Welcome back to the path went Chili.
I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and I want to welcome back Ashley. How is Teddy's first Christmas?
Oh?
My goodness, it was amazing. And what's funny is you know, Teddy's three months old and so he knows nothing of what's going on. It was another day for him. But to watch my two little girls who are helping him open gifts and playing with his toys, and just the joy of having just the greatest Christmas gift ever, which is a baby brother. And our new son has been such a blessing. So could not be more excited. This little man's starting to get his personality and enjoying playing
with the different things that he's getting. So just getting to actually see a little human being come to form, you know, and have his own little attitude and joy.
But the girls.
Watching them with him was the highlight of my Christmas break.
I love the photos you send us up them because his eyes are kind of bulging out like in chock, Like what's going on here? This overwhelming celebration going on. But it's good to hear that he had fun.
Oh he is so full of joy. Well, I'm glad to be back, and I'm ready to dive right into this week's case.
June twelfth, nineteen ninety three, Santa Clara, California, Twenty one year old US Army Private Justin Bergwinkle leaves his girlfriend's apartment and never returns. One week earlier, Justin had gone a wall from Fort Lewis, the post where he was stationed in Washington, and kept hinting to his friend that he was working on some sort of secret mission. Three months later, Justin's abandoned car is found at a motel in Monterey with his military dog tags and most of
his personal items inside. And while the Army denies that Justin was ever involved in any secret operation, no trace of him is ever found.
After that The path went Chile. So this week we're going to be exploring a bizarre mystery involving a missing soldier from the United States Army, the nineteen ninety three disappearance of Justin Bergwinkle. You might recall that several weeks ago we released a series of episodes about the nineteen fifty eight disappearance of Paul Whipkey, a first lieutenant in the United States Army who disappeared while stationed at Ford
Ord in California. That case had been featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and during our episodes we may mention of another case from the show involving a soldier named Justin Bergwinkle, who had also once been stationed at Fort Ord before he vanished without a trace. During the mid nineteen nineties, unsawd Mites went through a period where they produced a lot
of segments involving potential conspiracies within the military. They would usually focus on American servicemen who were found dead under suspicious circumstances, but even though their deaths were officially ruled to be suicides, their loved ones were certain that they were murdered and the military was covering something up. However, the Justin Bergwinkle case stands out from the others because he went missing and was never confirmed to be dead.
After serving at Fort Ord, Justin was transferred to Fort Lewis and Washington until he went absent without leave. Justin's girlfriend still lived in California, so he traveled there to visitor before he inexplicably vanished. Prior to his disappearance, Justin had been displaying paranoid and erratic behavior and implied that he was working on some sort of secret mission, though
the military has always denied this. The two potential explanations seemed to be that Justin either got himself in way over his head with something and became the victim of foul play, or he suffered some sort of mental breakdown and the so called mission was nothing more than a fantasy he had concocted in his own mind. But if
that's the case, then what actually happened to Justin? Surprisingly, this is not a story which has gotten a lot of coverage in the media, as the only sources you'll find online are the Unsolved Mystery segment and an article that was published in the Sacramento b newspaper in November of nineteen ninety three. In fact, it's not even clear to me if there's still an active official investigation to
find Justin. But since we recently covered the Paul Whipkey disappearance, I thought now it would be a good time to tackle this one, and we'll be making comparisons between the two cases on these episodes.
My question for you is, does the military ever stop looking for someone if they're considered a wall. Wouldn't that be a mission to say, we're going to see why this person abandoned their post.
Well, we talked about that in our Paul Whipkey episodes, how he was only missing for about a day before the army declared him a wall and started cleaning out his barracks, even though the standard proceed was that they would have to be missing for at least thirty days before you took that step. And here in Justin Bergwinkle's case, like they did declare him a wall, but it doesn't sound like they have made any real effort to try
to find him. They just kind of figured that he did his own thing and he's not really their responsibility. But of course his parents and his girlfriend were concerned because Justin kept talking about this secret mission he was involved in. But the Army has always denied this is the case, but they think that some sort of cover up has taken place.
I guess that's also how many resources are they going to put into looking for somebody when they truly are a wall. Like in the Paul Wikey case, it seemed like they did very little. But I think we settled on the fact that there was some kind of conspiracy or cover up with the military so the fact that they were saying he was a wall and that they were looking for him seemed unlikely. But here, yeah, that
is the question. How long are you going to look for somebody and what type of resources do you put towards it. I really don't know the answer.
I think in the military, it's such a horrific offense to go a wall, to abandon your post, and I feel like there would be consequences that the military would want to invoke or at least sever their relationship officially by figuring out where you went and then you owe us back resources. But I don't know. I'm not sure how that works.
Well.
Our story begins in nineteen ninety three, and our central figure is twenty one year old Justin Bergwinkle. Justin was originally born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to parents Walter and Diane Bergwinkle, and has two brothers. After being an honor student throughout high school, Justin enlisted in the US Army following graduation
and initially set his sights on becoming a paratrooper. Following his completion of boot camp during the summer of nineteen ninety Justin, who had been an excellent foreign language student in high school, earned a spot at the Defense Language Institute, located at the Presidio of Monterey in California. While there, he specialized in Korean language training and reportedly told his family that he was eventually hoping to serve in the
elite combat unit, the Army Rangers. However, Justin's military career hit a major snag in early nineteen ninety one after a shoplifting incident where he and some friends were caught stealing some tapes from a video store. As punishment, Justin was drummed out of the Defense Language Institute and sent to Cook's School in South Carolina. He was subsequently sent back to California and reassigned to Fort Ord, located just outside Monterey, where he became a culinary specialist who prepared
meals for his fellow soldiers. Justin was left pretty discouraged by the situation and was unable to rise above the rank of private But things started to look up for him in August of nineteen ninety two when he became
romantically involved with a woman named Yolanda Antunas. Yolanda was a computer science student at Santa Clairs University who lived in an apartment in the city and even though Santa Clara was located eighty five miles away from Fort Ord, Justin took frequent trips back and forth in order to visit Yolanda. Even though they had a strong relationship, Yolanda did notice some odd behavior from Justin, who would sometimes abruptly end their dates or cut off his visits by
saying that he needed to go back to Monterey. During her Unsolved Mysteries interviews, Yolanda stated, quote, all of a sudden, he would just stop what he was doing with me in the afternoon, and he would just say, I'm sorry, but I have to go to Monterey and see some people, but I'll be right back. End quote. Justin would attempt to explain his behavior by telling Yolanda that he was involved in something secret and couldn't tell her about it.
Okay, you have this dichotomy of who Justin really is. He's this man who's dedicated to his military service, with huge dreams of moving up in the service, but then you see behaviors that cost him that opportunity. He's stealing things, right, and petty theft and things like that. But he's also erratic, and his mental health and stability already seemed shaky from
what his girlfriend's telling us. Is there a potential that he's involved in drug dealing or drug use and that's part of the problem here.
Yeah, we'll be talking more about this later on in
our episodes. But the alternate theory that has been pushed forward is that Justin was not actually involved in a secret mission for the military, but could have been involved in something illegal, such as drug dealing, and just used that as a cover story because it did look like his military career was really going anywhere, So he could have got himself involved in something else on the side and then just used that as an excuse if he needed to go somewhere like Monterey and just abruptly cut
off dates with his girlfriend.
I mean, it could be something as simple as infidelity. Maybe he met another woman and he was using this excuse of, oh, it's a secret mission or I have to go meet some people. It doesn't necessarily have to be something nefarious. And I do find it interesting too that when we looked at the Paul Whipkey case, we
saw somebody with an exemplary record. His mental health was declining due to the exposure that he had with that training But in this case, we see a situation where he had a lot of potential, but Justin doesn't have the exemplary record that we saw with Paul Whipkey.
Yeah, he's not exhibiting any kind of discipline here. He's got the big dreams and the potential because he's excelling in language, he's getting selected for some elite programs, but then it's as if he's not disciplined enough to stay on that track, which makes me wonder too, is there potential that there's already some mental health issues going on before any of this begins. But the quick cutting her off and saying I'll be back, I have to go
see people, it just seems odd. Like you said, Jules, could actually be something like maybe there's somebody else he's going to see romantically. It could be that he's off to secure drugs or sell drugs. But like Robin alluded to, it makes sense that this quote secret mission could be something of another part of his character or another part of his pursuit of something that he just didn't want people to know about.
And on the subject of infidelity, we'll talk more about this later, but I have seen some unconfirmed rumors online from people who claim to have known Justin personally that he may have had another girlfriend on the side besides Yolanda, and that could have been his excuse for like abruptly cutting off there get togethers. Things became more complicated in February of nineteen ninety three when Justin was transferred from Florida or to Fort Lewis, which was located in Washington State,
over eight hundred miles north from Santa Clara. But in spite of this, Justin continued to maintain his relationship with Yolanda and would travel back to California to visitor whenever he could. In May of that year, Justin was granted a two week furlough from Fort Lewis and went to stay at his apartment, but she noticed that his behavior was becoming even stranger. Justin brought along a briefcase on the trip, which he was very secretive about and would
never open in front of anyone. If he did open it inside Yolanda's apartment, Justin would ask her to turn her head and not look. But there was one moment when she managed to catch a glimpse of Justin over her shoulder, and she saw him pulling small pieces of paper out of the briefcase, which he tore apart with his hands. There was also another incident where Yolanda found Justin's sobbing alone inside her living room, but he refused to say what was bothering him and said there was
nothing wrong. The strangest event which occurred during Justin's visit was when Yolanda received a phone call at her apartment from an unidentified man who asked for Justin. When Yolanda told the caller that Justin was out with friends, he asked her to let him know that quote unquote the missions off Even though Yolanda asked for clarification about what the caller meant, he simply responded to quote, just tell
him the missions off end. Quote. When Justin returned to the apartment later that night, Yolanda believed that he looked very pale, and she told him what the caller said. This caused Justin to become enraged and start storming through the apartment, but when Yolanda asked what was going on, he replied, quote, you don't want to know. After Justin's furlough ended, he returned to Fort Lewis and phoned his parents in Clinton, and they said that they did not
notice anything unusual about him. But around the same time period, credit card records would show that Justin purchased two handguns, a three fifty seven revolver and a ninety nine millimeter semi automatic, as well as over one hundred rounds of ammunition and some gun cleaning equipment. At four thirty am on Friday, June fourth, Justin was scheduled to report for kitchen duty at Fort Lewis, but he never showed up.
Since he had a good record, the dining facility decided to hold back on reporting Justin's absence to the superiors as they hoped they could find him and deal with the situation internally. However, by Monday, June seventh, Justin had still not turned up, so he was officially reported as absent without leave aka awol okay.
So he's officially been listed as a wall. But when you go back and you're looking at his behavior, he's visiting with his girlfriend and he has this briefcase that she cannot open.
Could it be.
Something created like this reminds me some of like Ray Rivera, where that briefcase could be something like the notes and things that Ray had around his house that made no sense right. They were to him clues to something, and
yet they were likely created by him. Here is it possible that the briefcase contains some fictitious item or something that he's constructed in his mind as important, or could it include drugs or something like that and names of people who owe him money or he's supposed to deliver
drugs to. It is odd when this phone call comes into play that it wouldn't be necessarily just quote made up, because when you have this man say the missions off and the girlfriend wants to know what's he talking about, and he becomes so defensive, justin so angry you don't want to know, and starts to buy guns and weapons and ammo and things, almost as if to protect himself
from something. It really makes me feel like there's something either a drug deal or drug dealing or sex trade or something that's happening that he's gotten involved in, and he's, like you said, just in over his head.
The little pieces of paper were interesting to me, So it could be somebody who's shredded documents that were important or they didn't want other people to see. But to harken back to what actually just said about the drug dealing. Some people will sell drugs packaged individually, like in folded up little pieces of paper, whether it be newspaper or other types of paper. Some people do it in plastic bags. So it could be something where he was portioning out
paper in order to put drugs in to sell. I mean that's a possibility.
I mean they have talked about the idea that he was doing this all for show that there was nothing important in the briefcase, but he wanted to make Yolanda believe he was a lot more important than he was and working on some secret mission, and that's why he did this whole facade with the briefcase. But the interesting thing about the phone call is that the whole thing
about the mission's off. You could assume that perhaps Justin made the phone call himself just as part of this elaborate trade to make it look like make Yolanda think that he's working on something important. But I do think that she would have recognized his voice if that was him on the phone. So the fact that she talked to an outside party does suggest that that Justin was involved in something, though it may not have necessarily been connected to the military.
Okay to play Devil's advocate, though you could very easily ask a random person just on the street be like, hey, I'll give you, you know, five bucks or whatever, I need you to make this phone call and this is what I need you to say.
Well, i'll talk about this more later. But it has been alleged that Justin would get other members of his army units to make phone calls on his behalf, So it does not sound like that kind of thing would have been out of character for Justin in this particular situation.
Well, it turned out that Justin had made an unexpected trip from Fort Lewis to Santa Clara on June fourth, and surprised Yolanda by arriving at her apartment that night. He remained there for the next several days, and would frequently leave to take what he described as important trips to Monterey. Yolanda also noticed that Justin was carrying the two guns he'd recently purchased at all times. When Yolanda learned that Justin's absence from Fort Lewis was not authorized,
she advised him to phone his parents. Justin agreed to call them and told his parents that he was not actually a wall but working. Though he refused to share any specific details about what he was doing, the Bergwinkles still advised Justin to contact fort Lewis, so later that night, he phoned his unit to let them know that he would report back as soon as possible after he took
care of a few things. However, Justin continued to remain at Yolanda's apartment, so she made an attempt to follow him on one of these so called clandestine trips to Monterey, but before they even exited the building, Justin saw Yolanda and a confrontation ensued, which led to her demanding an
explanation about what he was doing. Justin's only response for her was to watch the movie White Sands, a thriller which had been released the previous year and featured a story about a protagonist who becomes involved in the world of international arms smuggling. Justin had also mentioned White Sands during a previous conversation with his parents, and specifically told them to pay attention to the character played by Mickey Rourke, an arms dealer who turns out to be a CIA agent.
Will be providing more details about White Sands in Part two, but at the time Justin's reference to the film really didn't shed much light on what he was actually doing.
Okay, so not to knock any position in the military, because they're all important. In fact, my fantasy at one point I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be in the army band or choir, you know, jobs like that?
Yes? Yes, are you saying, yeah, what cats you do?
Absolutely right, he said.
But here he's a cook, right, and when you have a idea that maybe he's been called up for some secret mission. In our other case, with our military man who goes missing, it makes sense because of his exemplary record. However, here you have somebody who's been demoted, who's been moved to a new unit because he was shoplifting, and is now in the kitchen crew. I don't see them necessarily going to that crew to say, we have this highly
secret operative mission for everybody. We're gonna go pick one of the line cooks and get him up here to do this secret mission. It doesn't make sense, especially because Justin very recently has been in trouble in the military, so he's showing that he's not dependable, and to me, it almost seems like whatever quote mission this is is him taking that frustration out of I'm not moving up quick enough, I'm not getting where I want to be
in the military. So I'm going to take life by the you know, by the horns, and make money and clout somewhere else, aka in drugs or trafficking or whatever else he might be getting involved in. And he's finding his worth there versus the military or the CIA or somebody actually calling up Justin. It just doesn't fit with his behavior and record in the military.
Wouldn't the CIA tap somebody from an elite unit like Seal Team six to do a secret mission. If they were going to bring somebody into the CIA, they would bring They've got the pick of the litter. They can choose anyone they would like. They would want somebody with an exemplary record. They wouldn't take somebody who'd been kicked out of the Defense Foreign Language Academy and demoted to cook And he can't can't be he can't go above the rank of private. It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, And that is the big difference between this case and Paul Whipkey, because, like we just talked about, he had an exemplary record, and unlike Justin I don't believe Paul was ever in a relationship like he was devoted to the military. He had no wife, no children, And those are the type of people that you would want to choose for secret missions because they have no ties and are willing to throw themselves into it one hundred percent.
And here's a guy who's got kind of a mediocre record and was caught shopped lifting, and I hear in the military they treat that very seriously because they feel if you steal from us, you're someone that we can't trust with important secrets, So why we should we send you on some sort of top secret mission. And he's also like commuting back and forth to see his girlfriends, so he really does not seem like a likely candidate to be picked for something that could involve say arms
dealing or the CIA. On the morning of June the twelfth, Justin left Yolanda's apartment at ten am and told her that he would be back at around four pm. But he never returned, and this would turn out to be the last confirmed sighting of him. Even though Justin had told his mother he would call her the following day in order to update her about the situation of Fort Lewis,
he never did, according to his parents. When Justin failed to resurface, they tried contacting the police, the army, and even some US senators in order to get someone to launch an official investigation and a search effort for Justin, but nothing was done and no attempt was made to
find him. Well three months after he originally went missing, the Bergerwinkles were informed that his abandoned Chevrolet Cavalier had been found in the parking lot of the Monterey Marina Bay Travelodge and Isolated Beachfront Motel, located in Monterey near Fort Ort. Walter and Diane took a trip to Monterey in order to search the vehicle and found a briefcase in the trunk. It contained Justin's wallet, car keys, credit cards, some blank checks, his US Armed Forces identification, and his
military dog tags. The discovery of the dog tags was particularly concerning, as Justin once had a conversation with Yolanda in which he told her that if his dog tags were ever found somewhere, that meant he was dead. The only personal items of Justin's that couldnot be found inside his car were the two handguns and ammunition he recently purchased.
A check of the motel registry showed no record of Justin ever having stayed there, but the manager confirmed that the cavalier had been parked in the lot for nearly three months, as he assumed that it belonged to a guest who had left on a business trip and would return to pick it up at a later time. Unfortunately, no trace of Justin could be found in the area.
Justin's loved one started to wonder if he really he had been working on some sort of secret, clandestine operation which put his life at risk, but the Army denied any knowledge or involvement in Justin's disappearance. The alternate explanation was that Justin had suffered some sort of mental breakdown and that he concocted an elaborate fantasy about a secret
mission before he disappeared on his own accord. Justin's disappearance received very little media coverage at first, though it finally attained national exposure when it was featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries which aired in January nineteen ninety five. Sadly, the episode failed to bring about any solid leads, and in April of two thousand and six, Justin's mother, Diane Bergwinkle, unexpectedly passed away at the age of fifty three, and
her obituary listed Justin as having predeceased her. There had been no further developments in this story, so after more than thirty years, Justin Bergwinkle continues to remain a missing person. So I guess you could say the path went Chiley.
It's really sad when you think about the impact that this disappearance has on the community, the family, the military. But here you have a mom and dad and his girlfriend who were all very concerned about him, and the mom and dad seem to have stayed focused on helping to understand what happened, Where's our son? And then poor Diane dies just a few years later at fifty three.
That's so young, and I can't help but think to what extent died The stress and the trauma of not knowing where her son is put her health at risk.
Yeah, that is a recurring pattern, and a lot of these unsolved cold cases we cover where a victim's parents wind up dying unexpectedly at very young ages, which is probably brought about by the stress. And here it must be so concerning because you hear all these rumors that Justin is on some sort of secret mission, and even though the Army denies this, of course that's what they're going to do, even if this is even true. But at the same time, it's just so hard to get
an investigations launch because he technically went a wall. He decided he's an adult, he decided to disappear on his own accord. So I don't even know, like if law enforcement has ever been actively working on this case for the past several years. And of course it's very concerning when you find his abandoned car and they have all of his personal items inside and the only items that coulnnot be accounted for are his guns and his ammunition.
So it makes you wonder, did he decide to go into an isolated area somewhere and die by suicide and they've just never found his body. So, like I mentioned in the intro, there is very little information available about this case other than the Unsolved Mystery segment and one article which was published in the Sacramento Bee in the
months following Justin Bergwinkle's disappearance. However, if you search online discussions about this case, you'll find a lot of comments from people who claim to have known Justin personally and offer some interesting insight into a story, but we'll talk more about that momentarily. Over the years, unsaw Mysteries produced a lot of segments about suspicious suicides and military conspiracies, a many of which I covered on the Trail and Cold.
But when I researched these cases, I'd often find that there was very little or no outside sources besides the show. And as much as I love Unsolved Mysteries, it's no big secret that they sometimes had a tendency to distort the facts in order to further their narrative and add more mystery and intrigue to their segments. So when I am not able to find many outside, independent sources about these stories, I have to wonder if we're getting the
whole picture. We really don't know all that much about Justin Bergwinckle's service in the Army, as it is mostly based on secondhand information he supposedly shared with his parents and his girlfriend, Yolanda Antounis, who were interviewed during the UNSAWD Mystery segment. The only other interviewee was a retired Army first sergeant named James Tyler who served with Justin, though it was not clear what kind of relationship they
had or if he was Justin superior. But the segment it does not feature official comments from anyone else affiliated with the military or law enforcement, which I find a bit unusual. I mean, it would be one thing if Justin had been killed and his death was ruled to be a suicide and the investigation was officially closed. But he was a missing person who went a wall and had still not been found. Was there anyone else besides
his family who was actually looking for him. It's interesting how in many of the Unsaw Mystery segments about alleged military conspiracies, Robert Stack would often state that the military declined to participate in the broadcast, but he never actually
said that during this segment. This has to make you wonder how much the show actually consulted with the army while putting together this segment, or if they were basing most of their information on second hand stories shared by Justin's friends and family.
So to me, again, it's odd that we don't have more information about a search for Justin in a law enforcement and military effort looking for him. I was just looking up online what happens when a when a military member goes a wall, and it says that they do collaborate with military police and even local law enforcement to try to locate that individual, and that there's a deserter apprehension team that oftentimes will go look for the a
wall soldier, but also utilizing local law enforcement. And so you would think that there was more attention on this
case of saying, where is this kid? Right, it's a young guy in the military who just up and left, and like I said earlier, it's such a disgrace and an abandonment of your post in the military that you would think there was more attention here, that the parents would be part of an investigation with local law enforcement, with the military to say, we need to put hands on this young man and see is he sick, is he doing something criminal, is he in harm's way? Did
he complete suicide or did he just run away? Those questions need to be answered, and there's nothing here, which to me is the most perplexing part.
Well, I'm glad you look that up, because I really was curious, like what was standard procedure for military and law enforcement in order to find a soldier who went a wall? And it sounds like they really should have done more for justin. I mean, it's not like he was like a top flight military person with a lot of like classified intelligence, because he was only a private who worked in the kitchen, so I doubt he was
privy to a lot of confidential information. But it would be one thing if there was no trace of him. You could just assume that he disappeared and started a
new life somewhere. But he would think that after they found his abandoned car and like a briefcase with all of his personal items, that there would be a lot more urgency to try to find them, because it really suggests that either he got himself involved in something he should have or he was suffering from some mental health issues and needed to be found.
And think about the risk he could post to other people. Let's say he is the individual who parked the car and absconded with all only weapons. Think about the mental state he'd be in at that point. And he has two weapons, and we know at least one hundred rounds of ammunition that he had bought. So there's a fact that not only could he be a risk to himself, but he could be a risk to other.
People as well, and it seems like his connection with reality is tenuous at best at this time, where it seems like these are really deep rooted fantasies where he's talking about working with the CIA and on these secret clandestine missions and then tells his girlfriend Yolanda, if you find my dog tags, then I'm dead. But it's very possible that that's what he's set up intentionally because he wanted her to believe that. And then if he doesn't end his own life, what is he going to do?
And yeah, like you said, as she could be a danger to other people, because why did he procure these weapons? We don't believe that he was part of any secret mission or the CIA, so why did he need them? And all of these rounds, It really does beg that question.
And even if he was suicidal, why would he need to get two guns?
Exactly. So now's a good time to address some comments which have been made about this case online by people who say that they have a personal connection to Justin or his disappearance. One of the best resources is a lengthy thread about this case from the Unsolved Mysteries message board at the sitcoms online forum, which dates all the
way back to two thousand and four. I'll have a disclaimer that we have no idea if any of these commenters are legitimate, but with so little hard information available, we thought they were worth mentioning. Most of these comments are from posters who claimed to have gone to high school with Justin or served with him in the army, and they describe him as a very likable, funny, and intelligent guy who did not give off any outward signs that he might have been suffering from some sort of
mental illness that caused him to have delusional fantasies. However, one poster under the username neon Noodle, which let me just say that I lie, I figured you would. Yeah, so that Justin would sometimes do daring things just to see if he could get away with it and avoid
being caught. In fact, it's been theorized that this was the basis for the shoplifting incident, which got Justin drummed out of the Defense Language Institute, as he may have committed this completely senseless crime just to challenge himself, but it wound up backfiring on him in a huge way
when he got caught. I get the impression that Justin's attempts to become an army ranger were greatly exaggerated by unsolved mysteries, as he might have told friends and family that this was his goal, but the shoplifting incident pretty much ensured that it was never going to happen. It sounds like Justin was reassigned to become a culinary specialist just so he could fulfill his remaining service obligations, but after three years of enlistment, he'd still not risen above
the rank of private. So it's definitely not unbelievable that Justin could have been fabricating all of his stories about these secret missions to overcome compensate for the fact that his military career didn't seem to be going anywhere. And I get the impression that Justin's friends and family initially thought he was exaggerating these stories, but wound up taking them a lot more seriously when he turned up missing.
If you look at.
Someone like Justin, it's kind of easy to see how someone who had so much potential and likely a lot of pressure on their shoulders, like you're a smart kid, You're able to achieve a lot. You've been selected for this advanced language program and pursuing Korean language, and then he has these dreams, right, I'm going to be an army ranger. I'm going to do you know, these elite missions,
and he goes off in shoplifts. It's almost as if he has tons of pressure on him, but not the kind of oomph to go and chase the dreams anymore. Like he's just not going to measure up to what he's already set himself up to be, and so he starts to lie to people and kind of build a person he thinks he's supposed to be for his parents and his friends. Right, he was a big achiever, and
he was a big dream chaser. And then when he starts realizing that it takes a lot more effort and a lot more work to make those things come to fruition, and a lot more discipline and effort than he's willing to put in, he just starts making up these stories so that they think he's as grand as maybe they had held him to, right, and he can't live up to that.
And the fact that he was just gonna fulfill his being service obligations, Like if he had stayed in the army, he probably would have remained a culinary specialist for a few more years and got an honorable discharge. But he's probably thinking to himself, what's next, because if I can't have a career in the military, what am I going
to do with the rest of my life? And I think maybe he was just getting to that point where he was almost like having a midlife crisis even though he was still in his twenties, because he wasn't achieving his goals and didn't know what his future was going to be.
And I think too, when he finishes military service, it's almost like he'd had these delusions of grandeur and everyone in his life would soon find out that he wasn't as successful as he claimed to be because his career trajectory would go where. I mean, he's not like he's going to get this exemplary record, so he's not going to continue on in the military, I wouldn't think. And
what type of job prospects would he had? Like Ashley had mentioned, it seems like he wanted all of these things, but if he wasn't really going to put in the investment or the effort to attain them, and instead he lied about attaining them.
I do wonder if he maybe had original plans that I'm going to disappear for a few years and then come back and resurface, and I'll just tell my family and friends that I was off on some sort of secret mission, and they'll say, well, if the Army denies this, that's what they're supposed to do. You can't prove that I'm not telling the truth. And he hopes that maybe he could just coast on this for a while, but
who knows. Maybe he planned to disappear for a while, but then something else happen to him, and that's why he's never reserviced.
Do you think that he thought that he could just work odd jobs, because I would think if your social insurance number is used that that would trigger something for authorities that they would then be able to track him down.
Well, if it works odd jobs, like in construction or something, then he doesn't need a social insurance company. He can just get paid under the table in cash. Or alternatively, if he was involved in something illegal like drug dealing, he could have done that and then spent all those years supporting himself and then when he resurfaces, he can just tell his family, oh, I was on a secret mission with the Army and I can't tell anyone now this.
Aforementioned thread from the Unsolved Mysteries message board also contains a post by someone claiming to be Justin's little sister Katie, who wrote, quote, Justin, it's a total shot in the dark. But if you are out there and by some twist of fate you find this, please know we love you
and miss you very much. End quote. There are also a few comments from a post or claiming to be Justin's younger brother, Casey, who maintains that his family never saw any signs of mental instability in Justin as he was growing up. He also claims that when Justin went missing, the police would touch the case, and the Army did not communicate with the family or officially declared Justin to be a deserter, which is standard practice after someone has
been a wall for thirty days. However, I should mention that I've seen Diane Bergwinkle's obituary from two thousand and six, and it says that the names of her surviving sons are Jeffrey and Jared, not Casey, and it does not list her as having a daughter named Katie. I mean, I guess it's possible that Casey could have been a nickname for one of Justin's brothers, But since this is the Internet, I would take those comments which were made by Casey and Katy with a huge grain of salt.
Yeah, it's interesting because the one that Katie post is actually really genuinely hurtfelt like, Hey, if you happen to be out there and you see this, I love you, I miss you, contact us, basically is what it's screaming. Why would someone make that up? Like it's just very bizarre to put yourself in that position. But we've seen that many times before. And if she had those two children, they'd be mentioned somewhere in her obituary. I would assume to go out and say hey, we're looking for you,
we miss you. Means they were close enough to Justin, and so I doubt Mom would have had no relationship with those kids to a point where she wouldn't want them listened to her obituary.
It's a strange situation. I had no idea why someone would attempt to impersonate the sibling of a missing person who disappeared decades ago. But people just do weird things in cold cases to insert themselves.
We also wanted to make mention of a few more comments in that thread, which were made by a poster under the username NPI Guy, who said he was the lead investigator when Justin first went a wall and was unhappy that unsolved mysteries never bothered to seek any input or information from him. He believes that Justin was planning to rescue his girlfriend from a bad situation and bring her back to Fort Lewis with him. This was why he purchased the two handguns prior to his trip to California,
but Justin wound up getting himself in too deep. However, MPI Guy acknowledges that the girlfriend in question might not have been Yolanda and Tunez, but another secret girlfriend that Justin had who lived in Seaside, California. Yolanda lived in Santa Clara, but Seaside is located seventy five miles away in very close proximity to Monterey. So when Justin kept leaving her apartment on these so called secret trips to Monterey, could it have been related to a situation involving another
woman like we referenced earlier. After all, Justin would have had an ample opportunity to meet someone else while he was stationed at Fort Ord other than MPI Guy's message board comments. We've never seen any information to corroborate this, but it's an intriguing theory. Well, it seems very unlikely that Justin was actually working on some sort of secret mission for the military or the government. Perhaps he got himself mixed up in something involving a legal activity which
put his life at risk. However, the most prominent theory is that Justin suffered some sort of mental breakdown and they have killed himself shortly after abandoning his car, and his body has just never been found.
It intrigues me to think about the idea that someone could complete suicide and their body wouldn't be found. I mean unless you went to some just bizarre remote place and like by a cavern or something like that, how would his body never be found?
What is possible? We've seen documented cases of this where people just go out into remote areas to end their own life and their bodies can be missed for like years or decades. And it even happens for when they perform searches of these areas for the missing person and
then not find them. But then someone stumbles upon the remains years after the fact because they were missed the first time around, and he was also near this Pacific Ocean, so he could have potentially drowned himself or something like that. The possibilities are endless, but until they find his body, there's just no way of knowing for certain. This would be a good time to bring an end to Part one.
Join us next week as we present part two of our series about the disappearance of Justin Bergwinkle.
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Yes. The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured on the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon.
And if you join our highest tier tier three, the ten dollars tier, one of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsawd Mysteries where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track at which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jeueles and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Pathwent Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so they're not very mini, but they're just too short to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those. So we hope you'll check out those patreons. We'll link them in the show notes.
So I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciated. You can email us at the Pathwent Chili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and chili pass call for warm clothing.
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy