The Trial of Logan Clegg

Nov 8

Justice for Stephen and Djeswende Reid

This is an update to Justice for Steve & Wendy Reid: The Capture of Logan Clegg, an episode released on November 8, 2022. Visit the blog to listen or learn more about the incredible people Steve and Wendy were, and the intricate investigation into how Logan Clegg was caught before it was too late.

Recap leading up to the murders

Steve and Wendy Reid spent their whole career helping others in West Africa with the Peace Corp and USAID. They had just returned to New Hampshire in 2019 at the ages of 64 and 63 respectively to enjoy a well-earned retirement near Steve’s family.

Around this same time, Logan Clegg was living in the western United States in Utah, and racking up some criminal charges. In July of 2020, Logan stole a .45 caliber gun from Al’s Sporting Goods in a small town in Utah. In August of 2020, Logan was arrested for shoplifting in Walmart in Salt Lake City, and again in August of 2020, Logan was arrested on another burglary charge. In November of 2020, he was either was found guilty or pled guilty to one misdemeanor and three felonies relating to these incidents. He was sentenced to 72 days in jail and 35 months of probation in Utah. At that point he became a convicted felon.

In June of 2021, Logan left the country for five months, breaking the terms of his probation, and traveled to Portugal, Germany and Iceland. In July (while he was traveling) he missed a scheduled meeting with his probation officer and by the end of the month he became a wanted man—an arrest warrant had been issued by Cache County, Utah.

By November of 2021, Logan settled in Concord, New Hampshire, where he stayed off the radar, living in a tent in the woods near where the Reids lived.

In February of 2022, Logan quit his job at McDonald’s. He then traveled to Barre, Vermont, and purchased a Glock 9mm handgun and 3 boxes of ammo under a fake ID. He returned to Concord, where he continued to stay throughout February, March, and part of April.

The murder of Steve and Wendy Reid

It was Monday, April 18th—the day after Easter Sunday—and the Reids went for a walk. They left their apartment on foot and went to the nearby Marsh Loop trail for a little hike in the woods. At approximately 2:55PM, Steve and Wendy were gunned down in the woods with a 9mm handgun. There were no witnesses to the shooting. The killer dragged their bodies off the trail into the woods, out of eyesight.

Two days later, on Wednesday, Steve missed a tennis game with his brother. The couple was reported missing. Their son, Brian, looked around their apartment and found things frozen in time. The cars were there. A window was open. He found his father’s wallet.

Concord Police started looking for the Reids, but it wasn’t until Thursday night that they were discovered. The cool spring air had preserved their bodies. The area was thoroughly searched, and their bodies were taken for autopsy to the medical examiner’s office.

Through a combination of witnesses, store surveillance footage, and financial records, Logan Clegg was identified as a suspect in September—five months after the shootings. Logan was arrested in Burlington, Vermont in October, just before he was scheduled to leave the country on an international flight. He was initially arrested on the probation violation charges from Utah, but while he was making his initial court appearances for that, Concord PD was quickly analyzing the Glock 9mm handgun that they had confiscated from him at his arrest. They were able to determine that the spent cartridges that had been found at the scene of the shooting had come from his gun, and so they then charged him with the murders of the Reids.

Between October 2022 and October 2023, Logan’s case made its way through the legal system while he waited in jail for his day in court. And on Monday, October 2nd, 2023, his trial began.

Brief overview of trial

Two prosecutors (Josh Speicher and Danielle Sakowski), two defense attorneys (Caroline Smith and Maya Dominguez), and one judge (John Kissinger) gathered at Merrimack County Superior Court in Concord, New Hampshire, to argue the fate of defendant Logan Clegg.

Logan’s trial took 14 days. It was a long trial. It began with jury selection, where 16 jurors were picked, and a field visit to the site of the murders. Opening arguments from the prosecution and the defense followed, but the bulk of the trial was consumed with witness testimony. The prosecution presented its case first through a series of witnesses that spanned 9 days. The defense then called its witnesses over about 2 days. And finally, there were closing arguments.

Instead of a daily recap of each day of the trial, what we’ll do is focus on some key points that came up throughout the trial and organize them topically.

The spent cartridges

The single most important issue was the spent cartridges (also called casings) that were found at the murder site. There was no question that those casings came from Logan’s gun—that was scientifically proven. But the defense managed to cast quite a bit of doubt.

There were three points the defense raised to undermine the weight of this evidence.

Point one was the timing of the discovery of the casings. The bodies of the Reids were discovered on April 21st, but it wasn’t until May 20th, a month later, that the casings were found by investigators. Why weren’t they found right away?

Point two was who discovered them—they were found by the prosecutor from the DA’s office as he was walking through the woods with a couple of other team members on the investigation. It’s awfully unusual for a lawyer to find this type of evidence and not a crime scene tech or a cop. While on the witness stand, the prosecutor said it was his first time to testify at a murder trial.

And point three was the extent to which the area had been previously searched. Law enforcement had searched it several times. They had used scent dogs trained to detect spent cartridges. They had used metal detectors. And despite these sophisticated efforts, they had not managed to find these two casings. But a lawyer, walking through the woods, happened to find two of them in plain view.

A witness that testified at trial—Alan Schwartz—said that he was walking Marsh Loop Trail on the day of the shooting, and he noticed 4 spent cartridges. He even picked up two of them, examined them, and put them back where he found them. These casings were never recovered. The prosecutor suggested that the killer returned to the crime scene after the killing and cleaned up, concealing the drag paths, collecting the spent cartridges, and covering the bodies, but missing the two brass casings later recovered by the cops. But what if Alan Schwartz hadn’t put them back down? What if he put them in his pocket and later returned them to the scene?

The only scenario that doesn’t point to Logan is if someone went to Logan’s tent site, found casings there before the cops did, and then put them at the crime scene. The person who did that would have no idea who they were framing, though, which suggests it would be a random thing, a thing done just to mess with an investigation, a thing without reason. An odd and extremely unlikely thing.

But it is also difficult to believe that the casings were there the whole time and were never discovered despite extensive searching. The story of the casings may never be fully unraveled. Maybe the answer is the simplest—that a stiff wind blew the leaves away that covered the errant casings, revealing them to the naked eye.

Actions of Logan and consciousness of guilt

One of the main points from the state was that Logan’s actions after the killings were incriminating. He lied repeatedly to the police about a variety of things: what stores he shopped at, if he had lived in Concord, his name, his use of the alias Arthur Kelly, whether he had a gun. There were so many lies, it was tough to keep track. The state said that these lies were to distance him from the crime, showing consciousness of his guilt. The defense said that these lies were all related to being wanted in Utah for his probation violation. They claimed that he lied because he didn’t want to be taken back to Utah, and he was trying to conceal his identity. But that couldn’t explain why he denied that he lived in Concord—what did that have to do with anything but the Reids?

Logan had a laptop. In the days following the death of the Reids, Logan ran a process on his computer called “Fresh Start,” which was designed to erase his usage history. Forensic analysts weren’t able to recover much from his laptop, so they turned to Google to see records of his search history. The only one that the prosecution pointed out was one for “Concord NH news.”

The day that the bodies were discovered, Logan bought a bus ticket to Portland, Maine, so the state rightly pointed out that Logan fled the area right after the crime was committed.

But more than anything, the lead prosecutor, Josh Speicher, reiterated to jury that Logan had, “burnt his home,” by gathering up all of the empty propane tanks and other trash in his tent, and setting it ablaze.

The baking soda

Another strange topic that emerged during trial was about baking soda—someone had sprinkled baking soda on the bodies of Steve and Wendy Reid.

The investigators didn’t find any baking soda labels in Concord at Logan’s burnt tent site. They found the label 6 months after the killings in Logan’s trash at his new tent site, in Burlington, Vermont. We doublechecked—there are Price Choppers in New Hampshire—but there are many more in Vermont.

The connection between the baking soda on the bodies and Logan Clegg is tenuous, but I will say this: Logan had few worldly possessions. The things that were important to him fit into a small black backpack that he traveled with—even took to work with him. Of the few things that he owned (at least in Vermont), baking soda was one of them. Perhaps, being homeless, he might use baking soda to help with odor control, sprinkling some into his few shoes. If it was Logan Clegg who sprinkled baking soda on the bodies of Steve and Wendy Reid, I believe it was because he already had a habit of using it in his daily life, a habit that was borne out by the fact that there was evidence of him owning baking soda at the time of his apprehension.

Testimony of Nan Nutt

Other than the spent cartridges, the second most important issue at trial was the witness testimony of Nan Nutt.

Nan was the woman that we previously gave the pseudonym, “Laura,” in our last episode. She was the woman who saw a man in the woods on the day of the shooting and even heard the shots fired.

Steve and Wendy had overtaken her on the trail and were likely a few minutes ahead of her by the time she and her two small dogs heard the shots. She continued on and encountered a man on the trail who initially made no eye contact with her. He was looking out into the forest. After she passed him, she looked back again, and he was looking at her, which made her feel uncomfortable.

She described the man as in his late twenties or early thirties. Logan was 25 years old. This is close, but slightly inaccurate. She described the man as white, which was a match. She said he was about 5’10” which is Logan’s height. She said he was slender, which describes Logan. He had a clean-shaven face, and short brown hair—both matches. She also said that his appearance gave her the impression that he was homeless, which was true. She described him having a backpack, black in color, which was a match. She said he had a brown plastic grocery bag that looked heavy and weighed down with numerous items. Logan had just come from the grocery store and he had a rotisserie chicken and a 2 liter of Mountain Dew in his bag.

There were two discrepancies that the defense brought a lot of attention to. One is that Nan described the cylindrical object in the grocery bag as looking like a jar of peanut butter—that is, having defined ridges that were pressing into the thin plastic grocery bag. So although the 2-liter of Mountain Dew was cylindrical, and about the same diameter as a large jar of peanut butter, the geometry was not an exact match. More importantly, she said that the man she saw was wearing khaki pants. Logan Clegg can be seen in surveillance images leaving Shaw’s Supermarket in black pants. The timing from when Logan left Shaw’s to the time when Nan saw him on the trail was just 27 minutes and much of that time would have been consumed by the considerable walk from the store to the trail. To think that he would have had time to shoot the Reids, move their bodies, and change pants in the forest seems unlikely—if he even owned khaki pants. But witness testimony is often unreliable. To believe that Logan is guilty is to believe that Nan’s memory in this specific way, was mistaken. To believe that Logan is innocent is to believe that Nan saw someone else on that trail.

Motion for directed verdict

The defense said repeatedly that the prosecution had “no evidence,” that Logan killed the Reids. By this, I suppose they meant that there was no evidence that was beyond dispute—like a video recording showing him pulling the trigger, or DNA evidence that showed him handling their bodies. But they were right to point out that the evidence was mostly circumstantial, and as a result they motioned for the judge to end the trial and give a directed verdict of not guilty. The judge declined, saying that there was enough evidence of his guilt to let the jury decide the case. Either this circumstantial evidence points to Logan’s guilt, or he is the unluckiest guy in Concord.

The Corey Ward story

One thing that was not a part of the trial was Logan’s prior incident killing a man with a knife on the streets of Spokane, Washington. We covered this in our prior episode, but to quickly recap, Logan encountered Corey Ward in May of 2018 just before midnight. There was some sort of physical confrontation, and Corey ended up laying on the grass alongside the road bleeding to death. A neighbor called 9-1-1 and reported that his neighbor was screaming he had been stabbed. Police arrived and found he had numerous cuts on his jaw, chest, left arm, and back. Corey didn’t survive and was pronounced dead at the scene just after midnight. A search by police of Logan’s and Corey’s devices revealed no prior contact between the two men. It seemed almost random. A chance encounter that escalated to the highest level. Almost like the deaths of Steve and Wendy Reid. Logan told the police that Corey had yelled at him, called him names, and said he was coming out to fight. Spokane police decided not to bring any charges against Logan. There were no witnesses.

This was not allowed to be presented at trial likely because of the broad exclusion of a defendant’s “prior bad acts.” We asked Maureen what of Logan’s criminal background was part of the trial.

Deliberations and verdict and the specific charges

On the afternoon of Thursday, October 19th, the judge gave the jury instructions on how to decide the case. Their decision had to be unanimous.

They spent all of Friday discussing the case and went home for the weekend. On Monday morning they returned, and at 12:20PM that afternoon, they sent word to the judge that they had reached a verdict.

Everyone gathered back in Courtroom 1 in Concord, and it was announced: Logan Clegg was guilty on all charges.

In addition to the murder charges, he was also found guilty of multiple counts of falsifying physical evidence and being a felon in possession of a dangerous weapon.

Steve and Wendy’s son, Brian, spoke briefly, saying, “A liar, a thief, and a murderer has been brought to justice today. The legacy of my parents’ humanitarian work, their kindness, and their love for life will endure. Let today be a reminder of the value of human life and the strength of community. For myself, our families, and everyone who carried and shared our pain, may the justice that has been served aid in the work of our healing.”

Sentencing hearing

It is now early November of 2023, and in about a month, on December 15th, judge John Kissinger will impose sentence for Logan Clegg. And for two senseless murders, Logan, at just 27 years old, will probably be ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison.

This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, UPDATE: The Trial of Logan Clegg. To hear the full story and learn more, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.

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