Key witness places Clegg at the crime scene minutes after hearing gunshots

By JAMIE L. COSTA

Monitor staff

Published: 10-06-2023 5:31 PM

Bang, bang, a slight pause, and another bang, bang, bang, is what Nan Nutt said she heard within minutes of entering the Marsh Loop Trail in Concord last spring.

Spooked by what she thought were gunshots but aware she’d been watching too much crime television, she continued on the trail another few minutes until she saw a young man staring off into the woods, Nutt testified on Friday in Logan Clegg’s double murder trial. With her head down, she continued on her path toward him until he turned and faced her.

“My first thought was that he probably heard the same shots that I heard but I thought he didn’t look like the normal hiker or walker on this trail. He reminded me of homeless people I had seen around town,” she said. “He continued to look into the woods for a while and appeared to be staring, not scanning, as his head was not moving, he was just staring straight and as I came fairly close to him, he turned and looked at me. I felt anxious.”

Pulling her dogs in close to her side, she shifted her gaze to her feet and shuffled past him, uncomfortable with his demeanor, she said. She did not look off into the woods in the direction he was staring nor did she catch his eye or say hello to him.

“Because he made me uncomfortable, I turned around to make sure I knew what he was wearing, I wanted to remember what he looked like, and as I turned around, he turned around and looked at me,” Nutt said. “I turned back around and kept walking. I was not comfortable with him looking at me.”

That man was Logan Clegg and Nutt’s interaction with him was just moments after he shot and killed Steve and Wendy Reid, prosecutors say.

A few days later, a neighbor showed Nutt a news article with a picture of a missing Concord couple that had passed her on the Marsh Loop Trail moments before shots rang out in the woods, she said. Almost instantly, she contacted the Concord Police Department to tell them what she had seen and heard.

“I spoke with police after my neighbor showed me an article about the couple that I had seen on the trail that, at that point, was missing,” Nutt said. “I thought, ‘It’s time to call the police.’ The picture was absolutely the couple I had seen.”

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The couple, she told them, were a white male and a Black female in their late 50s to 60s wearing hiking clothes and having a comfortable conversation with one another as they briskly moved passed her on the trail. She was confident they were the missing retired couple, Steve and Wendy Reid, she told them.

The Reids entered the wooded section of the Marsh Loop Trail about 200 yards in front of Nutt around 2:50 p.m. on April 18, 2022, and five minutes later, she heard the gunshots, according to the prosecution’s timeline. She never saw them again. When police asked her if she saw anyone else on the trail, she gave them a description of the man she’d seen looking off the trail into the woods.

He was a white male with a slender build in his late 20s to early 30s wearing brown khaki pants, a navy sweatshirt or hoodie and a black backpack. In his hands, he held a plastic grocery bag that appeared to be full. Pushing against it was a cylindrical item that reminded her of a peanut butter jar not more than four inches in diameter. Nutt could not recall if he was wearing a hat but noted that his clothes didn’t appear out of place and were not stained.

The man Nutt described matched the description of the man police found in the woods and questioned in the days following the murders. He gave police the name Arthur Kelly, one of Clegg’s aliases. Police observed him on surveillance leaving Shaw’s off Loudon Road, wearing the same clothes described by Nutt, in the minutes before the Reids were fatally shot.

Around the same time Nutt heard five gunshots, Allen Schwarz was hiking farther to the west on the Ry’s Way trail and recalled hearing four shots, he testified on Friday.

Completing his hike traveling south on the Marsh Loop Trail, he recalled passing a large tree on his left before noticing four shell casings in the leaves just off the trail, he said. He picked one up to look for identification, which he did not find, dropped it back to the ground and exited the woods.

On Friday afternoon, Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Mitchell Weinberg testified that the Reids’ manner of death was homicide and the cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds. In his findings, Weinberg noted that Wendy Reid was shot twice while Steve Reid was shot four times, which likely caused immediate death.

Additionally, Steve Reid sustained postmortem abrasions on his back, chest and abdomen while Wendy Reid sustained a postmortem abrasion on her back, consistent with being dragged, he continued. As a result of the autopsy, Weinberg concluded that the Reids were not shot at close range, or rather, were shot at a distance greater than three feet.

Clegg, 27, who is standing trial for the Reids’ murders, was known to live in a tent near the trail system less than half a mile from the Reids’ apartment complex off Loudon Road. In the days following the murders, Clegg fled the area and police launched an extensive six-month investigation that led to his arrest in October.

His attorneys have maintained police have the wrong man and that Clegg lied and fled Concord because of his criminal past and his desire to be left alone.

Clegg is facing four charges of second-degree murder, four charges of falsifying physical evidence and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. If convicted, he faces life in prison.

Court will resume on Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. following the Monday holiday.

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