A New Hampshire man who was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of his 5-year-old daughter Harmony Montgomery has filed an appeal in New Hampshire Supreme Court.
The 101-page document filed on Tuesday comes nearly a year after Adam Montgomery, 34, was sentenced to 45 years to life in state prison for his role in Harmony’s death.
Investigators believe Harmony was killed in December 2019, nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021. Her body has never been found.
Montgomery was also sentenced to a minimum total of 11 more years for charges of falsifying evidence, tampering with a witness and second-degree assault.
His attorneys argued that he should have had a separate trial for his assault charges and that his estranged wife and stepmother of his daughter, Kayla Montgomery, should not have been allowed to testify after serving prison time for lying to the grand jury, Boston 25 reported.
At Montgomery’s trial last year, Kayla Montgomery revealed gruesome details in her testimony, telling the court that she saw her husband violently beat Harmony for soiling herself in the back of the car where they had been living on December 7, 2019. The incident happened shortly before they noticed her lifeless body.
The stepmother told the court that Montgomery stuffed Harmony’s body in a duffel bag and then spent several weeks moving it around, hiding it in different locations, including a restaurant freezer, in the ceiling of a shelter, and in an apartment refrigerator.
But in the appeal filed this week, attorneys claim there were “credibility issues” with Kayla Montgomery's testimony because her story had changed several times during the investigation and that she had a "a history of dishonestly and misplaced trust."
The attorneys argue that her testimony shouldn’t have been admitted.
The appeal also noted concerns with combining the murder case with the assault case. The defense had previously requested the two cases to be severed, but that request was denied.
Attorneys said the “bad acts” evidence that Montgomery assaulted and neglected Harmony in the two weeks leading up to her death should not have been admitted to the court, as well as evidence that he prevented Harmony’s mother, Crystal Sorey, from seeing her daughter to cover up that abuse.
“While the evidence may have been part of Sorey’s story, that circumstance does not make the evidence admissible. The disputed evidence was not necessary or essential for the jury to realistically evaluate the evidence about what happened to H.M. on and after December 7, 2019,” the appeal reads.
Montgomery has denied killing Harmony. He has, however, admitted to disposing of her body, but refuses to say where.
The search for Harmony continues.
