Convicted Concord Killer Logan Clegg's Lawyer Argues Evidence Tainted

By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH

Police violated the Constitution by failing to get a search warrant before they obtained key evidence in the murder of Concord couple Stephen and Djeswende ?Wendy? Reid, according to defense attorney Thomas Barnard.

Barnard argued Wednesday before the New Hampshire Supreme Court that evidence connecting Logan Clegg to the Reids' deaths is tainted because Concord Police detectives didn?t want to wait for a warrant before they arrested him in Vermont.

?So the fact that the police later got a search warrant does not erase the taint of the unconstitutional search. Clegg's backpack, they wouldn't have had that if it wasn't for the unconstitutional search. Clegg's Vermont campsite, they never would have found, if it wasn't for the unconstitutional search,? Barnard said.

Clegg is serving a 50-years-to-life sentence for the seemingly senseless killings of the retired couple in 2022. Among the items recovered during his arrest, police found a 9 mm pistol, ammunition, and $7,000 in cash.

Location data from cell phones is protected under the Stored Communications Act. Under the law, police can obtain that data from service providers if they first obtain a warrant from a judge. However, cellular companies like Verizon allow police to obtain information without a warrant by calling an ?emergency situations? hotline.

Police found Clegg living in the woods in Burlington, Vermont, five months after the murders, thanks to cell phone location data they obtained without a warrant. Concord detectives zeroed in on Clegg after a source in federal law enforcement tipped them off that Clegg had a one-way plane ticket to Germany.

But Assistant Attorney General Audriana Mekula argued police did not need a search warrant to get the data, since they had a reasonable belief that Clegg was about to leave the country and would, at any time, destroy evidence before getting on the plane. His flight to Germany was scheduled to leave New York 56 hours from the time they got the tip from Homeland Security.

?Any amount of delay, whether it was six hours or six minutes, however, in this case, would have potentially meant that the detectives would have lost this location information,? Mekula said.

Barnard pointed out that while detectives obtained the data without a warrant because the supposedly dangerous Clegg posed a flight risk, they waited several hours after getting the information before making the arrest. The Verizon data was obtained late the night before Clegg?s arrest, and Concord detectives planned to look for him after dawn.

Mekula argued there?s nothing contradictory in the fact Concord detectives felt getting Clegg?s location was such an urgent matter that they could not wait for a warrant, and then waited several hours before using that data. The Verizon data gave the detectives a search radius of 1,500 meters of woods around the nearest cell phone tower.

?That's a lot of woods. Who knows what could have happened if they went in the dark to try to find an armed suspect who had committed two prior homicides,? Mekula said.

The Court?s final ruling in the case could take months. All but Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi sat on the bench for Wednesday?s oral arguments.

Clegg was living in a tent in the woods off the Marsh Loop Trail in Concord when the couple was killed in April of 2022. 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.

When he was arrested, Clegg had an airplane ticket to Germany, cash he reportedly earned from working at a Vermont grocery store, and a Romanian travel card obtained under the name Arthur Kelly.

The Reids were retired after coming home to Concord from a career abroad. Stephen Reid was a USAID consultant and travelled the world for his job.

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