NH Supreme Court Vacates Clegg’s Denial Of Motion To Suppress Evidence In Reid Double Murder Case

CONCORD, NH — The New Hampshire Supreme Court has vacated a key component of a double-murder trial in Concord and sent it back to the superior court to reexamine, according to an opinion issued on March 17.

At issue is whether police should have sought warrants for cellphone location data, which allowed them to capture Logan LaVar Clegg, who was convicted later in the double murders of Stephen and Djeswende (Wendy) Reid, in April 2022, on a trail system in East Concord. The tracking allowed Concord police to find and arrest him in Burlington, Vermont, in October 2022. At the time, Clegg was in possession of a 9 mm handgun, ammo, more than $7,000 in cash, and a fake Romanian passport, and was mere 56 hours away from preparing to flee out of the United States, on a flight out of JFK Airport in New York to Germany.

The full decision can be read here, linked in PDF.

During the investigation, Concord police detectives made three warrantless requests to Verizon to locate Clegg, who police had learned was using the alias Arthur Kelly. The revelation of the alias occurred during a chance meeting at his homeless camp in East Concord when police were searching for the Reids. Days later, Clegg torched his camp and fled to Maine, then to Vermont.

His capture and the warrantless requests came after Concord police received a tip from Utah police that Homeland Security Investigations had learned Clegg had booked a flight to Germany. The booking had a Burlington, VT, post office address and a phone number associated with a legitimate Verizon account.

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Instead of filing for a search warrant and waiting days or weeks for Verizon to respond, police made requests to the company through its exigency hotline.

Police first requested ping data connected to the phone number, which led them to a wooded area near hiking trails in Burlington, Vermont. Investigators also requested updated ping data every 15 minutes.

A second request was for text message details to identify any associated phone numbers and historical communications for those numbers.

Two detectives also went to Burlington, VT, to search locations for Clegg, including the city’s bus station. They did not search the hiking trails because they were deemed unsafe at the time. After crashing for the night at a hotel, a detective requested a search warrant to use a cell site simulator device, belonging to the feds, to pinpoint Clegg’s cellphone.

“CPD ultimately never used that device,” the filing said.

The next day, a text message to Clegg from a grocery store employee was given to the police. Detectives also made a third exigency request to Verizon for “range-to-tower” data, which would determine the precise location of his cell phone, but this data was not used to locate Clegg. Investigators found him at the city’s library, using its Wi-Fi, and he was arrested on a probation violation warrant out of Utah. He was arrested later on multiple murder counts, as well as felon in possession of a gun and falsifying physical evidence charges.

During the trial, his public defenders attempted to suppress all evidence obtained from the ping, historical data, and range-to-tower data.

“The trial court denied his motion following a three-day suppression hearing,” the filing said. “It concluded that the searches were lawful pursuant to the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement.”

Clegg was later convicted on all charges.

During the appeal, the judges said they found Part I, Article 10, supported his argument, saying, “[e]very subject hath a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions.” The court wrote, “Under this provision, a warrantless search or seizure is per se unreasonable, and evidence derived from such a search or seizure is inadmissible, unless the search or seizure falls within the narrow confines of a judicially crafted exception to the warrant requirement.”

Investigators, though, must prove they needed a warrantless search under applicable exceptions. Some of those exceptions include danger to life or public safety, the possibility that evidence might be destroyed, or the escape of a suspect. Prior case law, however, has offered varied versions of what is expected.

The court also acknowledged Clegg conceded exigency was “largely” a “question of fact but points out that this phrase implies that there is a legal component to the analysis.”

In the analysis, the defense argued the officers should have made an official warrant request before the exigency request, which would have negated the fear that the warrant request would take days or weeks to process, and the Supreme Court judges agreed with this conclusion.

The filing also stated Concord police knew Verizon was staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for such requests. It added prosecutors had not demonstrated a “reasonable basis” for believing in the existence of a Verizon policy that would prioritize warrantless requests over those without a warrant. A Concord lieutenant who did not apply for a warrant “conceded that Verizon’s guidelines for law enforcement do not expressly prohibit police from using the exigency hotline if they have a warrant,” the ruling said.

Based on this and prior experience, the judges concluded the trial court erred in determining that the police department’s impression of Verizon’s policy was reasonable.

The delay, too, of a company’s time response to a warrant had no bearing or consideration “of whether ‘the delay caused by obtaining a search warrant would’ give rise to a substantial threat of imminent danger or a likelihood of destruction of evidence or a suspect’s flight,” the judges found.

The judges also said in less than six hours, an officer drafted a warrant for the cell site simulator technology and received approval after business hours.

The court also found the 56-hour timeframe during which Clegg could have evaded apprehension was not a concern, as he could have booked another flight or traveled elsewhere during that time. Concord police also “had concrete information about the defendant’s upcoming flight, which provided it an opportunity to work with federal or local law enforcement to apprehend him in the highly regulated setting of an international airport,” the judges wrote.

“There is no indication in the record that CPD needed the defendant’s then-current whereabouts to facilitate his apprehension at the airport, so any delay to obtain a warrant for the cell phone data would not have frustrated the defendant’s apprehension in this scenario,” they wrote.

The court acknowledged had Clegg not shown up for the flight, “the critical urgency relied upon by the trial court and the state” would be exigency, but disabling or discarding his cellphone was “not sufficient to give rise to exigency.”

The judges also raised the issue of the length of time between the murders and his capture, noting Clegg could have discarded the gun at any time or even before the flight. He, the court determined, was already aware he was a murder suspect.

“Yet,” the decision noted, “the trial court did not address the fact that five months had elapsed between the murders and the initial exigency request and that there was no evidence that, during that time, the defendant, or a person using the alias Arthur Kelly, committed any crimes. This lapse of five months without any indication of further violent or dangerous behavior distinguishes this case from those involving a demonstrated immediate and ongoing threat to public safety.”

The court vacated the denial of the motion to suppress and remanded the case back to the trial court “for the limited purpose of deciding whether the defendant’s motion to suppress should have been denied on the basis of the inevitable discovery doctrine.” The Merrimack County Superior Court has until June 15 to hold any further proceedings to resolve the issue, report findings, and rulings to the Supreme Court.

Michael Garrity, the communications director for the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, said in reaction to the opinion, “We are reviewing the Supreme Court’s decision and will take appropriate action.”

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