State Plans New Testimony In Clegg's Murder Convictions; Submits 6 Potential Witnesses

By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH

CONCORD, NH — Prosecutors submitted a list of six potential witnesses to testify about the warrantless search that led to the arrest of Logan Clegg, the homeless man convicted of killing Concord retirees Stephen and Djeswende “Wendy” Reid.

Clegg was arrested in Vermont five months after the 2022 murders thanks to cell phone data Concord Police obtained from Verizon without a warrant. But the New Hampshire Supreme Court rejected that warrantless data search in a ruling last week, and ordered Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John Kissinger to hold a do-over evidentiary hearing.

Five Concord police officers; Sgt. Wade Brown, detectives Danika Gorham, Brendan Ryder, Garrett Lemoine, and Marc McGonagle, as well as Verizon representative Sarah Ferguson, are all listed by prosecutors as potential witnesses at the new hearing. Clegg’s defense team, which opposes bringing new evidence to justify the unconstitutional search, has a week to respond.

The question about allowing the cell phone data, in essence, could determine whether evidence obtained during Clegg’s arrest should have been used at trial.

Using the cell phone data — obtained without a search warrant — police were able to locate Clegg in Burlington, Vermont, and place him under arrest at the city’s public library. Police then seized other evidence in Vermont, like a 9 mm Glock pistol, $7,000 in cash, and a Romanian identification card. At the time, Clegg had a ticket under an alias to fly to Germany. That plane was scheduled to take off two days after his arrest.

Last week’s Supreme Court order directs Kissinger to reconsider the cell phone data in light of the inevitable discovery doctrine, which allows illegally obtained evidence into the record if it would have been found anyway by legal means. But, in the run up to the 2023 trial, prosecutors told Kissinger that police would never have arrested Clegg when they did without the unconstitutional use of the cell phone data.

During the original pre-trial hearing stage, police and prosecutors argued it would have taken too long for investigators to obtain the data with a search warrant. While a warrant could have been obtained within hours, investigators claimed Verizon takes days or weeks to respond to warrant requests. Instead, investigators used an emergency Verizon hotline for police and got the data within half an hour.

However, the Supreme Court ruled there is no evidence Verizon would have made police wait days or weeks if they had a warrant and used the emergency hotline. The Supreme Court noted that investigators didn’t leave Concord as soon as they determined the location, but instead waited a few hours before heading to Vermont so as to be able to arrest Clegg in the morning daylight.

Clegg maintained his innocence through the trial, and there’s never been an explanation for why he killed the Reids. He never met the couple, and there is no evidence they were robbed or otherwise interfered with during or after the killings.

Stephen Reid had recently retired from a career abroad working for international aid organization, USAID, and was settling into life in his hometown. The couple was out hiking when they were shot to death in April of 2022. Clegg lived in a tent in the woods near the hiking trail and regularly walked to his job at a Concord McDonald's.

In the days after the shooting, Clegg burned his tent and left the state, eventually traveling to Vermont under an alias. Clegg’s argument at trial was that he was afraid he would be arrested on a warrant out of Utah after Concord police started searching the area in April of 2022.

The murders were committed with a 9 mm handgun, determined to be a Glock by the state’s forensic experts. Clegg owned a 9 mm Glock, as do millions of Americans. The Austrian firearms company sells some of the most popular 9 mm pistols in the country. The forensic testing never narrowed the field down to Clegg’s individual weapon.

Clegg was convicted and is serving a 50-year-to-life sentence for the murders, but his Supreme Court appeal could change that. The cell phone data search is the first question the Supreme Court decided, and other objections raised by Clegg are pending.

Along with the objection to the warrantless cell phone data, Clegg says trial testimony about the location of the spent pistol shells also needs to be thrown out.

The shells, fired by a Glock 9 mm pistol, were found in the woods a month after the murders by then-Assistant Attorney General Geoffrey Ward on May 20, 2022. The area was searched multiple times by police experts immediately after the Reids were killed, and no shells were found. The area had been open to the public for days before Ward made the discovery.

The casings Ward found are not seen in two photos of the area, one taken on April 22, 2022, and another on May 10, 2022. At the 2023 trial, both Brown and Ryder made surprise testimony that they could see objects in the photos that could have been the shell casings. Brown and Ryder came to that realization 24 hours before their testimony, and before a defense photo expert was scheduled to testify about the lack of shell casings in the images.

Clegg’s team is also appealing stricken testimony from Fish and Game Officer James Benvenuti, who searched the area with his K-9, Cora. Benvenuti and Cora, specially trained to find firearm evidence, never found the casings in their search.

During the trial, Clegg’s lawyers asked Benvenuti how many times Cora had failed her training certification tests.

“We haven’t failed,” Benvenuti testified.

Kissinger struck Benvenuti’s answer from the record after prosecutors objected.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.