Concord, New Hampshire — The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the murder conviction of a man accused of killing his 5-year-old daughter and transporting her body for months before disposing of it.
Although her body was never found, police believe Harmony Montgomery was murdered in 2019, nearly two years before she was reported missing. Her father, Adam Montgomery, was sentenced to prison Minimum 56 years in prison in 2024 after being found guilty of second-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, witness tampering, and assault.
However, the Supreme Court overturned the more serious charge, agreeing with Montgomery that the less serious assault charge should have been tried separately. The second-degree murder charge was returned to the district court, leaving the other convictions standing.
In their unanimous ruling, the justices said combining the cases jeopardized Montgomery’s right to a fair trial because jurors may have used stronger evidence about the assault to come up with weaker evidence that he killed her months later.
“There was a significant risk that the jury would draw an impermissible inference that because the defendant had assaulted the victim previously by striking her on the head, he must have assaulted her to death in December by striking her on the head again.”
The second-degree murder conviction represents 45 years of Montgomery’s 56-year-to-life sentence, which was imposed on top of a previous 32 1/2-year sentence he was already serving on unrelated gun charges.
The district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment Thursday about whether it plans to retry him on murder charges. Emails were also sent to Montgomery’s attorney.