New Hampshire's highest court has thrown out Adam Montgomery's murder conviction in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, ruling that combining key charges in a single trial undercut his right to a fair one. In a decision released this week, the state Supreme Court said jurors heard strong evidence that Montgomery had assaulted Harmony months before she disappeared, and that the earlier beating may have improperly influenced their conclusion that he killed her in December 2019, though evidence of murder was weaker, Fox News reports.
- Because jurors heard from multiple witnesses about the July 2019 assault "there was a significant risk that the jury would draw the impermissible inference that because the defendant assaulted the victim before by striking her in the head, he must be the one who fatally assaulted her in December by again striking her in the head," the ruling states.
The lone witness tying Montgomery to the December assault was his then-wife, Kayla Montgomery, who received a deal for her testimony and whose credibility the defense attacked. Harmony's body has never been found; investigators say she was last accounted for in 2019, but her mother didn't report her missing until 2021. Kayla Montgomery, Harmony's stepmother, testified that Adam Montgomery, who had custody of Harmony, punched her because he was angry that she was having bathroom accidents. She said that in the following months, he hid the girl's body in several locations, including a freezer at his workplace.
The court's ruling angered relatives, with the adoptive parents of Harmony's brother saying they were "absolutely disgusted." "The reality is—more protection is in place for this monster than Harmony Montgomery ever received," they said, per Fox. Montgomery was sentenced to 45 years to life for the murder in 2024, but even with the conviction overturned, he won't be leaving prison in the near future, CBS News reports. He is also serving a 32.5-year sentence for an unrelated gun conviction.
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