Shocking story of how cheating husband almost got away with murder after driving wife off cliff overlooking couple's favorite view

A misogynistic courtroom remark sealed the fate of a wealthy art dealer who wanted to murder his wife so badly, he nearly killed himself in the process, according to the man who brought him to justice.

Rinette Bergna, 49, plunged 800 feet to her death after her husband smashed their Ford pick-up through the guardrail on a spectacular mountain road overlooking Washoe Lake in Nevada.

Rescuers found Peter Bergna, 45, dangling over the edge from a tree branch, with a broken foot and claiming his car had careered into the barrier after its brakes failed.

Five years and two trials later, prosecutor Kelli Viloria knew Bergna could escape justice as she finished delivering her closing remarks - before he gifted her the conviction. 

'B***h,' he muttered in the silent courtroom.

'You couldn't have stabbed yourself harder,' investigator Sergeant Jim Beltron recalled. 'Justice was a long time coming, but we got there in the end.'

Bergna was handed a sentence of 20 years to life for the first degree murder of his wife.

As Bergna approaches his first parole hearing next year, the retired detective shared his memories of the investigation with SFGate.com. 

Beltron was among the first on the scene after dispatchers received a frantic 911 call just before midnight on May 31, 1998.

'My car rolled down the hill, my wife is in the car,' Bergna said on the phone. 'I'm sliding down the hill, and I can't hang on. Rinette!'

When rescuers reached the spot on the Slide Mountain Ski Bowl Highway they found Bergna's baseball cap on the road, Bergna himself 80 feet down the slope, but no sign of his Ford F-150 hundreds of feet below in the Washoe Valley.

'I started to brake, and it wasn't braking,' he told investigators.

'I know I hit the guardrail, and the next thing I'd wake up, I'm on the dirt and I don't see the car and I'm yelling for my wife.'

He claimed he had been thrown through the open driver's window after the car hit the barrier.

'In all my years, I've never seen anything like it,' Beltron said of the scene, where authorities were initially suspicious of Bergna.

Before the fatal crash, Renitta had returned to Reno-Tahoe International Airport that evening from a six-week trip to Italy as part of her new job as an international travel director for Tauck Tours.

She had been traveling for 25 hours straight after stops in New York and Salt Lake City, but Bergin told police that they decided to take a detour up the mountain on the way back to their four-bedroom home on the north shore of Lake Tahoe.

He said that they had always loved gazing out over the valley floor and watching the lights of Reno twinkling in the distance.

But investigators discovered that after 11 years of marriage, he was angry at both her prolonged foreign travel and at her refusal to have children with him.

Multiple women came forward to report that Bergna had been 'hitting on them' while his wife was away, including one who said he tried it on the night before she died.

And police learned that Rinette herself had been scouting apartments during her trip to Rome.

But Bergna insisted they had worked out their differences on the drive up the mountain.

'It might be part of your job, but I'm home, and I'm alone, and I don't like it,' he recalled telling her before claiming she had agreed to cut back on her foreign travel.

When daylight came, police took Bergna back to the scene to see Rinette's body recovered from the crashed car.

'His wife was lying right there in a bag,' Beltron said. 'He didn't say boo about his wife. He was more interested in what happened to his travel bag.'

At the crash scene, forensic investigators were also starting to ask questions, with Beltron surprised that the guardrail had disintegrated under what appeared to be the impact of a direct hit.

'It wasn't a scrape and punch through the guardrail. It was a T-bone,' he recalled.

When the car was retrieved from the valley below, investigators found that the airbag on the passenger side had been disabled, and there were 10 gallons of gasoline in two unsealed plastic containers in the back.

Bergna claimed he had bought the fuel that evening ahead of an upcoming trip to Las Vegas, but there were more still more details that did not add up.

He was wearing gloves and a winter jacket when he was rescued, despite the warm spring weather.

And none of his clothes had been soiled during his supposed tumble down the slope, apart from a sneaker with an asphalt mark on it and the seat of his pants which had become dusty.

'When you get pitched out of a vehicle, you're dirty, you tumble,' Beltron said. 'The ejections I've seen, dead or alive, you're dirty.

'There was no scuff, no skid, no brake fluids, no debris, no tire marks of any kind.

'If you knew you were headed to the edge, you'd be stomping all over those brakes. It's reflex.'

Beltron also wondered why – if the brakes had failed on the year-old car – Bergna had steered into the guardrail rather than into the mountain itself.

'If you're heading to the edge, any input in the opposite direction would pull you away — into the ditch or the side of the mountain,' he said.

At his wife's funeral, Bergna was asked by a guest about his injured foot.

'It wasn't hurt that bad, and I wish I had been hurt worse,' he told her.

And then, during further questioning, Bergna 'spontaneously' told Beltron: 'I don't cheat on my wife.'

'It was like "ding ding ding," no one asked you,' Beltron added.

Their suspicions only grew after they bluffed about having found a witness to the crash.

'We just threw it out there,' Beltron said.

'It set him back. We watched his micro-emotions, his face, his hands. It looked like someone had slapped him.'

Bergna was well-known to wealthy clients across the West Coast through his work as an appraiser for the San Francisco art dealer Butterfields.

But he also came from a storied legal family as the adopted son of the long-serving Santa Clara County District Attorney Louis Bergna.

And Bergna's father was in the interview room for what Beltron believes was a near confession by his son.

'When Bergna couldn't answer the questions, his dad would tilt his head a little,' the detective said. 'Like when your child says something that's not quite true.'

Bergna struggled through an inconclusive polygraph test, but by 2001, prosecutors believed they had enough evidence to bring charges.

By then, Bergna had used much of his wife's $450,000 life insurance payout for some globe-trotting of his own.

The jury also heard that he had received $275,000 from his wife's share in a family ranch back in her home town of Manteca.

But her family saw justice slip through their fingers when three jurors held out against a guilty verdict.

'One did not like policemen at all, one didn't like the evidence, and one said it should be in God's hands,' Beltron said.

Prosecutors knew it was their final chance when a judge agreed to a retrial and the case resumed in June 2002, more than five years after Rinette's death.

The defense proved that Bergna could have been thrown through the open window of his truck as he had claimed, and they discovered that 1997 Ford F-150 trucks had a history of brake problems.

They also demanded to know why anyone would choose to risk their own life by jumping from a car in pitch darkness as it plowed through a guardrail above a ravine in order to murder their wife.

But it was tales of Bergna's character that started to sway the jury as witnesses came forward.

A neighbor on Geraldine Drive recalled seeing him aim a snow-blower 'with full force' at Renitta months before her death, while his first wife said she had feared for her life during their marriage.

She recalled him going 'absolutely berserk' and screaming at her over some hash browns she had made.

One woman testified that Bergna had shown no signs of grief when he invited her into his hot tub six weeks after Renitta's death, and had 'snapped' when she protested at him grabbing her breast.

They said the car hit the barrier at an angle of 60 to 90 degrees when Bergna steered sharply into it while driving down the steep road at around 30mph.

He opened the driver's door, jumping out just before impact, losing his cap, fracturing his foot and scuffing his sneaker on the asphalt in the process.

'There was a mark on the top of his head,' Beltron recalled. 'As he jumped out, he hit the button of his cap on the door jamb.

'There was asphalt on his shoe where he twisted his ankle. That means he was out on the roadway. His cap was found on the edge of the road. It didn't blow off his head and land 30 feet above him.'

The prosecutor said Bergna then 'slid down the slope on his butt,' before finding a tree branch to cling to and making the 911 call from his cellphone.

The gasoline containers in the car failed to ignite but his wife's body was so disfigured after its 800-foot fall that it was impossible to determine whether she was already dead by the time the car left the road.

'Dead or unconscious. We couldn't prove anything, she was so messed up from the tumbling,' Beltron said.

It was the prosecutor who secured the final breakthrough when she sparked his furious response by telling the jury he 'cared as much about the person he sent over that cliff as he did about the truck. Both are replaceable'. 

Bergna's mother wept with her head in her hands as her son was found guilty of first-degree murder.

He may be eligible for parole next year, but he has never admitted his guilt.

'Pompous is a good word,' said Beltron.

'He was very smug throughout the whole thing. I think he thought some expensive attorneys could get him off.'