Park Predators - The Tenter

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

When a retired couple vanishes on an afternoon walk behind their apartment in New Hampshire in the spring of 2022, it's all hands on deck to find them. When the horror of what happened to them is revealed, it sends investigators down a rabbit hole of clues which lead to the doorstep of a young man with a dark past.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-tenter Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators  | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today happened just a few years ago, in 2022. It's probably a crime story that listeners living in the New England region of the United States know about. But for many of you tuning in, it might be the first time you're hearing about it. It takes place in the city of Concord, New Hampshire, which is located about an hour and a half northwest of Boston, Massachusetts. All around the capital

city are lakes and a few different state and local parks. It's a really beautiful place to spend time outdoors without necessarily having to go very far off the grid. There are 30 different designated public trail systems in Concord that loop through or around residential neighborhoods. One of those popular hiking areas is the Broken Ground Trail System, which is made up of six different smaller trails or paths that in total cover about five miles. The Marsh Loop Trail is about one and a half miles long and a short stretch of it is right off Interstate 393.

When ice and snow begin to melt after a long winter, many of the trails get muddy and erosion can be a problem. Walkers who don't want to get dirty tend to veer off the beaten path to avoid the mud and end up doing what's known as widening the trail. The city's conservation commission highly discourages this, not only because it speeds up erosion, but because you could get hurt. In mid-April 2022, a couple going for an afternoon stroll on Marsh Loop ended up going off trail, but not by choice. The saga of events that unfolded after they vanished is a story with as many twists and turns as the city's trail system itself.

By the time you finish this episode, you might be bogged down by the question, was justice served? This is Park Predators. I'm sorry. On the morning of Wednesday, April 20th, 2022, a woman named Susan Forry checked her cell phone to see if she had any texts or calls from her older brother, 67-year-old Steven Reed. Steven, who everyone just referred to as Steve, had made plans to play tennis with Susan and their other brother that morning in their hometown of Concord, New Hampshire.

But when it had come time to hit the courts, Steve had been a no-show, which Susan thought was really unusual for him. So to figure out what was going on, she tried calling him and his wife, 66-year-old Just Wendy Reed, who went by the nickname Wendy. But both of their phones just rang and rang without any response, which immediately concerned Susan.

So, she did what a lot of people in this situation would do. She started calling around to Steve and Wendy's friends, as well as their two adult children, Ryan and Lindsay. She asked all of them the same question, had anyone heard from the couple? At the time, Brian lived in Florida, and Lindsay lived a few hours away with her own family in Vermont. Neither of them had heard from their parents,

and that's when Susan realized she hadn't actually communicated with her brother either, since confirming their tennis match via text two days earlier on Monday, April 18th. So now that it was Wednesday afternoon, Susan decided to go over to Steve and Wendy's apartment in Northeast Concord to check on them. The complex, called Outenwoods Apartments, was a sprawling property with multiple buildings grouped together around a main clubhouse. It sits directly next to Interstate 393, a few retail shops and a large clump of woods

that lead to broken ground hiking trails. The Reeds lived in building 14 in a third floor unit. When Susan got there, she was accompanied by a few other family members by that point, and she explained to the property manager that Wendy and Steve were not answering their phones, and she wanted to check their unit to see if they were inside or if anything was wrong. According to reporting by the Concord monitor, the manager agreed to let Susan take a look around, but when she went inside,

what she found was kind of puzzling. It was eerily quiet and nothing in the apartment appeared to be disturbed or in disarray. In fact, it seemed as if her brother and his wife had just been there because two cell phones, Wendy's purse, and Steve's wallet were both inside the apartment. Their bed had been made too, and a window was left open. Now, I don't know if that window being open was a red flag or not, because none of the source material goes into detail about it, but I imagine since the Reeds

unit was a third floor apartment, a window being open probably wasn't super suspicious. I don't know for sure though, but that's a scenario that makes sense. Either way, when Susan looked outside, she saw that both Steve and Wendy's cars were parked in their normal spaces, which meant if they'd gone somewhere, they had to either be walking or had taken another means of transportation. By 6 20 p.m. that night, Susan had spent enough time speculating, so she called the Concord Police Department and officially reported her brother and his wife missing. Tony Cinello reported for Patch.com that Susan was actually a former commander

with the New Hampshire State Police. So I think her natural instincts to assume something was wrong probably came from the fact that she was previously in law enforcement. A few hours went by though, before Steve and Wendy were formally entered into a missing and endangered persons database. And I think that has to do with the fact that they were both adults and law enforcement needed to do at least a preliminary investigation before they filed any kind of official missing persons paperwork.

Or maybe it was just protocol. I'm not 100% sure. So shortly after getting the phone call from Susan, two city police officers went out to meet her and some others at the Reeds apartment to do a more formal search of the couple's home. When the officers got inside, they saw the same strange things everyone else had. The rooms were neat and tidy, and all of Steve and Wendy's personal belongings

were just sitting around, including their passports. There was zero indication that anyone had forced their way inside the apartment or that anything untoward had happened in the unit. The only information authorities had to work off of at that point was that family members told them neither Steve or Wendy had a history of mental illness or previous incidents involving domestic violence. Susan said that the last time anyone had physically seen them

was on Sunday, April 17th, which happened to be Easter Sunday. She emphasized that she'd texted with Steve on Monday morning, but after that, she didn't hear from him. Authorities learned from speaking with other people close to the couple that Steve and Wendy liked to spend time outdoors and frequently walked in the broken ground trail system behind their apartment complex. So during the morning and afternoon of Thursday, April 21, search crews from the police department, New Hampshire State Police, and an organization called the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit fanned out along the trail system as well as adjacent roads around the apartment complex. Patch.com reported that some officers even used search dogs and rode around on bikes looking for clues. During that time, investigators issued a news release about the missing couple, which included pictures of each of them. One detective told news publications

that the main reason Steve and Wendy's disappearance was concerning was because it was extremely unlike them to stop communicating with their loved ones and just vanish. These next few details come straight from police documents, and I'm not entirely sure how they figured this out, but within those first few hours of searching, detectives learned that in addition to the two cell phones left inside the couple's apartment, Steve actually had another cell phone. That device just so happened to be connected to his personal Gmail account. And because we live in the amazing age of technology, law enforcement was quickly able to get Google to provide them with the location information for that device and, more importantly, where

it had been recently. Shortly after 5 o'clock on that Thursday, investigators reviewed the phone's data and discovered that it had left the vicinity of the couple's apartment complex at 2.42 p.m. on Monday, April 18. Six minutes later, it had pinged again on the Marsh Loop Trail. The last time Google's software had received GPS data from it was at 3.47 p.m. on Monday, April 18th. And its location at that point in time was in a heavily wooded area off Marsh Loop Trail. So, with this critical information in hand, detectives with tracking dogs

went out around six o'clock to follow the digital footprint Steve's phone had left. And in less than half an hour, investigators zeroed in on a specific area off the trail near a noticeable vegetation pile. When one of the dog handlers took a closer look beneath some of the stuff on the pile, he saw the top of what he immediately recognized as a person's head. Over the next few hours, investigators and crime scene techs slowly removed sticks and leaves to fully reveal what was all underneath the pile. And sure enough, there at the bottom, on the ground, were Steve and Wendy's bodies.

Both of them were dead. The police then called an assistant medical examiner to the scene, and after she examined the reads, she determined that both of them had been shot. Even more interesting, she told detectives that, to her, it looked like the couple had been dragged to their makeshift grave because their clothing was bunched up in places that sort of looked unnatural. Law enforcement was kind of surprised to hear that take about the victims being dragged because detectives on scene hadn't found any blood in the area around the bodies or drag marks on the ground

that indicated someone had manipulated the scene after the killings. Something else weird that investigators noticed was that Steve's phone, the one that investigators had used to track his movements, was not with the bodies or anywhere in the general area. I imagine this caused detectives to wonder if maybe whoever had killed the pair had taken the phone with them. By the end of the day on Thursday, the Emmy's office had removed the bodies from the area and sent them to Concord Hospital to await autopsies. Meanwhile, the authorities completely closed the eastern section of Marsh Loop

Trail so that no one could disturb crime scene texts while they continued to work. At 11 p.m., the New Hampshire Attorney General's office released a statement confirming that law enforcement's investigation had officially changed from being a missing persons case to a suspicious death investigation of two adults. The AG's office also asked homeowners, businesses, and residents, really anyone in the surrounding neighborhoods, to take a look at their doorbell cameras, surveillance cameras, or dashcam video from Monday, April 18th,

to see if any of those devices caught a glimpse of the couple walking. Authorities also wanted people who may have placed wildlife cameras in the trail system to review footage from those devices too. Immediately following the discovery of the victims, New Hampshire's Fish and Game Department sent two ballistics-detecting dogs to the scene to try and find bullets or spent shell casings

used in the murders. Another pup from a local sheriff's office was brought in to find electronic devices — things like cell phones, hard drives, cameras with SD cards. Which I'll be honest, I didn't even know that was a thing dogs could do, but how cool, right? It also wasn't long before the deputy chief medical examiner from the New Hampshire ME's office conducted the couple's autopsies and determined that they both died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Steve had been shot four times with injuries to his left wrist, left shoulder, head, left arm, chest and back. And Wendy had been shot two times near the right side of her head and neck. Their deaths were ruled as homicides. Because both victims had been repositioned after being killed, the pathologists couldn't conclude with any certainty where Wendy and Steve had been standing in relation to their killer at the time of the murders.

All he could deduce was that they hadn't been shot at close range because neither of them had any soot or gunpowder burn marks on them, which typically show up when a gun is fired in close proximity at a person. After the autopsies concluded, Concord's police chief told the press, This is a tragedy. It came out of nowhere, and we're going to be doing our due diligence and investing all of our resources and working with the state. The police department checked their records and discovered that officers hadn't received

any calls reporting gunshots in the area on the day Wendy and Steve were killed. Which begged the question, how in the world had someone fired so many shots at the Reeds and no one heard a thing? Well, turns out someone had. According to police reports in this case, after the flurry of news coverage on Friday, April 22nd, talking about Steve and Wendy's murders, a woman named Nan Nutt called the Concord Police Department with some really interesting information about some alarming things she'd heard and seen while walking on the Marsh Loop Trail earlier that week. Nan told investigators that on Monday,

April 18th, she'd taken her two dogs for a walk around 2.45 p.m. Beneath some power lines near the Marsh Loop Trailhead, a couple had passed her that she now recognized as Wendy and Steve Reed. She said that the Reeds were dressed in outdoor clothing and seemed in good spirits. They were going a little bit faster than her and her dogs were, so she let them pass by and go on up ahead.

The last time she saw them, they were walking into a section of the trail that's surrounded by woods. Several minutes later, around 2.54 p.m., Nan said that she walked into the same part of the trail she'd seen the reeds go into, but suddenly stopped. Because a startling series of sounds rang out. The noise was five distinct gunshots that sounded like they'd come from a handgun, not a long gun, like a rifle. Nan told police that the shots were so loud she and her dogs had

shuddered because it felt like someone had fired them super close by. For a second she hesitated to go much further down the trail but for whatever reason she decided to continue on. After several more minutes of walking she bumped into a young man on the trail who she described as alternating his gaze from the woods to her and back and forth. The guy eventually passed by her going in the opposite direction, and neither of them said anything as they exchanged looks.

When detectives asked Nan to explain what the man looked like, she told them he was white in his late 20s or early 30s, around 5'10 tall, slender with short brown hair and a shaved face. To her, the guy appeared to be unhoused or perhaps experiencing homelessness. He was wearing khakis and a dark blue jacket that may have had a hood on it. He was also carrying a black backpack and a brown plastic grocery bag that looked like it was full of stuff. Law enforcement took down all this information from Nan to help build out a timeline of the events she'd witnessed and factor all of that into what they already knew about Steve

and Wendy's last movements. Essentially police realized that the time frame of when the couple had been killed was extremely small, sometime between 2.54 p.m. and 2.59 p.m., which meant more than likely the suspicious young man Nan had encountered was involved in the murders. After speaking with Nan, another witness also came forward who told investigators that he'd heard at least five gunshots on Monday afternoon while hiking the Marsh Loop Trail. The second witness said he'd even seen four spent shell casings laying on the ground,

but didn't report ever seeing a shooter. Unfortunately though, when he led police back to the spot where he said he seen four spent shell casings laying on the ground, but didn't report ever seeing a shooter. Unfortunately, though, when he led police back to the spot where he said he saw the spent casings, nothing was there, and neither the metal detectors nor the ballistic sniffing dogs could find them. The rest of the day, Saturday, teams of officers walked along the marsh loop trail looking for any potential evidence. At some point, they found a few bullet fragments and coagulated blood 80 feet away from where Wendy and Steve's bodies were found, which was just

more proof to investigators that they'd likely been assaulted while walking on the trail and then moved afterward. Another clue that pointed to this scenario was a patch of ripped fabric stuck to a log between where the blood was found and where Stephen Wendy ended up. That material matched the fabric Wendy's pants were made of. Brian Reed, Stephen Wendy's adult son, posted online after the murders that he'd been told his parents' bodies were definitely dragged or transported in some way after being shot. By the end of the second day of investigating, law enforcement had a much clearer picture of what had happened to the couple. Everything so far indicated they left their apartment around 2 30 ish on Monday April 18th and walked about a half a mile toward Marshal Oot Trailhead. Based on Nan's account, sometime around

2 54 p.m. Is when they were attacked and within a matter minutes, their bodies were hastily concealed in the woods beneath a few inches of leaves and vegetation. Patch.com reported that the path the Reeds would have taken from their apartment to get to the actual hiking trails went right across a road called Portsmouth Street, which was a known area for unhoused people to live in tents or makeshift shelters.

Police learned from speaking with neighbors that Stephen Wendy regularly walked past this spot three to five times a week. One theory that was floated suggested someone, maybe even the suspicious guy Nan had seen, had followed Stephen Wendy or known their routine in order to target them while they were vulnerable in the woods. But their son Brian said that his parents just sort of walked whenever they felt like it. They didn't have a set routine, so it would have been pretty difficult for someone to time

exactly when they were going to be on Marsh Loop Trail. He just couldn't buy into the theory that whoever killed his parents had done so simply for the thrill of it or to rob them. Especially considering the fact that neither Wendy nor Steve had anything of real value on them, other than Steve's extra cell phone. A week after the killings, the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office brought in the FBI to assist local investigators. By that point, more than 60 tips had come in, but all of the different agencies involved remained tight-lipped about what some of those leads were. For example, they didn't publicly release anything

about Nan's story of seeing the suspicious young man on the trail or that other witnesses account of hearing the gunshots. All the authorities would say was that they wanted to speak with anyone who might have seen something unusual or suspicious before or shortly after 2.30 p.m. on April 18th. Meanwhile, Wendy and Steve's loved ones tried to make sense

of what had happened. The Associated Press and Patch.com reported that just three years earlier the couple had settled down in Concord to enjoy retirement. Steve was originally from the south side of the capital city and like I mentioned earlier, he was close with his adult siblings. He and Wendy's daughter, Lindsay, lived with her husband in nearby Vermont.

So the pair retiring to Concord also meant that they had at least one child who was fairly close by. The Reeds first met one another in 1982 in Washington, DC, while Wendy, who was originally from Togo, West Africa, was in college on an athletic scholarship. Before that, she'd spent a few years playing travel basketball with Togo's national basketball team, winning lots of accolades and making a name for herself.

Steve had graduated from Notre Dame in the late 70s and turned down scholarships to several law schools so that he could work for the Peace Corps. When he met his wife, he'd just returned from spending four years overseas teaching English in Niger, West Africa. The two of them connected through mutual friends in DC and ended up bonding over their shared ability to speak several languages, which included French and a West African language called Hausa.

They both developed a love for spending time together, and based on some information I found in their obituaries, it seemed like their relationship was the definition of when opposites attract. Wendy was reportedly a people person who was really outgoing, while Steve was quieter and more timid. After two years of dating, they got married in 1984 in Senegal and two years later they welcomed the birth of their daughter, followed a few years later by their son. During that time, Steve earned a master's degree in public administration and went to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development, an entity also known by the acronym

USAID. In that position, he worked as a liaison with privately funded organizations that helped to find solutions for things like food insecurity and environmental problems in West Africa. Projects that directly required his oversight eventually spread to other countries like Bangladesh and Haiti. Wendy spent several years as a stay-at-home mom raising their kids before eventually going back to work as a community liaison officer for the American Embassy. Their children told Concord Monitor reporter Cassidy Jensen that their parents were true soulmates who spent a ton of time together. The COVID-19 pandemic had kept them cooped up so much inside that one of their outlets had been taking walks along trails in

Concord. Their kids also said that pre-pandemic, the pair had been traveling abroad to places they'd previously lived in, like Chad, Senegal, and Niger. Having a double murder in such a popular recreation space like the broken ground hiking trails was highly unusual for Concord, which I think explains why the crime was so jarring and made headlines every day in local newspapers. Patch.com reported that city counselors were fielding calls left and right from scared residents who felt the city's trails weren't as safe anymore. People wanted more updates from police about who the possible perpetrator was in order to feel better about going outside. But that wasn't going to happen.

Law enforcement wasn't giving up any details because the case was still very active. An associate attorney general told the press that residents needed to be patient and explained that even though folks were frightened by the killings, people needed to prepare themselves for it possibly taking weeks, months, and maybe even years to solve. Which to me seems like kind of a strange comment to make so early on in the investigation, but I guess it was just the AG's office's way of covering all their bases and trying to curb public concern. Law enforcement's response to residents' growing fears was to noticeably increase their

visibility in the city's trail systems and parks. Uniformed officers from Concord Police Department and deputies with the Merrimack County Sheriff's Office were assigned to go out and walk or ride bikes in these areas to make sure that people saw them. But this effort came at a serious cost to the city. Patch.com reported that normally Concord officials budgeted around $25,000 to $26,000 per week to pay staff at the police department over time. But all the extra hours that staff members were putting in

to work Wendy and Steve's case made that financial figure inflate exponentially. Thankfully though, the city ended up pulling some money from its emergency reserve accounts and the efforts to keep up the increased patrols continued without interruption. On Monday, May 2nd, two weeks after the murders, FBI agents and local police got back out to pound the pavement

and canvassed a bunch more homes in East Concord. They were trying to find anyone who might have surveillance footage of traffic on Portsmouth Street or any of the surrounding roadways that were within a few miles of the crime scene. By the end of the first week of May, authorities still didn't have a suspect in their sights though. A $5,000 reward was posted to try and entice people who might know something to come

forward, but still the results were nada. At that point around 130 tips had come in and while some were helpful others were just kind of meh. For example, investigators got their hands on some dashcam video that came from two area school buses as well as a private citizen, and it showed a mid-to-late 2000s dark green Toyota RAV4 parked near the Marsh Loop trailhead on the afternoon of the crime. But when authorities eventually identified and spoke with the owner of that car, they ruled them out and publicly released that the vehicle was not connected in any way to the crime. The police tried not to get discouraged, though, and thanks to some private donors, the reward

for information increased to $33,500 and then $50,000 in the hopes of getting the right folks to talk. A spokesman for the AG's office told the press, quote, "...it is crucial that any person who has information regarding these murders report to the police what information is known to them, no matter how inconsequential the person believes the information may be.'" End quote. On May 17th, a little more than a week after making that plea for help, investigators decided

to take a gamble and publicly released a composite sketch of the man Nan Nutt had described seeing on the trail shortly after hearing five gunshots. The sketch and accompanying description included all the details that Nan had provided. So, a white guy who was 5 feet 10 inches tall with a medium build and short brown hair who was wearing a dark blue jacket and carrying a black backpack. Authorities excluded the detail that Nan had seen him holding a brown plastic grocery bag and that he appeared to look unhoused.

My only assumption as to why investigators withheld this small bit of info was to probably just keep some details to themselves. The day after the sketch went out to the public, investigators got flooded with calls. More than 100 people dialed in, and some of them gave a similar description of having seen a younger white male who looked a bit sketchy going in and out of the trail system throughout March and April of 2022.

None of these accounts could help investigators put a name to the face, though. No one had taken a picture of the guy or talked to him. At this point, it was the end of May, and June was right around the corner. Lindsay and Brian, Wendy and Steve's adult kids, were growing a bit frustrated with what appeared to be a lack of progress in law enforcement's investigation. It was like the police would just throw stuff like the composite sketch out into the world, but then never give any further explanation of where it led or if detectives were any closer to making an arrest. Patch.com reported that the siblings took to social media to ask hard questions of investigators and to try and get information about what evidence had been uncovered in the case

that might point to a possible motive. All of their requests were met with the proverbial no comment due to the pending investigation response. Brian revealed in his post that he was told detectives and the FBI were using a technique known as geofencing to try and identify and track cell phones or other electronic devices that had been in close proximity to where his parents' bodies were. But again, police didn't confirm that detail publicly. It was just something Brian wrote about online.

He and his sister, Lindsay, contemplated if what had happened to their parents was somehow related to the fact that they were an interracial couple. Online, Brian mentioned that he was at least considering a race-related motive as a possibility because he personally felt the number of hate groups that had popped up in New Hampshire in recent years had increased, and maybe someone in one of those had become a threat to his parents. Lindsay's reason for suspecting that the murders might be racially motivated came from an exchange she had with one of Steve and Wendy's neighbors while moving their stuff out of their apartment

after the crime. She told Patch.com that the person she spoke with made comments that she interpreted as possible racist rhetoric regarding her mother and father's marriage, and this interaction had been so chilling to her, she reported it to police. Of all the theories floating around though, there was one that the siblings were definitely not buying into. It was a rumor that purported their parents' murders were somehow connected to work they had done for the federal government and international humanitarian

agencies overseas. Now, you might be asking yourself, wait, when did that theory start to circulate and why? Well, turns out there was some growing chatter in Concord that perhaps the titles and positions both Wendy and Steve had held in their various overseas jobs were merely that. Just titles and positions. You know, covers for their real line of work.

International espionage. Now to be clear, I don't personally hold the belief that the Reeds were retired spies. But when you think about it, I can understand why some folks made that leap. The Reeds had lived in a bunch of different countries since the late 1970s and early 80s. Steve had graduated from college with high honors, but decided to abandon offers to attend law school for free and instead enlisted in the Peace Corps. They both also spoke multiple languages and had worked for the federal government and some of its subcontractors in countries that had historically experienced lots of unrest. So you get the picture.

Other factors that fed into the whole they could have been spies narrative was the fact that residents in Concord who lived close to the broken ground hiking trails had experienced some odd things right after the murders happened. For example, some of the men who initially canvassed for information and surveillance footage during the first week or so of the investigation were reported to have been wearing plain clothes, not uniforms. Homeowners who spoke with those individuals said the guys didn't show badges or give much info about who they worked for, which kind of felt odd. One area realtor told Patch.com that two investigators who came to her house had wanted to review her home security camera footage, but they

wouldn't tell her who exactly their employer was. She was so uncomfortable with this interaction that she made sure to snap a photo of the men's car and license plate. And after they left, she called the local police to confirm the guys were actually law enforcement. And according to the source material, she was told they were legit. But of course, she didn't get their names or any other concrete information about them. So she just had to take the police's word for it that they were, in fact, working the investigation in some sort of official capacity. News outlets that dug a little bit further into this theory about the Reeds uncovered that a private company Steve had worked closely with

during his career as a contractor for USAID was Tetra Tech, a billion-dollar consulting firm headquartered in California that claimed to develop water systems and infrastructure in foreign countries, including West Africa. At some point in his career, Steve actually started working for Tetra Tech as a senior associate for democracy and governance. It's unclear though what exactly he did in that role, but a few lines in his obituary explained that one assignment required him

and Wendy to travel to and live in Haiti for a while. They reportedly worked as liaisons for the local municipalities and helped coordinate aid after a devastating earthquake hit the country in 2010. Steve and Wendy eventually moved to West Africa where he officially retired from overseas work. They came home to the U.S. for good, and Steve took up his old love of playing tennis, and Wendy joined him whenever they'd play doubles matches with friends. Their life was for all intents and purposes, like any other retired couple

who was in their late 60s. Even with all the wild theories floating around, USAID representatives didn't do anything to stamp out rumors that the couple had worked as spies for the federal government. The entity refused to comment on what Steve had done for them during his more than 30 years of service, and when asked by reporters, the entity also didn't provide any information about its contracts or operations with Tetra Tech or the U.S. government. As interesting as all that was, though, like I mentioned earlier, Lindsay, the couple's daughter, condemned people trying to make connections between her parents' previous

work and their deaths. She referred to those sorts of assumptions as conspiracy theories, which were not rooted in fact, but instead random people's misunderstanding of what her parents actually did for a living, which was humanitarian work. As you probably can imagine, law enforcement investigators in charge of the murder case wanted no part in publicly taking sides on what a possible motive was for the killings. The New Hampshire AG's office said

it would be irresponsible for their staff or police detectives to speculate on any one theory without hard facts or evidence to back it up. They weren't closing the door on much though. There was still a lot of ground to cover and clues to follow, including a vital piece of evidence that investigators had found while revisiting the crime scene on May 20th, a month after the murders. During this follow-up trip to the trail, authorities recovered two spent shell casings that had the markings SIG Luger 9mm on the bottom. That caliber of bullet was

in the same size range that could have killed Stephen Wendy, so they were kind of important. But you're probably asking yourself the same question I was, which is why did the police miss these two casings during their first search? And the answer is, I have no idea. Police records state that when the casings were eventually found, they were sitting about five feet from the spot on the trail that investigators believed was the spot where the shootings had occurred. So to call this an oversight, I think is totally fair. But regardless, once police got the casings, they had them tested at the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Lab, which determined that they'd both been shot from the same gun.

Authorities had also followed up on some tips about an abandoned burned out campsite that had previously been spotted just off Marsh Loop Trail in the days and weeks leading up to the murders. To cover their bases, police visited the site and found a handful of pots and pans, trash, clothing, soda cans, and propane tanks that appeared to have been set on fire or burned up. A lot of the other things at the campsite looked damaged too, so authorities collected a bunch of it as evidence just in case any of it became relevant in the investigation later down the road. On June 24th, more than two months after the murders,

Wendy and Steve's family members held a memorial service for them in New Hampshire. A second memorial service was scheduled to happen in West Africa to commemorate their influence, legacy, and life's work over there. Thanks to the public's support, a GoFundMe page was set up to help raise more than $14,000 for Brian and Lindsay to pay for their parents' funeral expenses. By the end of that month, investigators hadn't released any new information in the case, despite having gone through more than 400 tips. The reward for information was hovering at $50,000, but still, the investigation remained stalled. It would be three and a half long months before authorities finally broke their silence and made another huge announcement. They had an official person of interest.

According to Tony Chanel's reporting for Patch.com, on October 12th, 2022, nearly six months after the crime, law enforcement officials in Burlington, Vermont, picked up a 26-year-old unhoused man named Logan Clegg and brought him in for questioning in relation to Steve and Wendy's murders. Burlington is about two and a half hours northwest of Concord, New Hampshire. So close, but not like right next door or anything.

According to multiple news outlets, Logan had been living on the streets for a while and had some open warrants out of Utah for violating his probation in an unrelated crime from 2020, which was what allowed the authorities in Vermont to take him into custody in the first place. How exactly New Hampshire homicide detectives landed on him as a person of interest, though, for the murders wasn't information they shared right away. Those details wouldn't come out until six days later, on October 18th, when the Concord Police Department filed an affidavit for Logan's arrest

in Merrimack County Superior Court. That 25-page document explained in detail everything detectives had been up to since April, and there was a lot to unpack. For starters, the arrest warrant affidavit explained that when officers had first been searching for Stephen Wendy on Wednesday, April 20th, well before their bodies were found the following evening, a detective had bumped into a young man living in a tent in some woods near Portsmouth Street, about a half mile from the Marsh Loop Trail.

The guy told investigators that his name was Arthur Kelly, and he wasn't from New Hampshire. He was just visiting from Boston, Massachusetts. When investigators asked him how old he was, Arthur told them he was 30. The detective then ran Arthur's name and date of birth through databases in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but he didn't get any matches, which was kind of odd. So he pressed Arthur a little more about what he was doing tenting

in the woods and if he knew that a couple was missing from the area. Arthur told police he'd been away from his tent for most of the day on Wednesday and couldn't be much help to police. Shortly after that, the detectives and Arthur parted ways. Now, I imagine because Portsmouth Street and Concord and the surrounding woods near the hiking trails were common places for unhoused residents to camp, this detective's interaction with a random guy living in a tent didn't raise alarm bells initially. Especially when you take into account when this interaction between the detective and Arthur went down, Wendy and Steve's bodies hadn't been discovered yet. However,

something about Arthur and the fact that his name and date of birth had not come up in any databases just didn't sit right with the detective who'd questioned him. So by the afternoon of Friday, April 22nd, the day after the murders were discovered, law enforcement went back to the spot in the woods where they'd previously spoken with Arthur to try and question him again, but he wasn't there. His tent and all of his belongings,

even his trash, were all cleared out. Something distinct that the one detective who'd first spoken with Arthur remembered about him was that he'd had a bunch of Mountain Dew code red soda cans laying around his campsite and tent. The fact that even the soda cans were gone immediately struck investigators as strange. Because normally when unhoused folks would leave one campsite to go to another, they wouldn't even worry about leaving stuff like trash behind. Essentially, everything about Arthur's campsite being immaculately clean just felt really suspicious to police.

So their next move was to visit every store nearby that sold Mountain Dew Code Red Cans to try and find surveillance footage of Arthur. And as luck would have it, a Walmart not far from the Broken Round Trail system had video of a man matching his description buying the soda on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 20th. But there was just one problem. The guy in the video had a blue bandana over the bottom of his face the entire time he was in the store. So police couldn't determine for sure if the guy was in fact Arthur. They also obtained footage of the same man

wearing the bandana riding a Concord City bus that same day. But again, his face was covered so investigators couldn't know 100% who it was. Over the course of several weeks, investigators reviewed more surveillance video from the stores in the area and all of the clips showed instances where the same young white man purchased items. And it was at this point in the investigation that detectives realized something super important.

All of the stuff the guy bought matched the kind of items they discovered burned up at that abandoned campsite off Marsh Loop Trail many weeks earlier. You know, the one with all the propane tanks, trash, and cooking gear laying around. Well, each time the guy in the videos paid for his stuff, he used cash or a prepaid debit card, which authorities weren't able to trace easily. Police started to wonder if maybe Arthur Kelly and the guy in the store on all the surveillance footage and whoever had been staying at the burned out campsite

were all the same person. And maybe that person was connected to the Reed's murders. On Thursday, August 25, 2022, detectives found even more evidence that sent them down that line of thinking. While visiting the remnants of the abandoned campsite for a second time, they found and collected nine spent shell casings that had the distinct markings Sig Luger 9mm on the bottom. A few days later, they went back to the site again with metal detectors and found 10 more spent casings

as well as a partial bullet. All of this stuff got investigators' hackles up. So they decided to go nose down on trying to determine the identity of the mystery man they felt was connected to the bullet casings, the campsite, and potentially the homicides. Their best shot at doing that though, was to figure out the prepaid cards he'd used to buy supplies in Concord could be

linked to his true identity, not the seemingly fictitious name, Arthur Kelly. After several weeks of trying to trace each of his prepaid cards and gift cards, detectives caught a lucky break. One card had been used to buy vitamin supplements online, but it seems like the transaction platform couldn't provide police with the buyer's identity. However, when they contacted the supplier directly, that company's record showed that the person who'd made the purchase was Logan Clegg and he'd used the email address rkxkelly at gmail.com,

which incorporated a lot of letters and phonetics that sounded like the name Arthur Kelly. So with all this information in hand, police zeroed in on Logan as their prime suspect. When they looked into his background, they discovered he was a high school dropout who'd stabbed a man to death in self-defense in 2018 in Washington state. And he had prior arrests in Utah for burglary and carrying loaded handguns that had been stolen from a local sporting goods store there. Both of those guns had been seized by police when he was arrested for those crimes in 2020.

So investigators in New Hampshire didn't suspect those were the firearms he might have used to kill Steve and Wendy. New Hampshire police couldn't help but notice though that Logan's mugshot closely resembled the composite sketch of the young man Nan Nutt had seen on the Marsh Loop Trail around the time of Wendy and Steve's murders. He also looked a heck of a lot like the guy seen on surveillance video buying all the camping supplies around Concord, the very same camping supplies that had ended up at the burned-out campsite in the woods. His criminal history and travel records indicated he'd spent a few months in jail in Utah before being released on probation in late 2020. For four and a

half months, starting in the summer of 2021, he visited Portugal, which was a violation of his probation by going too far from Utah. As homicide detectives learned all this stuff about Logan, they uncovered that his upbringing had been kind of rough and he was estranged from his mother and relatives who lived in the western part of the U.S. When he was a kid, his father had died by suicide and it didn't appear he had any stable figures in his life to look up to. Investigators floated his name to several businesses in Concord to see if at any point he'd been employed in the city and once again, they hit a stroke of luck. He'd worked at a McDonald's from late 2021 until February

2022, just a few months before Wendy and Steve's murders. When Logan's former manager looked at some of the video police had collected from area retailers, she confirmed that the guy in those clips was the guy she knew as Logan Clegg. Some of his other McDonald's co-workers told police that Logan had noticeable anger problems while at work, and he seemed to be a bit of a loner. They also said he was extremely protective of his backpack and never wanted anyone to mess with his stuff. When homicide detectives got Logan in for an official interview on the afternoon of October 12th, he told investigators that he wasn't Arthur Kelly and he had not been in Concord, New Hampshire in

April 2022. He said he'd left much earlier than that in either February or March. When detectives pressed him to tell them where he'd stayed while he was in the area, he denied ever living in a tent in broken ground trail system or in the woods off Portsmouth Street near the Alton Woods apartment complex. When confronted with images of himself

buying supplies from local stores that were the same kinds of items found at the burned out campsite, Lohgen denied being a frequent shopper at some of those stores and ultimately told police he didn't know what they wanted him to say, but the guy in the clips just wasn't him. He also vehemently denied any involvement in Stephen Wendy's murders. Authorities weren't buying Logan's story, though, and arrested him for second-degree murder on October 19.

And it's a good thing they nabbed him when they did, because according to reporting by multiple news outlets, Logan had purchased a one-way ticket on October 11 to travel from New York to Berlin, Germany on October 14, just two days after police in Vermont located him. When investigators searched his backpack, they found, among other things, a loaded Glock 17 handgun with Sig Luger 9mm ammunition in it. An ATF agent quickly pulled some records and confirmed Logan

had bought the gun in February 2022 using the alias Arthur Kelly. Homicide investigators also visited the campsite he'd been living at in Burlington, Vermont, right before his arrest, and seized camping gear, more ammunition, roughly $7,000 in cash, his passport, and various pieces of mail. Jamie Costa reported for the Concord Monitor that through additional ballistics testing, techs were able to loosely link Logan's Glock to the bullet fragments and casings they'd

recovered on subsequent searches of the crime scene. He was taken into custody in Vermont, but eventually extradited to New Hampshire for his arraignment on October 26. He ultimately decided to waive his arraignment and didn't request bail. Three months later, in late January 2023, a grand jury in Concord formally indicted Logan for four counts of second-degree murder, three counts of falsifying physical evidence, and being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. His trial was scheduled to start later that summer in July, but it got delayed until early October.

He was facing a maximum punishment of life in prison if he was convicted. According to coverage by ABC News, when opening arguments got underway on the first day of trial, Logan's lawyers told the court that their defense was simple. Their client was not there when Steve and Wendy were killed.

The police had the wrong guy. The prosecution's theory, as you can imagine though, was very different. They argued that Logan and Logan alone had murdered the Reeds. However, the state was unable to come up with a clear motive for the slayings. They just said he had no apparent reason, which is likely why they didn't ever charge him with robbery, because they couldn't prove he'd intended to or actually took anything from the couple. The defense admitted that law enforcement was right to at least look at Logan as a possible

suspect early on, but they argued that any lies he'd told detectives were merely his way of avoiding re-arrest for his prior crimes in Utah, not because he'd killed Stephen Wendy. The lawyers said that none of the physical evidence police claimed to have conclusively tied him or his belongings to the crime. They argued that even the ballistics results from the spent shell casings didn't prove anything. They also pointed out that it was highly questionable that police had found the so-called damning shell casings several weeks after investigators had searched the crime scene with metal detectors and then released it back to the public.

Tony Cinello reported for Patch.com that another powerful moment during the first day of trial came when everyone involved in the proceedings left the courthouse to tour the different locations associated with the crime. Jurors got to walk the actual ground behind Steven Wendy's apartment that led toward the Marsh Loop trailhead.

They also went right past where Logan was alleged to have camped and told detectives he was Arthur Kelly, as well as the area of the hiking trails that he was accused of burning one of his former campsites and went target shooting. The real crux of the case came down to whether or not his Glock 17 9mm handgun was the murder weapon. And that just wasn't a connection the experts for the state could definitively make.

There just wasn't enough conclusive evidence to say his gun was the gun that shot the rounds that killed Wendy and Steve. The closest prosecutors could get was saying that the Reeds were killed by a 9mm gun that shot similar ammunition to what was found in Logan's Glock 17. But beyond that, it was just too inconclusive. The defense on the other hand spent a lot of time hammering away at the state's smoking gun evidence. They found that not only could Logan's firearm have shot the rounds that killed Steven Windy,

but so could a Walther and several other manufacturer's models of the same style gun, which I imagine was a pretty significant blow to the prosecution's case. It also didn't help matters that not a single trace of Logan's DNA was found on Steve or Wendy's bodies or their clothing and none of their blood was on any of the stuff police had confiscated from him when he was arrested or had recovered from any of his campsites. The defense asked the court more than a week into the trial to simply throw out the case and render a verdict in Logan's favor. But the judge felt that because Logan's gun was a possible match to the murder weapon and there was clear evidence he burned his most recent campsite

before leaving Concord, the trial needed to go on. Essentially, the judge was like, thanks for asking nicely defense, but I think we'll keep going and let the jury decide. Which is exactly what happened on October 23rd, 2023, after approximately three weeks of testimony and trial. Jurors deliberated and unanimously convicted Logan of all the charges against him. He was sentenced a few months later in December to serve 50 years to life in prison for the second degree murder charges and three and a half to seven years for each of the other charges, which essentially meant he was going away for the rest of his natural life. The judge presiding over the case said during the sentencing hearing that Logan was, quote, a stone cold violent murderer, end quote.

Several of Steve and Wendy's family members spoke too and shared how heart-wrenching the entire ordeal had been from the time the murders were discovered to when the trial finally concluded. They described the experience as shattering, agonizing, and shocking. For his part, Logan continued to maintain his innocence and said in court that police detectives had been out to get him from the very beginning. He said he was confident the verdicts against him would get overturned when he would appeal. New Hampshire Business Review reported that his appeal was filed in January 2024, but

the outcome of that is still pending. In an interesting twist, Jamie Costner reported for the New Hampshire Union leader that despite the appeal still in flux, some of the evidence and documents used at trial have been made available for the media to view. Which I know from my own reporting is kind of a wild and unheard of scenario in post-conviction proceedings.

Usually stuff like that is kept under lock and key just in case a defendant actually wins their appeal and a retrial happens. Otherwise, an argument could be made that anything touched or viewed outside of court staff could be contaminated. How exactly all that's going to pan out is still yet to be seen. Some people continue to have a lot of questions about the basic facts of the crime. For example, Steve's missing cell phone has never been found, and there are people out

there who wonder if everything the police did to try and get answers was actually all on the up and up. But where I'm left in all this is remembering the two people at the center of this narrative that should not get lost in all the noise, and that's Wendy and Steve. If you read their obituary online, you'll see comment after comment from folks who knew and loved them over the course of many decades. The legacy this couple left behind was said to be a remarkable one, with a true global footprint.

And even though in the end, their lives were taken so violently, they did leave this world together. And in a small way, that could be a comfort to the people who love them most. Park Predators is an audio-checked production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com, and you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, at ParkPredators. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Woo!