rocks and the random selection of objects in his pockets. Apart from his clothes, the only things he kept were his watch, a small, unwrapped bar of soap, a modest sum of money, aspirin tablets and tissues, nothing else. Why would you choose to put soap in your pocket, a bar of soap you brought into the country with you, over your passport or credit card, both of which we can only assume he had with them at some point in Ireland. The Slygo guards searched Ross's point beach for the other belongings that Peter Bergman was known to have had with him. The purple bag and the black bag, his glasses. This is John O'Reilly here explaining how they organized the search at Ross's point. They started with a small public bin close to the bus stop from Slygo, which stops outside the eight's country hotel. Obviously it was nothing there when we searched it. We went back to the refuse collectors and we asked them the obvious questions and they were absolutely adamant that there was no cases or nothing of a similar nature in that bin when their collectors and you've been to the location. It's quite an open area. Yes, like there's no trees. No, and that's my point. It's not as if you could hide it in strawberry or anything like that and we searched that now. I think a tree, if not four different times over that day, the following day, the following week and the week after and as I said again with the Coast Guard helicopter also went up for us, I think twice. To see on the off chance that could have been flown into the water and might have been washed up as well. If you tried to bury it, you would have been quite obvious. It's certainly under the sand. It was only when the Slygo guards started to go through the CCTV footage that they realized Peter Bergman had been deliberately getting rid of his belongings, leaving Slygo City Hotel 13 times with a full purple plastic bag and coming back each time with an empty. You could have to look at hours of footage to actually find and identify him on CCTV footage. So that job in itself is a serious matter work. When we started to develop the picture, it could have been maybe four or five days subsequently, so we were at a disadvantage trying to find clothing. But we did interview bin men. As I said, shop owners, they didn't even remember him. Bin men didn't lift any clothing items. We also spoke to the cleaning staff who cleaned the room daily. They found nothing at any stage belonging to him. So whatever process he had in play, it was, he certainly achieved what he set out to achieve. He concealed everything and anything from everybody. At the time of the autopsy, when I was performing this, I was not aware of the full intrigue of the circumstances that only came to light as the guardian continued to investigate more thoroughly. So how had the dead man who was found near a dead man's point died? Clive Kilgallen, the pathologist at Sleigo Hospital and who did the autopsy, spent almost two hours talking me through the autopsy results of the person he then knew only as an identified male. So how did he die? He was found lying in the first beach in Ross's point and he was pronounced dead at the scene and there was no signs of classical saltwater drowning, which is without frothy secretions in the mouth of the trickier and the main bronchi. And given the fact that he had not fully undressed, it is likely that he had not immersed himself in the saltwater longer deep enough for that to be a contributory to his death. So Peter Bergman had not in fact died by drowning. Arthur Kinsler, who first found Peter Bergman on the beach, had assumed he had drowned. So too had Terry Macman and his other guard the colleagues. So how had he actually died? Coming up on the final episode, we find out how Peter Bergman died. We also find out how this LEGO Gars and Interpol have worked together to try and discover who Peter Bergman really was. 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? 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 [email protected].