The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Thursday overturned Adam Montgomery’s second-degree murder conviction in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony Montgomery, undoing the count that helped drive his 56-years-to-life sentence. The court said keeping the murder and assault charges together in one case jeopardized his right to a fair trial.
The ruling leaves Montgomery convicted of second-degree assault, falsifying physical evidence, witness tampering and abusing his daughter’s corpse. He also remains subject to a decades-long prison sentence on unrelated firearms offenses, while the question of Harmony’s remains stays unanswered.
Montgomery was convicted in 2024 of second-degree murder for recklessly causing Harmony’s death and of second-degree assault for an earlier episode of physical abuse. The same trial also produced convictions tied to testimony that he did not report her death and hid her body in multiple places, including the ceiling of a homeless shelter and a walk-in freezer at the pizza shop where he worked for about a month.
Justice Pamela E. Phelan wrote that fairness must guide a criminal trial, saying justice is served only when a person accused of a crime receives a fair and just proceeding, and that a trial not conducted on those principles does not do justice to the accused or to victims. The court’s decision reversed the murder count, but it did not clear Montgomery of involvement in Harmony’s death.
That distinction matters because the rest of the case remains intact. Montgomery was still found liable in civil court in May and ordered to pay nearly $15.5 million to Harmony’s estate in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by her mother, Crystal Sorey, who also reached a separate $2.25 million settlement with the state of New Hampshire.
Sorey lost custody of Harmony in 2018 as she struggled with substance misuse, and a Massachusetts judge later awarded custody to Montgomery despite his violent criminal history. Harmony disappeared in December 2019 while Montgomery, his wife and two other children were living in a car in Manchester after an eviction, and her disappearance went largely unnoticed by authorities for two years.
Sorey came to Manchester in late 2021 to search for her missing child. Harmony’s remains still have not been found, and the Supreme Court’s ruling leaves the murder case changed but not closed.
