TEN YEARS AGO THIS WEEK, A MAN CALLING HIMSELF PETER BERGMANN CHECKED IN TO A HOTEL IN SLI GO TOWN. FIVE DAYS LATER, HIS BODY WAS FOUND ON ROSES POINT BEACH. WHO WAS HE?
In the early morning of June 16th, 2009, a sea fog was hovering over Roses Point beach, in Co SLI go. It was just beginning to lift soon after 6am, when Arthur Kinsella and his son Brian drove into the beach’s car park after a short journey from their home, in CARTON.
Brian Kinsella was training for a triathlon, and he ran ahead of his father across the sand, eager to enter the Atlantic and swim.
The tide was out that morning, and as Arthur Kinsella came on to the beach he caught sight of something unusual to his right. He knew Roses Point beach intimately from many morning expeditions. He went closer, to the unfamiliar object not far from the slipway, close to rocks.
This is what Arthur Kinsella found. “It was the body of a person, and he appeared to have drowned and was lying face downwards on the sand.”
He called to his son to come back from the water. The fog had almost totally lifted by then. He noted that there were no footprints anywhere around the body, which appeared to have washed up.
“He looked about 65, I thought,” he says. “We walked around the body, just to make sure that he was dead, and I actually placed my hand on his ankle, and it was marble cold.”
Seven Kilometers off Roses Point, Sgt Terry McMahon had been on duty since 6am at SLI go Garuda station. He was 45 minutes into his shift when the call from Arthur Kinsella came in about the body on the beach.
McMahon dispatched a car but did not go straight away himself. “I actually went to a storeroom here in the station, and did a bit of hunting and got a tarpaulin kind of thing, because we knew one of the things we needed to do if there was a body out there was to cover it, away from the public gaze,” he says.
McMahon arrived with the blue tarpaulin about 10 minutes after his colleagues, who were taking statements from the Kinsella.
“It was quite obvious he was dead,” McMahon says. “A gray haired gentleman, he looked to me like he hadn’t been that long in the water.”
McMahon noted that the dead man was oddly dressed for a swimmer. He had on a pair of purple striped Speed-type swimming trunks, with his underpants over the top and a navy T-shirt tucked into them. This was only the first of a number of strange things about the dead man on the beach.
PETER BERGMANN ARRIVED in SLI GO on a Friday. On the Saturday afternoon, he walked around the corner from the hotel to the town’s main post office. He bought 10 82c stamps and was also given airmail stickers.
Back in 2009 it cost 55c to post a letter within Ireland; a 82c stamp would take a letter to the rest of the world.
This transaction was captured on CCTV. SLI GO post office has boxes both inside and outside the building. There is a CCTV camera over the boxes that stand near its left-hand entrance. (There are two doors; the other is to the right.) But if you post letters in the exterior boxes, there are no cameras.
“We got the CCTV footage from the post office,” says O’Reilly. “And when we went to look at it – it was downloaded by a staff member – for some strange technological reason the footage hadn’t actually gone on to the USB stick. And when we went back to the post office it was gone off their system.
“It is one of those mysteries, and it has created so much curiosity and speculation in so many places over the years, including my own mind,” he says. “There are so many unanswered questions that will probably never be answered, but the one I would love to get answered is, Who was Peter Bergmann?”
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