The New Hampshire Supreme Court ordered a lower court to reexamine Logan Clegg’s attempt to exclude evidence used to track and arrest him without a search warrant in the 2022 killings of a Concord couple.
Concord police requested cell phone location information from Verizon without a warrant after suspecting Clegg might flee the country following the killings of Steve and Wendy Reid near their Loudon Road home, arguing he was a flight risk who posed an imminent danger to public safety.
“The trial court did not properly weigh the circumstances relevant to the risk of the defendant’s escape or the risk that the defendant would destroy evidence or imminently endanger life or public safety,” the state Supreme Court said in a ruling released Tuesday. “In short, the circumstances did not ‘make it impracticable to obtain a warrant.'”
The state Supreme Court didn’t overturn Clegg’s conviction. Instead, it sent the case back to the trial court to review whether evidence like his phone data should have been suppressed.
Clegg could appear at the status conference in his case, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Friday at Merrimack County Superior Court, as a transport order has been sent to the state prison.
If the lower court decides that the evidence would have been discovered anyway, his conviction will stand and there won’t be a new trial. But if the court rules that the evidence shouldn’t have been used, and that its discovery was key to the outcome of the case, Clegg could end up getting a new trial.
“We are reviewing the Supreme Court’s decision and will take appropriate action,” the office of Attorney General John Formella said in a statement.
Officers testified over the course of Clegg’s court proceedings that they skipped obtaining a warrant for the cell phone data, fearing that the process could take days or even weeks. Police asked for the data 56 hours before he was scheduled to board a one-way flight to Germany and ultimately used the information to locate him in Burlington, Vermont.
Police can legally obtain evidence without a warrant in certain circumstances, when a situation is so pressing that there’s a “compelling need” for immediate action.
The Supreme Court determined that the threshold was not met.
“It’s unreasonable that any individual’s freedom from governmental intrusion might be curtailed by virtue of how long it may or may not take a third party to respond to a warrant,” justices wrote.
The court found Concord police would have had another opportunity to apprehend Clegg at JFK International Airport, and that the “few hours delay” before a warrant could be issued wouldn’t meaningfully affected their chances of doing so.
“CPD 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 order states. “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.”
Court records show that Concord police were also aware Verizon has a dedicated team to handle law enforcement requests, including a 24/7 exigency hotline and a separate, streamlined process for responding to search warrants and subpoenas.
The case will be sent back to Superior Court, where a judge will reconsider Clegg’s motion to suppress the evidence before June 15. Clegg is serving a 100-year prison sentence for the 2022 murders of Steve and Wendy Reid, who were shot to death on a hiking trail near their home.
Early events
On the afternoon of April 18, 2022, Steve and Wendy Reid, a retired Concord couple respectively aged 67 and 66, left their home for a walk along the Broken Ground trails and didn’t return.
They were reported missing two days later, and a manhunt for a suspect began.
The investigation involved local, state and federal authorities and ultimately spanned six months, ending with Clegg’s arrest inside a public library in South Burlington, Vermont.
No motive has been provided for why Clegg shot and killed the Reids.
Concord police first interacted with Clegg two days after the murders, when they found him at a tent site near the trail. He had given them a fake name, ‘Arthur Kelly,’ and told officers he was homeless. But unlike others in the local homeless community, he had no interactions with city shelters or services.
The next day, he disappeared, leaving behind a burned tent.
Surveillance footage from nearby businesses, along with other evidence, soon identified the man who called himself Arthur Kelly as the suspect in the Reids’ murder.
With his true identity still unknown, local police began referring to him as the “Mountain Dew Man,” due to the unusual number of soda cans left at the tent site where they first encountered him.
Further investigation uncovered that Clegg had a criminal history in Utah, including an outstanding warrant for absconding from probation, and prior arrests that resulted in police finding stolen firearms in his possession. Investigators with Homeland Security also told Concord Police that Clegg had previously traveled to Portugal.
When Clegg was arrested in Vermont, he was carrying a Romanian passport under the name Claude Zemo, $7,000 in cash and a Glock 17 handgun. Forensic testing by the New Hampshire State Police confirmed that this handgun fired the bullets, fragments and casings found both at the crime scene and at Clegg’s former tent site in Concord.
Arrest with phone ping
After months of searching, and with the Concord community growing increasingly uneasy that the suspect had not yet been caught, investigators reached a breakthrough on Oct. 11, 2022.
A Utah police detective notified Concord authorities that Homeland Security had information indicating Clegg had booked a flight from JFK Airport to Berlin, Germany. The flight was scheduled to depart a few days later, on Oct. 14, at 12:30 a.m.
Believing that a warrant could take “days or weeks to process,” Concord police decided to ping Clegg’s phone number without one, aiming to track him down before he boarded the flight. Over the next 17 hours, police also submitted three warrantless requests to Verizon through its exigency hotline.
The next day, detectives tracked him at a grocery store in Burlington before trailing him to a nearby library, where they arrested him.
A year later, after a three-week trial, a 16-member jury found Clegg guilty on all nine charges he faced: four charges of second-degree murder, four of falsifying evidence and one of firearm possession as a convicted felon.
Clegg was sentenced to two consecutive 50-year-to-life terms, which he is currently serving at the state prison.
In January, he filed an appeal, arguing that a panel of judges should review whether the Concord police had violated his constitutional rights by obtaining his phone data without a warrant.
“No man with any pride or dignity gives up just because it was a single battle,” he said in court after the jury found him guilty. “Especially when he knows he was in the right.”