State ballistics expert ties casing found on trail to Logan Clegg’s gun

Story updated at 7 p.m.

CONCORD, NH – The indictments against Logan Clegg will stand, Judge John Kissinger ruled Tuesday afternoon in Merrimack County Superior Court after defense attorney Caroline Smith moved to have them dismissed, arguing the state hadn’t proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

“There’s sufficient evidence” that Clegg may be the person who shot Djeswende and Stephen Reid to death, and all of the indictments will pass to the jury, Kissinger said after hearing the defense and state make their case in a 15-minute motion hearing after the state rested its case Tuesday.

The hearing was held without the jury present.

The defense motion is fairly standard after a state rests in a murder case, but gave an indication about how Kissinger views the strength of the state’s case against Clegg.

Clegg was indicted on 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, four counts of falsifying physical evidence and one count of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm.

After Kissinger’s ruling, at 3 p.m. Tuesday, the defense called its first witness. The trial, now in its third week, was originally scheduled to end Friday, but there are indications it may go into next week.

The state’s final witness was Jill Therriault, of the New Hampshire State Police forensics lab, who testified a bullet casing found on Marsh Loop Trail a month after the Reids were shot, in the area investigators believe the shooting happened, matches test casings fired from Clegg’s gun.

During the hearing on the motion to dismiss, Smith said what the defense team has implied throughout the trial – that the casings, found May 20, 2022, by Assistant Attorney General Geoffrey Ward “in plain sight,” after extensive searches of the area in the preceding weeks, were not there when the site was searched.

“Yes, we’re certainly implying someone planted those casings, and the state hasn’t done anything to refute that,” Smith said. She didn’t say who may have planted them.

Investigators at the time had found no evidence that would have led them to Sig Sauer 9mm Luger bullets. In August, 18 such casings, which Therriault testified also matched Clegg’s gun, were found at his former tent site about a quarter mile from the shootings.

Allan Schwarz earlier in the trial testified he’d been hiking on Marsh Loop Trail the afternoon the Reids were believed to have been shot and saw four shell casings in the area where the two cases were later found. But when Schwarz and an investigator with a metal detector looked for them on April 22, 2022, they couldn’t find them. At least five searches, two including bullet-sniffing dogs, others with metal detectors and an intensive line search also failed to turn them up.

Ward saw them when he was visiting the crime scene with investigators on May 20, 2022. He testified he simply looked down and saw them on the ground.

Assistant Attorney General Ryan Olberding, making the state’s case for the indictments at Tuesday’s hearing, said whether someone believes the casings were there and missed, or were planted, they still match the casings shot from Clegg’s gun, found in his backpack when he was arrested Oct. 12, 2022.

Under questioning from Assistant Attorney General Joshua Speicher Tuesday, Therriault said she fired test rounds from Clegg’s gun in the state forensic lab’s test firing room, and the test round’s casing had individual characteristics that matched the casing.

Speicher, during his direct questioning in front of the jury, didn’t specify that the casing was one of the ones Ward found near the crime scene, but referred to it by its police evidence number, 2589. Other witnesses have testified to the casing having that evidence number, but Therriault was also testifying about other casings and bullets found.

Therriault said that when checking bullets and casings, she looks for class characteristics, which anything shot from a similar gun would have – caliber and shape of firing pin, for instance. If class matches, under a microscope she looks for individual characteristics that weren’t part of a manufacturer’s design, but things a specific gun would leave.

Therriault pointed to the similarities between the test-fired casing and evidence number 2589 – the casing found May 20,2022 – on a photo from her microscope’s camera projected on the wall behind her.

During cross-examination, Smith asked Therriault if she assumed the May 20 casing was related to ones found in August 2022. Those casings were found at a tent site Clegg had lived in before the shootings and burned sometime after April 15, with most of his belongs inside.

Therriault said she knew that the casings and other ballistics evidence were all part of the same case.

“You have no connection between these casings [and other ballistics evidence from the case], other than it was submitted [as the same case]?” Smith asked.

Therriault said that was accurate.

Therriault also testified that the casing was discolored when she got it, possibly from fingerprint examinations.

“You can’t say this casing was in the same shape [when found] as when you got it?” Smith asked.

Therriault said she couldn’t.

“And the casing you examined, you don’t know how it got there?” Smith asked. “You don’t know if it’s related to the shooting of the Reids at all?”

“Only that it was submitted with all the other evidence [in the case],” she responded.

Smith also pressed Therriault on her determination that most of the ballistics evidence she examined came from a Glock 9 mm pistol.

Therriault had listed 14 other types of 9 mm guns that many of the casings and bullets could’ve come from. Smith continually made the case that there were many guns, including ghost guns [the owner buys a gun frame and barrel and other parts separately and constructs a gun], that could’ve shot the bullets found.

Smith also pressed Therriault on the characteristics of the bullets found, including one recovered from Djeswende Reid’s head, and several found underground and in a tree branch at the former tent site. Therriault said they were all too damaged to match to Clegg’s gun. But she testified that combining characteristics of the casings found and those of the bullets, the commonalities led her to believe the bullets came from a Glock.

“But you can’t say those bullets came from those casings?” Smith asked.

“Right, I can’t put bullets back in casings [as a match],” Therriault said.

Wearing a gray zip-up sweater over the blue shirt he’s worn since jury selection on Oct. 2, Clegg listened with his chin in his hand, sometimes taking notes.

Sufficient evidence to proceed

Smith, in her motion to dismiss, argued that key state witness Nan Nutt, who saw a man resembling Clegg on the trail five minutes after she heard gunshots, described someone who may not be Clegg. Nutt said the man had khaki pants and the grocery bags he was carrying had what looked like a peanut butt-er-type jar in them. Clegg was seen on Shaw’s surveillance video less than half an hour earlier wearing black pants and buying a rotisserie chicken and two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.

Smith also said that if it was Clegg, he would’ve come upon the area right around the time of the shooting, and from a different direction.

She also said that the “burnt tent site,” was Clegg’s, but the state didn’t prove Clegg burned it to hide evidence. Investigators found 155 propane tanks and other items in the charred footprint of the tent. In August 2022, they found the 18 bullet casings that Therriault had testified about earlier Tuesday. Onew was in the footprint and the rest in an adjacent clearing. They also found three bullets underground and one embedded in a tree branch. There were also pots and pans and other detritus, including a charred jeans label the same size as those Clegg wears.

The state contends that the morning of April 19, 2022, Clegg bought a new tent and sleeping bag at Walmart on Loudon Road – a purchase caught on surveillance video – because he’d burned the one he’d been living in to hid evidence after he shot the Reids the day before. The state also believes Clegg burning the tent and its contents shows consciousness of guilt.

But Smith said he burned it because police Officer Bran Cregg had visited it on April 15, 2022, and Clegg was worried he’d be arrested on a fugitive warrant out of Utah.

Smith said that’s also why he gave police a false name – something he’d done before – and got on a bus to Portland, Maine, on April 23, 2022, with a ticket he bought April 22, the day after the Reids’ bodies were found.

She said the falsifying evidence charges, which also include him clearing his laptop data, can’t be proven if it can’t be proven he killed the Reids.

Olberding argued that Clegg was living at Broken Ground Trail System when the Reids were killed, but later lied to then-Det. Wade Brown that he’d left the area in March. He lied about where his tent site was, removing himself from the scene. He lied when he said he didn’t shop at Walmart, though the police found 50 separate shopping trips on surveillance video.

He also bought a gun, gun accessories and ammunition in February 2022.

Olberding also said that the five-minute window between when Nutt heard gunshots and when she saw the man the state asserts is Clegg on the trail near the crime scene doesn’t mean Clegg moved the Reids’ bodies all the way to the recovery site off the trail before Nutt came upon him. Olberding said Clegg could’ve moved them out of site and moved them farther down later.

Olberding said aside from the details about the grocery bags and pants color, Nutt’s description of the man on the trail “is a very close description to what the defendant was seen wearing” in the Shaw’s video.

Kissinger, when ruling on the motion, said that the jury can accept all, or some, or none, of what Nutt said. “But he generally matches the description of the defendant.”

He said he believes the state’s evidence that the tent site was burned between April 15 and 20, 2022, is credible, and is evidence of consciousness of guilt.

He also said it seems to be “an extreme reach” to argue Clegg burned the tent site because he didn’t want to be arrested for a probation violation. “To burn all of his possessions but what he was carrying on his back…essentially all of his worldly possessions.”

Kissinger also said that Clegg bought a firearm that could’ve been the firearm used to shoot the Reids; gave “a series of false statements to police, had a one-way ticket to Berlin, Germany, and had done computer searches for news in Concord, New Hampshire, after he left the area.

Testimony will continue with defense witness Amber Smith, a DNA analyst with DNA International, in Florida, at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Smith spent about an hour on the stand Tuesday afternoon explaining to the jury the process of extracting and testing DNA. She had been sent 32 items for testing from the Concord Police Department and New Hampshire Office of the Attorney General, and tested 63 DNA samples from those items.

Earlier Tuesday, FBI agent Kevin Hoyland testified about cellphone and Google data that led police to the area where the Reids’ bodies were. They were found by police sniffer dog Oakley after the location was narrowed down.

Google data pinpointed the last location for Stephen Reid’s phone. The phone was shut down in a “non-usual” way at 4:29 p.m. April 18, 2022, more than an hour after investigators believe the Reids were shot. Hoyland said that type of shutdown can come from a phone being broken, the antenna broke, it’s in an area with no coverage, or some other way other than someone putting it in airplane mode or intentionally shutting it down. Under cross-examination, he said it could also shut down that way because of the battery dying.

Stephen Reid’s phone has never been found.

Hoyland also testified how he helped narrow down Clegg’s location in Vermont after police uncovered the number on his Verizon Trac phone.