The Murder of 5 Year Old Harmony Montgomery
Harmony Montgomery was a 5-year-old disabled girl who suffered from behavioral and developmental delays, and was blind in her right eye, who went missing in Manchester, New Hampshire in 2019.
According to Massachusetts child advocate Maria Mossaides, Harmony spent most of her life in foster care, and when Harmony was born, it was believed she would have severe disabilities, and never be able to see.
"Harmony defied expectations. Although blind in one eye, she grew stronger with each passing week," Mossaides said.
Harmony also had "very well-developed" language skills, according to Mossaides, and, "As she grew into a toddler, it was clear that although she had visual disabilities, she had developed superior coping mechanisms as well as a knack for overcoming challenges."
"Harmony was independent as a toddler and very young child. She liked books, playing with dolls and playing with other children," Mossaides said, adding, "She is described as both charming and very active."
Crystal Sorey, Harmony’s biological mother, first lost custody of Harmony in Massachusetts in 2015 due to neglect stemming from drug use, when the Department of Children and Families was awarded custody.
Harmony was removed from Sorey’s custody on three separate occasions before finally being placed in a foster home in Haverhill, MA, according to a Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate report.
Johnathon Bobbitt-Miller and Blair Miller adopted Harmony's brother Jamison, who they say that asks about Harmony often. You may recognize Blair Miller, who has worked as a news anchor and a national correspondent covering the White House and Capitol Hill. He works for Atlanta News First as of 2023.
"It is very difficult to answer his questions. He looks at us and says, 'Why did my sister have to die? Why did someone have to hurt my sister?'" Bobbitt-Miller said in an interview with Greater Boston. "That was the only stable person in his life until he was adopted."
The couple adopted Jamison in 2019 and maintained a relationship with his mother, Crystal Sorey. Blair Miller has said that Jamison’s struggle to process his sister’s absence made the Millers encourage Sorey to push harder in her search for Harmony.
“[Jamison] asks for his sister and looks for her at playgrounds. We pushed her to help us figure out where she is so we [could] have a relationship with her,” Miller told one outlet.
Miller also said that he inquired about possibly adopting Harmony into their family where should live with her brother, but a caseworker told him Harmony had been returned to the custody of her father.
After the Division for Children, Youth and Families informed Sorey that Harmony was never registered for school, Sorey called the Manchester police department in November of 2021 to tell them that she hadn't seen her daughter since early 2019.
Officials had requested additional information for a home study of the Montgomery residence in New Hampshire, but a family court judge in Lawrence, Massachusetts gave custody of Harmony to her father anyway.
Sorey testified at Montgomery’s murder trial that she last saw Harmony during an April 2019 Facetime call, and told police that she had contacted Adam Montgomery for over a year after the Facetime call, trying to make contact with her daughter without success.
The Police asked the Division for Children, Youth, and Families to attempt to locate Harmony, and when they told the Manchester police that they were unable to locate Harmony, the police began looking for Harmony's father, Adam Montgomery.
Police interviews with family members revealed that Montgomery was abusive toward his daughter, allegedly giving her a black eye, forcing her to clean the toilet with her toothbrush, and making her stand in a corner for hours as a punishment.
Adam Montgomery, Harmony's father, was first arrested by Manchester Police in January 2022, charged with assault related to a July 2019 incident where he allegedly abused Harmony.
A few days later, his estranged wife, Kayla Montgomery, was also arrested, on charges of welfare fraud. She was accused of cashing food stamps that the state provided for Harmony even though both she and her estranged husband Adam made statements to the police that Harmony had not lived with them since November of 2019.
Police found Adam living out of a car in Manchester with another woman, Kelsey Small, who was found dead in a hotel room in March of 2022. She did not face charges in connection with the case and her death was not considered suspicious.
Adam was soon arrested again, on April 4, 2022, on unrelated weapons charges. After he was located, Adam Montgomery was arrested for having an AR-15 rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun that police believe he stole from a home in Manchester, NH between September and October 3, 2019.
While prosecutors say the firearms don’t have a direct connection to Harmony’s murder, they are how her death was uncovered by authorities. Police believe she was killed in Manchester in early December 2019; her remains have never been found.
After Kayla Montgomery was charged with receiving stolen property in connection with the theft, she was released from jail and ordered to continue with substance abuse treatment, not have any contact with Adam Montgomery, to check in with Manchester police on a daily basis, and to not to leave the state of New Hampshire.
She was arrested again, this time on perjury charges, in June 2022, accused of lying to a grand jury about when and where she worked during the time that Harmony Montgomery was last seen. While being interviewed by police about the stolen weapons, Adam Montgomery’s estranged wife Kayla Montgomery told investigators that Adam Montgomery murdered Harmony.
She was released from jail three days later, then arrested again on a bench warrant in September of the same year, after she failed to show up for a court hearing, and her bail was revoked on September 13.
She pled guilty in November 2022 to felony perjury; her testimony in the prosecution of her estranged husband was part of her plea deal. Crying on the witness stand in the weapons case, she told jurors that her husband would take care of the kids while she was working mornings at Dunkin Donuts, and she would take over in the afternoon, while “…we were using drugs… getting high, using heroin, and crack…”
In October of 2022, Adam Montgomery pled not guilty to the second-degree murder of Harmony Montgomery, falsifying physical evidence and abuse of a corpse.
In June the following year, Montgomery was convicted on the unrelated gun charges, after a jury found Adam Montgomery guilty of all six charges: two counts each of being an armed career criminal, receiving stolen property, and theft.
Judge Amy Messer said she was only considering the weapons charges as she determined his sentence, but rejected the defense's requested sentence of 10-20 years. "The stolen firearms in this case also had significant aggravating factors," she said. "These guns were stolen. There was a child in the house. The guns were maintained while you yourself had children in the home."
On August 7, 2023, Montgomery was sentenced to 15-30 years on each of two charges of being an armed career criminal, which she ordered him to serve consecutively. She also sentenced Montgomery to 15 years in prison on the theft-related charges, which she ordered he serve concurrently at the end of the other sentence.
During opening statements in Montgomery’s murder trial, which began on February 8, 2024, prosecutor Christopher Knowles said that after beating Harmony, Adam Montgomery continued driving to Burger King.
"He pulled into that parking lot at Burger King and he ordered his food. He ordered his food and he ate. He didn't stop to check on Harmony," Knowles said. "He didn't look back at her. He didn't show any concern for this innocent little girl, the child he had just beaten. He ordered his food, and he ate."
In addition to the charge of second-degree murder in the death of Harmony Montgomery, Montgomery was also charged with assault, witness tampering, falsifying physical evidence and abusing a corpse.
Harmony Montgomery's mother, Crystal Sorey, asked a New Hampshire court to declare her little girl legally dead just days before Montgomery’s murder trial began.
According to the New Hampshire Union Leader, Sorey asked the court to declare Harmony dead with the intent of filing a wrongful death lawsuit for Harmony.
“Whenever there is a request to open an estate for someone presumed dead, they have to have a hearing,” Sorey’s attorney Sheliah Kaufold told the Union Leader. “It’s a notice to the public to say if you don’t think she is dead, or you don’t think this person should be in charge of the estate, this is your opportunity to come forward and state your piece.”
Sorey has requested the process be expedited due to the statute of limitations to file a wrongful death suit. She also told NBC10 Boston that she wasn't happy when she heard that Kayla Montgomery had agreed to take a plea deal.
“I told them how I felt; this isn’t fair, she was a part of it. As far as I’m concerned Kayla can rot,” said Sorey, adding, “You want a round of applause because you finally did the right thing. She’ll never get that from me.”
“It means she’s doing it for herself so she can see the light of day again,” Sorey told the outlet. “So she can one day be free. She’s not doing it for Harmony.”
“There was multiple times this woman could have stood up as a real woman and mother and done something,” said Sorey. “She did nothing.”
Crystal Sorey sobbed on the witness stand while describing her daughter as, "Amazing. Rambunctious. You know, very smart,” adding that, “By the time she was 2, she could tell you her whole life story."
On February 9th and 12th, Kayla Montgomery gave over eight hours of testimony, describing Adam Montgomery’s downward spiral into paranoid rage after the beating death of his daughter Harmony.
She told jurors that after Harmony was killed, Adam Montgomery's rage turned to her, and the prosecution presented photographs of Kayla Montgomery with black eyes as she testified that Adam started tearing the house apart looking for hidden surveillance equipment.
Tara Hilbert told jurors that she drove Kayla Montgomery to a hotel with her children in 2020, “Because Adam had beat her pretty bad,” Hilbert said in tears. “Really bad, her eyes, her nose.”
Defense attorney Caroline Smith suggested Harmony died early in the morning when Adam Montgomery wasn't in the car, which Kayla Montgomery repeatedly denied. The defense described Kayla Montgomery as a liar who misled police in an effort to get a plea deal, "Kayla was all about about protecting herself to wiggle out of accountability for her own crimes," said attorney Brooks.
According to Kayla, in the weeks before Harmony Montgomery was murdered by her father, the 5-year-old and her siblings were living in filth, surrounded by drugs and guns, her stepmother testified, “It was just chaos in that house at that time, I didn’t want the guns in the house,” Kayla Montgomery told jurors.
After being evicted from their apartment that November, they were living in their Chrysler Sebring. While Adam, Kayla, Harmony and the couple's two other boys were living in their sedan, on December 7, 2019, Adam hit his 5-year-old disabled daughter multiple times because she wet herself in the car.
Kayla said Adam was driving, with Harmony in the back seat on the passenger side, when Adam, "turned his body and delivered sets of three-to-four blows with a closed fist to Harmony's face and head on three separate occasions over the course of a few minutes."
Kayla said after the abuse ended, Adam said, "I think I really hurt her this time. I did something."
She said Harmony began moaning, which continued for about five minutes before it stopped, and that no one checked on or sought medical attention for the 5-year-old disabled girl, until shortly after noon when she and Adam discovered that Harmony was not breathing.
Kayla said Adam removed items from a duffle bag left in the trunk of the Sebring, and put Harmony's dead body in it. Adam Montgomery's defense attorney James Brooks told jurors that Montgomery is guilty of concealing Harmony's body, but argued that it was Kayla Montgomery who killed the little girl.
"Kayla Montgomery was the last person to see Harmony alive and know how Harmony died," Brooks said. "Adam is not an innocent here. He and Kayla covered up Montgomery's death… Adam Montgomery did not kill Harmony."
Kayla told investigators Harmony's body was repeatedly moved to different locations as the family moved around, initially to a cooler left in the hallway of an apartment building where Kayla's mother lived in Manchester. The body, still inside the duffle bag, was left in the cooler until the end of December 2019.
After leaving Kayla's mother house at the end of December 2019, they stayed at a shelter in Manchester where, Kayla said, the bag was placed in a ceiling vent in the bedroom.
"Kayla stated that during this time, there was liquid coming from the bag containing Harmony's dead body, and there was an odor," according to court documents. "She said Adam placed a trash bag around the bag to keep it from leaking."
Much of the case focused on forensic evidence of DNA samples collected from that ceiling, and investigators testified that they could smell the decomposition while collecting that evidence. An expert in DNA analysis testified that the DNA was extremely likely to have come from Harmony Montgomery.
The body was moved to again when the family moved to an apartment on Union Street in Manchester; this time, Adam put the bag with his daughters body inside of it into a plastic storage container, which he pushed down the street from the shelter to their new apartment.
Kayla said that Adam took the duffel bag out of the plastic storage container, and because the duffel bag was leaking, Adam put another trash bag around it before he put it inside of the refrigerator of their new apartment.
At some point, Adam transferred Harmony's body from the duffle bag into another bag; Kayla said Adam spent several hours in the bathroom with the shower running when he moved Harmony's body into a Catholic Medical Center maternity tote bag, and then placed that bag in the apartment's freezer.
She said the tote bag was much smaller than the duffle and Harmony's body wouldn't have fit "unless it was dismembered or grossly distorted."
That same day, Kayla brought the bag to the Portland Pie Company on Elm Street in Manchester, a pizza place where Adam was working, at his request. She put the Catholic Medical Center maternity tote bag in a stroller that contained her own young children when she brought it to the Portland Pie Company.
He kept the bag in the restaurants walk-in freezer for about a week, and then took it back to their apartment. Another employee said he remembered the bag being in the freezer but he never asked Adam about it.
Kayla said Adam added “lime” to “speed up the body decomposition” and kept the bag inside of the freezer at their apartment until he rented a U-Haul van during the spring of 2020.
Manchester Police Detective Max Rahill testified about a Home Depot receipt that investigators secured trying to corroborate Kalya Montgomery’s story; they sought verification about the bag of crushed limestone, presumably because lime slows decomposition rather than speeding it up.
Detectives requested records of any and all limestone purchases from Home Depot stores in and around Manchester, and discovered that a Home Depot in Manchester sold a 40-pound bag of crushed limestone was bought along with an angle grinder cutting power tool, blade, and battery on February 26, 2020, Rahill testified.
The total purchase was about $400 and paid in cash, and Rahill also testified that about a half an hour beforehand, someone withdrew $500 in cash from Kayla and Adam Montgomery’s checking account at a nearby ATM.
Rahill said that investigators don’t have any surveillance video of Adam Montgomery withdrawing the money or making the purchase from Home Depot as any footage had long since been deleted by the time investigators went looking for them in 2022.
However, February 27, 2020, it was Adam Montgomery who called the management company at his Union Street apartment complex to request maintenance. The drain in the bathtub was clogged.
Travis Beach, the friend who helped Montgomery rent the van, testified, “He was pacing back and forth. He said he effed up,” Beach told jurors. “I asked him what he meant and all he could say was he effed up.”
Beach testified that he wasn’t sure what Montgomery did with the U-Haul, saying, “Honestly I felt like I didn’t need to ask, I saw all his stuff packed up, he said he had problems with DCFS, so I thought he was trying to move.”
Beach messaged Adam Montgomery on Facebook on March 4, 2020, after Montgomery failed to return the U-Haul and Montgomery replied, “Please don’t message me stuff like this on FB again.”
Beach said that he was not allowed to talk to Kayla Montgomery, who testified that Adam made a trip by himself to dispose of Harmony's body, returned in the early morning, and that he never told where he took the body or what he did with it.
According to investigators, Adam accumulated 133 miles on the rented U-Haul van. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation said that the van had toll violations on both sides of the Tobin Bridge in the early morning hours of March 3, 2020, two northbound violations, and one southbound.
Rebecca Maines, one of the final witnesses called by the state, described Montgomery as her best friend, and testified that Adam Montgomery told her that Harmony reminded him of her mother. When asked how he said that made him feel, Maines replied, "He said he hated her."
Maines said he hated Harmony "right to his core" because she reminded him of her mother. Maines also said he told her he "backhanded" his daughter after she put her hand over her younger brother's lips and nose, and told her in the summer of 2021 that he had been trying to see his daughter since 2019 after he dropped her off with her mother because she was having bathroom accidents "on purpose."
He reportedly told her that Harmony's mother wouldn't allow him to visit her. Defense attorneys suggested that Maines, in prison for a parole violation, was only trying to improve her own situation, but Maines denied asking for any promises about her pending charges.
"I am a criminal. I don't have a problem telling you that," Maines said.
Harmony's great-uncle Kevin Montgomery told jurors that he reported that Harmony was being abused to the Division for Children, Youth and Families, and told them about Harmony’s black eye in 2019.
Adam gave different explanations for how Harmony got the black eye to different people. Kevin Montgomery testified Harmony's father said, "I bashed her around the [expletive] house."
Montgomery told former Child Protective Services worker Demetrios Tsaros that, “He bought the kids, like, foam swords or light sabers and that they were playing with them and that Harmony was struck in the face," Tsaros testified.
Another friend of Montgomery’s, Nicholas Ahern, testified that, "He told me that she acquired it during a soccer accident."
Prosecutor Benjamin Agati told jurors in his closing statements that Adam Montgomery, who has not attended a single day of his trial, was angry when he killed Harmony for having urinary accidents inside the car they were living in.
“All he has is his car, and his rage, and his fists,” Agati said, “She doesn't get a headstone in the ground above the head that he battered. She doesn't get to be at peace in death because of what he did, because he can't afford to tell anyone where she is."
A New Hampshire jury found Adam Montgomery guilty on all counts in the murder of 5-year-old Harmony Montgomery after about six hours of deliberations. He now awaits sentencing from his cell at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord, where he is already serving up to 75 years.
What a sad story of Harmony’s short life & ill treatment by her own family. Definitely well researched. Makes one wonder about Adam’s own childhood that would produce such anger & hateful treatment towards other people. Be safe!