A New Hampshire judge has denied Logan Clegg’s attempt to throw out key evidence in the case that sent him to prison for the 2022 murders of a Concord couple, ruling that investigators would have inevitably discovered the evidence even though they tracked him down without a search warrant. The decision, reported by NHPR in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative and originally produced by the Concord Monitor, reaffirms an earlier ruling that the New Hampshire Supreme Court had ordered the lower court to reexamine.
The order, released June 12 by Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John C. Kissinger, Jr., keeps in place the evidence that helped convict Clegg of one of the most closely followed crimes in recent New Hampshire memory. For the families of victims Steve and Wendy Reid, and for the broader public that watched the case unfold, the ruling marks another step toward finality, even as the constitutional questions it raises continue to ripple through the state’s legal system.
The Case That Gripped Concord
Clegg was convicted in the 2022 killings of Steve and Wendy Reid, a retired Concord couple who were fatally shot on a hiking trail near the city’s Broken Ground trails. The case drew intense attention across New Hampshire, both because of the seemingly random nature of the violence on a public trail and because of the months-long manhunt that followed before an arrest was made.
A jury found Clegg guilty on nine charges connected to the Reid murders: four counts of second-degree murder, four counts of falsifying evidence, and one count of firearm possession as a convicted felon. He is currently serving two consecutive sentences of 50 years to life at the New Hampshire State Prison in Berlin. The scope of the verdict and the length of the sentence reflected the gravity of the crime and the strength of the evidence prosecutors assembled.
That evidence is precisely what Clegg’s legal team has tried to challenge. The dispute centers not on whether the items found were incriminating, but on how police obtained the information that led them to Clegg in the first place.
The Constitutional Question
The heart of the matter is a warrantless search. In the fall of 2022, six months after the Concord murders, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security alerted New Hampshire authorities that Clegg had purchased a one-way flight to Germany. The notice arrived on October 11, 2022, and Clegg’s flight was scheduled to depart from New York at 12:30 a.m. just three days later, on October 14.
Believing they had little time to act before Clegg left the country, Concord police decided to “ping” the phone number associated with the flight reservation through his carrier, Verizon. They did so without first securing a warrant. The warrantless requests led detectives to track Clegg to a grocery store in Burlington, Vermont, and then to follow him to a library, where they arrested him. Once he was in custody, police found a handgun that matched the one used to shoot the Reids, along with other evidence in his backpack and at a campsite in Burlington.
The timing pressure was real, but so was the legal shortcut. Investigators could have sought a time-sensitive warrant compelling Verizon to cooperate. The complication, according to the court record, was that Verizon’s internal manual instructs its team to respond to warrants within 14 days, a timeline that would have been useless given that Clegg’s flight was set to leave in three. Faced with that gap, police chose speed over process.
What the Supreme Court Said
Clegg’s attorneys argued that the warrantless phone tracking violated his constitutional protections against unreasonable searches, and that the evidence flowing from it should be excluded. In March 2026, the New Hampshire Supreme Court agreed that the cell phone location data had been obtained improperly. The justices found that Concord police detectives violated Clegg’s constitutional rights when they failed to obtain a warrant before contacting Verizon for location and text data.
But the Supreme Court did not simply throw out the evidence and end the matter. Instead, it remanded the case back to the lower trial court, directing it to reconsider whether the warrantless search was a serious enough constitutional violation to require excluding the evidence that was ultimately used to convict him. In other words, the high court identified the violation but left it to the trial court to weigh whether the remedy of suppression was warranted.
The Inevitable Discovery Doctrine
On remand, Judge Kissinger again declined to suppress the evidence, this time grounding the decision in the doctrine of inevitable discovery. That doctrine permits evidence seized during an illegal search to remain admissible if the search was justified, if police acted in good faith, and if the evidence would have inevitably surfaced during a future legal search.
“The court finds that the Concord police would have inevitably discovered the evidence that was inside of Mr. Clegg’s backpack at the time of his arrest as well as the evidence found at his Burlington campsite,” Kissinger wrote in the June 12 order. The state, the court concluded, had met that legal standard.
The judge also weighed the severity of the police department’s conduct against Clegg’s constitutional rights, a balancing test that ultimately favored the state. “Given the limited nature of CPD’s intrusion and the absence of bad faith, the court concludes that the weight of society’s interest in deterring CPD’s unlawful police conduct is relatively low,” the order states. “By contrast, the weight of the public interest in having the jury receive all of the probative evidence implicated by Mr. Clegg’s motion to suppress is comparatively high.” Witnesses for the state had underscored the urgency local authorities felt to apprehend Clegg before he could board his flight, and the court found no evidence that police acted in bad faith.
What It Means and Where the Case Stands
For now, the ruling leaves Clegg’s conviction and sentence intact. He remains imprisoned in Berlin, and the evidence that tied him to the Reid murders stays in the record. The decision is a clear win for prosecutors, who have argued throughout that the urgency of the situation justified the police response and that the evidence would have come to light regardless.
The case nonetheless carries weight well beyond Clegg himself. The Supreme Court’s recognition that the warrantless ping violated constitutional protections is a meaningful statement about the limits of police authority when it comes to cell phone data, even in fast-moving investigations. At the same time, the inevitable discovery ruling illustrates how courts can acknowledge a rights violation while still allowing the resulting evidence to stand. New Hampshire courts have wrestled with similar questions of evidence and procedure in other recent high-profile cases, and the Clegg decision adds to that evolving body of law.
For New Hampshire residents, the takeaway is twofold. The justice system continues to work toward resolution in a case that shook the Concord community, and the courts are actively defining how constitutional protections apply to modern surveillance tools. Both threads are likely to keep surfacing as law enforcement increasingly relies on digital data to solve crimes.
