Bullet casings found weeks and months after Reid shootings focus of Clegg trial testimony

CONCORD, NH – Two police officers and a former assistant attorney general took the stand Tuesday to testify about bullets and shell casings found in the days, weeks and months after Djeswende and Stephen Reid were shot to death on Marsh Loop Trail, as the second week of testimony in the trial of Logan Clegg, charged with killing the Reids in April 2022, began.

But it was two short snippets of surveillance video as the day’s testimony in Merrimack County Superior Court drew to a close that had the courtroom riveted.

Video shown by Assistant Attorney General Joshua Speicher showed a man buying items and walking out of the Loudon Road Shaw’s supermarket less than half an hour before the Reids are believed to have been shot on April 18, 2022. Investigators and prosecutors believe the man – dressed in black pants and a blue coat, wearing a black knapsack, baseball cap and a blue bandanna covering most of his face – is Clegg.

Det. Danica Gorham, of the Concord Police Department, lead investigator in the case, testified that she first saw the video after it was brought to her attention by Concord Police Department Det. Wade Brown.

The man in the video is similar to the description of a man seen about 25 minutes later on Marsh Loop Trail in the nearby Broken Ground Trail System by Nan Nutt, who was walking her dogs. Nutt saw the man about five minutes after she heard gunshots and about 10 minutes after the Reids passed her on the trail.

Nutt, though, said in testimony Friday that she was certain the man she saw was wearing khaki pants, not black ones.

When Gorham said that Brown told her they had a man on surveillance video who “matched Nan Nutt’s description,” defense attorney Caroline Smith objected, and Judge John Kissinger sustained the objection.

A second video clip showed the man making purchases at the self-checkout. Earlier testimony was that the man bought a cooked Rotisserie chicken and a large bottle of Mountain Dew. Nutt had testified she saw one grocery bag, which was fairly full and stretched across a lid that could’ve been something like a jar of peanut butter.

Speicher had started asking Gorham about the store receipt from the man’s purchases when testimony ended for the day.

Clegg, dressed in the same blue shirt and black pants he’s worn since the trial began a week ago, watched intently, sometimes taking notes.

Before the surveillance video was shown, Gorham, and others, testified about bullets and shell casings that were found on the Marsh Loop Trail and other areas of the trail system on May 20, Aug. 25, Aug. 30 and Aug. 31, 2022.

Gorham said that bullets and shell casings she found with a metal detector on Aug. 25 and Aug. 30 at the site where a tent and its contents had been burned months earlier were difficult to find. The metal detector that investigators were using gave false readings, and every time it beeped, they would dig to see what they could find.

At the site, about a quarter mile north of where police believe the Reids were shot on Marsh Loop Trail, investigators found one shell casing in the footprint of the burned tent and eight more in a nearby clearing. When they returned Aug. 30, they found 10 more in the clearing.

Gorham said investigators then brought the metal detector to Marsh Loop Trail to search there. That area, she testified, had already been searched “several times,” including a line search with about 20 officers, that Det. Garret Lemoine also testified to earlier Tuesday.

Investigators had already found bullet fragments and blood on the trail near where the Reids’ bodies were found April 21, 2022, and former Assistant Attorney General Geoffrey Ward had spotted two shell casings near the possible shooting scene May 20, 2022.

Using the metal detector, on Aug. 30 and 31, 2022, Gorham and other police found three bullets, in a small cluster. All were buried eight to 10 inches in the dirt. The bullets were feet away from where blood was found leaves at the entrance to a small trail that led about 50 yards down an incline to where the Reids were found.

“[The bullets] were not in plain sight,” Gorham said several times in answer to Speicher’s questions about finding the three bullets in August, four months after the Reids were killed.

When he asked her how many times the area had been searched, Gorham said, “several.”

Gorham said in the days after the Reids’ bodies were found, when police asked the public for information, they received more than 400 tips.

Speicher asked how many they followed up on.

“As many as we could,” Gorham said. “Upwards of 100. Hundreds.”

Ward, who is now an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of New Hampshire, began testimony Tuesday morning, recounting how he found two shell casings behind a large tree on Marsh Loop Trail May 20. It was close to where blood was found, the entrance to what prosecutors called the “drag trail” leading down an incline to where the bodies were found.

Ward had been brought to the scene by investigators, along with Assistant Chief Deputy Medical Examiner Mitchell Weinberg, to view the scene that day a month after the shootings.

“I was standing there, looking around, and looked down to the left and saw what appeared to me to be a couple of shell casings in the pine needles and leaves,” he said.

He said he stepped back from them and alerted Det. Wade Brown. “I said something like ‘Wade, take a look at this,’” he said in response to questions from Speicher.

On cross-examination, defense attorney Smith asked him if the scene was still secured on May 20, 2022, which means the public doesn’t have access. Ward said it was secured during the visit, but hadn’t been in the weeks prior, because it was an outdoor, public place and would have been difficult to block off.

In response to questions from Smith, Ward said he’d wandered a little north of the big tree that is at the beginning of the drag trail and where he moments later found the bullets, to have a “different vantage point” of the crime scene.

“Not to see if you can find something someone missed?” Smith asked.

Ward said that when he’s at a crime scene he isn’t necessarily looking for something someone missed, but it’s also not uncommon for him to notice things about the scene. “I want as a prosecutor to make sure I understand everything I can about the area.”

He said one reason he walked behind the tree was to see if it was big enough for someone to stand behind and ambush someone on the trail.

On re-direct questioning by Speicher, Ward said the casings were “partially obscured by leaves and sticks.”

He said, in response to Smith, that the casings weren’t new-looking, but also “hadn’t been there for decades.”

Det. Garrett Lemoine also testified that he was present when casings were found on many of the occasions, both in the days after the Reids’ bodies, and in the months following.

Lemoine was part of the line search shortly after the shootings that included about 20 law enforcement officers walking about arms’ length from each other searching the area around the scene, including where Ward later found the casings.

Lemoine also testified about surveillance video from the Loudon Road Walmart from April 20, 2022. A man police believe is Clegg, dressed similar to the man in the April 18 Shaw’s surveillance video, is seen buying a 12-pack of Mountain Dew Code Red and other items.

The man seen on the video is wearing a blue bandanna as a face covering, though face coverings were largely not being used by April 2022, Lemoine said.

Officers who talked to a man that police believe is Clegg at a tent site near the Alton Woods apartment complex on April 20, 2022, when they were looking for the Reids, said he had a pile of Mountain Dew Code Red cans outside his tent.

Lemoine also testified about finding Clegg in Burlington, Vermont, Oct. 11, 2022, which led to his arrest the next day. Clegg had a one-way ticket to fly to Berlin, Germany, out of JFK Airport in New York on Oct. 14.

Lemoine and his partner, Det. Matthew Doyon, used location information from Clegg’s Verizon Trac Phone to find Clegg’s location. Clegg had used his real name and that phone number to buy his airline ticket.

The defense had tried during three days of hearings in May to have the phone location information excluded as evidence. The police made an exigent circumstances request for the information, which allowed them to get it without a warrant. Kissinger ruled after the hearings that the evidence would be allowed.

After Clegg was tracked to the public library in South Burlington, Vermont, he was arrested by Vermont State Police on a fugitive warrant out of Utah. He was arrested on charges he killed the Reids in the following days.

In cross-examination, Smith asked Lemoine about the police presence to arrest Clegg on the warrant.

Lemoine testified there were six officers at the scene, not including himself, including three with long guns and at least one in tactical gear.

Also testifying Tuesday was Concord patrol Officer Brian Cregg, who responded to a complaint by a Profile Avenue resident on April 15, 2022, that there was a tent site in the woods off the nearby power lines.

He said it stood out to him. “Normally we don’t take tent calls in that area,” he said. “We take them all over the city, but not in that area.” He said it is illegal to camp out in the city.

At the site he saw a pair of man’s brown boots outside the tent, which was padlocked. He said nobody was there.

Defense attorney Mariana Dominguez asked him how he knew no one was there.

“It was padlocked,” he said.

Dominguez pointed out it was padlocked on the outside.

She also asked him if he’d written a report about finding the site, or gone back to it to tell the camper to move along. He responded that he hadn’t.

“You testified [on direct] with some specificity,” Dominguez said. “Did you review any other officer’s reports [before testifying]?”

Cregg said he didn’t.

Cregg apparently didn’t notify investigators searching for the Reids after they were reported missing five days later, or notify investigators after they were found dead six days later, about the tent site. Investigators in the case first found out about it in July 2022.

Police believe that site is the “burnt tent site” where Gorham and other investigators in August 2022 found the shell casings and other possible evidence against Clegg.

Eliseo Medina testified Friday that on April 20, 2022, he stumbled upon the tent site while he was biking in the area and saw it had been recently burned. He took photos, including a pile of more than 100 camping-size propane tanks, which he later shared with police.

Clegg has been held in Merrimack County Jail without bail since his arrest a year ago. He is charged with two counts of second-degree murder for “knowingly causing the death” of each of the Reids, two alternative second-degree murder charges for “recklessly causing” their deaths, three counts of falsifying physical evidence and one count of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm and one count of falsifying physical evidence (a Class B felony) was added.

The trial resumes at 10 a.m. Wednesday and is expected to last until Oct. 20.