On Friday the jury saw video of Adam Montgomery’s arrest and heard testimony about his violent relationship with wife Kayla Montgomery. Adam Montgomery continues to be absent from his trial as prosecutors lay out the case that he murdered his daughter Harmony Montgomery.
Follow NBC10 Boston on…
Instagram: instagram.com/nbc10boston
TikTok: tiktok.com/@nbc10boston
Facebook: facebook.com/NBC10Boston
X: twitter.com/NBC10Boston
Jurors viewed police bodycam footage and heard from a friend of Adam Montgomery on Friday, the eighth day of the high-profile murder trial.
Montgomery is accused of killing his 5-year-old daughter Harmony and hiding her body.
Testimony resumed Friday morning, with prosecutors calling Travis Beach as their first witness of the day. Prosecutors allege that Beach rented a U-Haul that Adam Montgomery used to dispose of Harmony's body in March of 2020. Beach's ex-girlfriend, Britney Bedard, testified Thursday that the U-Haul was rented "in someone's name" and they needed a credit card on file, so Adam and Brendan Middleton rented the vehicle using her card.
Middleton, who is currently incarcerated, also testified Thursday about the U-Haul truck that he rented March 3, 2020, which he then passed along to Beach and Bedard. Records showed the truck traveled more than 100 miles by the time it was returned, but he didn't return it, Middleton testified.
Beach testified Friday that he has known Adam Montgomery "since he was 17 years old." He said Montgomery contacted him in March of 2020 and asked if Beach could rent a U-Haul for him because he wanted to "move stuff."
"I didn't hesitate. He was a friend. I wasn't thinking of anything negative," Beach said. "I was at his apartment, saw everything packed up, put one and one together and thought it was two. It wasn't."
Beach said he wound up getting Middleton to rent the U-Haul for Adam Montgomery. Since Beach didn't have a license, he said he asked Bedard to get the U-Haul. She couldn't, so they had Middleton rent the U-Haul since he had a driver's license.
He said the three of them went to the U-Haul location on South Willow Street in Manchester and then stopped for gas at a nearby gas station. They then went back to a local Econo Lodge Hotel where he and Bedard had been staying, where he, Bedard and Adam and Adam's wife Kayla Montgomery did cocaine.
Beach said he and Bedard gave the keys to Adam Montgomery, who was also staying at the Econo Lodge, and then Beach and Adam Montgomery went outside to smoke a cigarette.
"He said he F'd up," Beach said. "I asked him what he meant, and all he could say and repeat was that he F'd up." Beach said Montgomery repeated that "four or five times."
Beach said he asked Montgomery to clarify, but he did not.
Beach said he doesn't know what Montgomery did with the U-Haul and never asked him because he assumed he was just moving. He said he was not aware that Montgomery had just moved into his apartment on Union Street.
Facebook messages from Beach to Montgomery sent the next day asked if the U-Haul had been returned, because Beach had gotten a text saying the van was supposed to have been returned already.
Montgomery then responded, telling Beach he had already dropped the U-Haul off, and asking Beach not to message him "stuff like this" on Facebook again.
Also testifying Friday was Tarah Hilbert, who managed the 644 Union St. property where Adam Montgomery once lived. She said she never visited Montgomery's apartment, but she did interact with him in the parking lot and at her residence nearby.
She said Adam mentioned to her in 2020 that he had a daughter named Harmony "and he hadn't seen her in a couple years because her mother took her back to Massachusetts." She said he told her that Harmony was with her mother in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Hilbert also testified that she communicated via Facebook with Kayla Montgomery, and in April of 2021 she took Kayla away from the apartment "because adam had beat her pretty bad."
Breaking into tears, Hilbert said Kayla looked "Really bad... her eyes, her nose, she was covered in blood." She said she brought Kayla and her two boys and a baby girl she had just had to a hotel in Hooksett. A short time later, she said the Montgomerys were evicted from the Union Street apartment.
The third witness to testify Friday was Jessica Guerin, who worked at a rehab center, Granite State Recovery, back in 2021. She said she met Adam Montgomery in 2021, while she was dating a friend of his.
Guerin said Adam once told her he had a daughter, but she was with her mother in Massachusetts. But she said he quickly changed the subject.
Shortly before 11 a.m., after returning from the usual morning break, the judge ordered cameras off, without explaining why. The Boston Globe reported Friday that a witness in the case had refused to testify because of the presence of TV cameras due to an ongoing restraining order matter. After a brief period where the cameras were shut off, court resumed with a witness testifying just off camera without her face shown.
Nicole Giles, who lived at the Families in Transition shelter in 2020, testified that she met Adam and Kayla Montgomery and their two sons while she was staying there.
She also testified that she often saw Kayla with bruises "all over her face, her abdomen, her arms, her legs... Sometimes purple, sometimes yellow -- depends on how soon I seen them." She said some were small and others larger.
"There was like a new one pretty much every day," Giles said.
She said Kayla told her that Adam was responsible for her bruises. "She would say that Adam was doing it and she was afraid, she needs to get out of there, but she's afraid to leave."
Giles said she helped the Montgomerys move out of the shelter and into an apartment on Union Street using her vehicle and she stayed friendly with them after the move and even visited them in their new apartment.
"It was kind of cluttered, a little messy, there was cockroaches," she said. The living room, the walls and bathroom appeared to have been torn apart. And the light fixtures were hanging from the ceiling.
"He thought the owners were spying on him, listening to his conversations," Giles said. "He actually thought that pretty often."
Adam Montgomery also told Giles that the tub had backed up and he was waiting for the landlord to fix it.
Just before the lunch break, Michael Dobe, a former Walmart security worker, testified about a security video from Dec. 30, 2021 that showed three people -- a male and two females -- walking into and around the store, stopping at an EcoATM, which allows people to exchange cell phones for cash. The man and one of the women could later be seen on security video walking through several aisles inside the store while the second woman stayed at the EcoATM.
The man, wearing a tan baseball cap and a Coors T-shirt, was later caught on video leaving the store with the woman he had been observed walking through the aisles with. The woman from the EcoATM exited the store using a different door.
The footage shown in court was shared with the Manchester Police Department, Dobe said.
Following the lunch break, several Manchester police officers took the stand to detail their involvement in the search for Harmony Montgomery.
One of those officers, Manchester police Detective Craig Stanzel, testified about his involvement with the search for Harmony Montgomery. In December of 2021, he located the vehicle that Adam Montgomery was in.
He said a "be on the lookout" had been issued during the Manchester Police Department's morning roll call for a blue Pontiac with Maine plates that Adam Montgomery was associated with.
Stanzel said he located the vehicle, which was registered to a relative of a woman who Montgomery was seeing, in a parking lot where homeless people sometimes parked in their cars. His police bodycam footage was shown in court, showing Montgomery getting out of the car wearing a Coors Banquet T-shirt.
Another person was in the vehicle with him, a woman who was sleeping in the front seat.
The judge told the jury Friday that the trial is moving faster than expected, and they could get the case by the end of next week.
During Thursday's testimony, jurors were shown a portion of a blood-stained ceiling from one of the places where Montgomery is accused of keeping the body. A DNA expert testified that the blood could be a match.
"This analysis provides very strong support for the proposition that Harmony Montgomery is a contributor to the DNA profile obtained from the sample," said Alan Ackroyd-Isales, of DNA Labs International.
The jury also heard Thursday from two former coworkers of Adam Montgomery at Portland Pie Co. in Manchester, where Adam is believed to have stored Harmony's body for a time.
Kayla Montgomery testified last week that Adam beat Harmony to death after a bathroom accident in the car they were living in. Authorities believe the girl was killed on Dec. 7, 2019, almost two years before she was reported missing. The girl's body still has not been found.
Adam Montgomery has not returned to the courtroom since jury selection over a week ago.
