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
Chapter 1: What case is discussed in this episode?
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.
so so
On the morning of Wednesday, April 20th, 2022, a woman named Susan Forey 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 Jess 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 Lindsey. 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.
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Chapter 2: Where did the couple go missing?
So during the morning and afternoon of Thursday, April 21st, 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 18th. 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 6 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 reeds, 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.
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Chapter 3: What did the investigation reveal about the couple's last movements?
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 rearrest 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 Schinella 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 Steve and 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 nine millimeter gun that shot similar ammunition to what was found in Logan's Glock 17.
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