The father convicted of killing his own five-year-old daughter, Harmony Montgomery, had his murder charge vacated by New Hampshire’s highest court.
Adam Montgomery appealed to the New Hampshire Supreme Court his February 2024 conviction for the second-degree murder of Harmony Montgomery, for which he had been sentenced to 56 years in prison.
His appeal argued that it was wrong for prosecutors to not have divided his charges over separate trials and that a key witness against him was not credible. The Court on Thursday ruled to vacate his murder conviction and return it to the trial court.
Harmony was Montgomery’s biological daughter who was sent to live with him and his wife, Kayla Montgomery, and their own children.
Harmony’s mother reported her missing in 2021, stating that she hadn’t seen her girl since April of 2019. Authorities found that nobody had seen Harmony since December 2019, when authorities believed she was killed. Her body has never been found.
Montgomery was indicted on one count each of second degree murder, second degree assault for having struck the victim in July of 2019, falsifying physical evidence, and witness tampering.
Montgomery’s attorneys in their opening statements at trial acknowledged that he was responsible for falsifying evidence and abuse of a corpse but that he was not guilty of Harmony’s murder and had only committed the other crimes to protect his wife, Kayla, who, his attorneys said, “was the last person to see [the victim] alive and know how [she] died.”
The family was in dire financial straits in December 2019 and were living out of a car.
“He contended that the victim did not die during the day on December 7 but during the previous night while the defendant ‘was running around trying to make money to get them out of their situation’ and Kayla was alone in the car with the children,” the N.H. Supreme Court wrote.
Montgomery’s appeal hinged on two arguments:
— First, that the charges should have been severed — meaning tried separately — in order for him to have received a fair trial on the murder.
— Second, that Kayla Montgomery’s testimony pointing toward his guilt was not credible for multiple reasons, including that she had been guilty of perjury in the past.
In particular, Montgomery argued that evidence of him striking Harmony in July 2019 after he allegedly found her suffocating one of his other children — a charge both he and the N.H. Supreme Court concluded the State had strong evidence for — would unfairly prejudice the jury against him for the murder charge even though the two events were separate.
The N.H. Supreme Court agreed:
“As compared to the evidence of multiple disinterested witnesses substantiating the July assault, the evidence of the December 7, 2019 fatal attack is substantially weaker. We therefore conclude that this disparity created a significant risk that the jury would rely on the strength of the evidence that the defendant struck the victim in anger in July to conclude that, as Kayla testified, he similarly — and fatally — struck the victim in December,” the court wrote.
“We conclude that, under these circumstances, trying the second degree assault and second degree murder charges in a single trial jeopardized the defendant’s right to a fair trial,” the court added later.
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