Adam Montgomery has been found guilty on all charges in the murder trial over the death of his 5-year-old daughter Harmony, bringing some closure to one of the highest-profile legal sagas in New England this decade.
Montgomery was convicted on five charges: second-degree murder – reckless; second-degree assault; witness tampering; falsifying physical evidence (alter, destroy, hide); and abuse of corpse. He was not in court when the verdict was delivered on Thursday — he hadn't come to Hillsborough Superior Court in Manchester, New Hampshire, throughout the trial.
Montgomery faces decades in prison for killing his daughter, disposing of her corpse and more, on top of the prison sentence he's already serving for an unrelated gun conviction. He is due to be sentenced later this spring, with the exact date yet to be set by the court.
Harmony's biological mother, Crystal Sorey, was in court for the reading of the verdict, and she said afterward she was relieved to hear the verdict against the father of her late child.
"I think for a second he thought he was going to get away with something, but he didn't get away with anything," Sorey said, calling Adam Montgomery a coward for not appearing in court.
Montgomery's attorneys had admitted as part of their arguments in his defense that he falsified physical evidence and abused the girl's corpse, but urged he be convicted of those charges and denied the others.
Harmony's body has never been recovered, though Sorey and authorities remain hopeful that it will be found. She was killed in December 2019, but was only reported missing two years later, after Sorey was able to reach a sympathetic officer at the Manchester Police Department who began looking into the case.
"Wherever she is right now, maybe she feels it and feels what we were able to get done," Manchester Police Chief Allen Aldenberg said.
He and lead prosecutor Benjamin Agati were hopeful that someone may come forward with more information about Harmony's body, though they weren't holding out hope that Montgomery would himself.
Agati, who called it "a very big relief" that the jury held Montgomery accountable for his crimes, said that the end of the trial allowed authorities to more clearly say that they believe Harmony's body is likely in the Revere area, given where he drove in a rented UHaul the day he's believed to have dumped her body, which was in a canvas bag.
"If you see this bag, if you hear about this bag, if you walk in one of these areas … please let us know," Agati said. "There's a high likelihood that there may still be parts of her that we can recover."
Thursday was the jurors' second day of deliberations, and just before noon — about an hour before reaching the verdict — they asked a question, seeking the court's definition of the phrase "consciously disregarded." The court replied with the legal definition of the mental state "recklessly," and was told to use common sense and judgment when applying the definition.
The question appeared to relate to the second-degree murder charge that Montgomery is facing — it involves him behaving recklessly with extreme indifference to the value of human life, and part of the definition of recklessly involves a person being "aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that his conduct would cause a certain result."
The jury heard closing arguments Wednesday before starting deliberations in the two-week trial. Jurors deliberated for about two hours before recessing for the day. They resumed deliberations around 8:45 a.m. Thursday.
In closing arguments earlier in the day, defense attorney Caroline Smith said Montgomery moved the body and hid it because of “a very misguided belief” he had to do so “to keep his family from being ripped apart.”
But prosecutor Benjamin Agati told jurors a different story. He said Montgomery, 34, was angry that his daughter was having bathroom accidents inside the car they were living in after they were evicted from their home. He said Montgomery punched her in the head until she died.
“All he has is his car, and his rage, and his fists,” Agati said, later adding, “She doesn’t get a headstone in the ground above the head that he battered. She doesn’t get to be at peace and death because of what he did, because he can’t afford to tell anyone where she is.”
Sorey, Harmony’s mother, cried and at times covered her ears as Agati spoke in court.
Adam Montgomery is serving a 30-year prison sentence for an unrelated gun conviction and has not attended his trial. He said in court in an unrelated case last year that he loves Harmony “unconditionally” and did not kill her. He has pleaded not guilty to the murder charge.
Montgomery’s attorneys have acknowledged his guilt on two lesser charges, that he “purposely and unlawfully removed, concealed or destroyed” her corpse and falsified physical evidence.
Montgomery also faced charges of assaulting his daughter in 2019 — giving her a black eye — and of tampering with the key prosecution witness, his estranged wife, Kayla Montgomery, who is Harmony’s stepmother.
Investigators believe Harmony was murdered in December 2019, though she wasn’t reported missing for nearly two years. Kayla Montgomery testified the body was hidden in the trunk of a car, a cooler, a ceiling vent, and a workplace freezer before Adam disposed of it.
Adam Montgomery had custody of Harmony. Sorey, who was no longer in a relationship with him, said the last time she saw Harmony was on a video call in April 2019. She eventually went to police, who announced they were looking for the missing child on New Year’s Eve 2021.
Photos of Harmony were widely circulated on social media. Police eventually determined she had been killed.
Kayla Montgomery is serving an 18-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to perjury for lying during grand jury testimony about where she was when Harmony was last seen. She was not given immunity, but acknowledged to defense lawyers that she hasn’t faced further consequences for inconsistencies in her statements to police or prosecutors.
Kayla Montgomery testified that her husband repeatedly punched Harmony in the head because the girl had wet herself. She said her family, including the couple’s two young sons, had been evicted and were living in their car. According to Kayla, Adam punched Harmony at several stop lights as they drove from a methadone clinic to a fast food restaurant on the morning of Dec. 7, 2019.
She also testified about handing food to the children without checking on Harmony, the subsequent discovery that Harmony was dead, and the places her husband hid the body, including in a ceiling vent at a homeless shelter and the walk-in freezer at his workplace.
Kayla testified her husband drove away with Harmony’s remains in a rental truck in March 2020, and that he didn’t say where he was going. Not long after that, he started to suspect she might go to the police, so he began punching her, giving her black eyes, she said. She eventually ran away from him in March 2021.
Toll data shows the truck crossed a major bridge in Boston multiple times. Last year, police searched a marshy area in Revere, Massachusetts, without finding Harmony’s body.
Adam Montgomery’s attorneys said that the only person who knew how Harmony died — Kayla — was lying. They said that Harmony actually died the night before Kayla said she did, and that Kayla was alone with her at the time.
“She was an instigator and equal partner,” Smith said. “He did not influence her. She influenced him, and most importantly, he did not kill his daughter.”
But Agati described Kayla as “a battered woman admitting an inconvenient and terrible truth that she failed in a moment of life when her character was put to the test. She did nothing to help Harmony, nothing to stop her. She didn’t kill her. Only the defendant did that.”
