New Hampshire court reverses Adam Montgomery murder conviction in Harmony case

Adam Montgomery’s second-degree murder conviction in Harmony Montgomery’s death was wiped out, but the rest of his case stayed standing. The New Hampshire Supreme Court sent the murder count back for further proceedings on Thursday, creating a fresh round of legal risk in a case that has gripped both the true crime world and child-welfare advocates for years.

The ruling in State v. Montgomery, 2026 N.H. 24, turned on a narrow but decisive issue: the trial court should not have joined a July 2019 assault charge with the homicide-related charges tied to Harmony’s death later that year. The justices said that combining the cases created a significant risk of unfair prejudice, because jurors could have used evidence from the earlier assault to infer that Montgomery was guilty of murder. The court’s concern centered on the possibility that the July incident, when Harmony was five, colored the jury’s view of the December 2019 killing.

That earlier episode was no abstraction. The court’s factual summary said Harmony had moved in with Adam Montgomery and Kayla Montgomery in February 2019 at Montgomery’s grandmother’s home in Manchester. The opinion recounted testimony about a black-eye incident and said Montgomery was heard saying, “I bashed her around the f**king house.” The family was evicted from the Manchester home on November 27, 2019, and then lived in their car.

The reversal does not amount to exoneration. Montgomery’s convictions for second-degree assault, falsifying physical evidence, witness tampering and abuse of a corpse remain intact, along with the prison term he received in 2024 after the Hillsborough County Superior Court jury trial in the Northern District. He had been sentenced to a minimum of 56 years in prison. The murder count, though, is now back in play, and the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office said it intends to retry it and still believes in the strength of the evidence.

That leaves the case exactly where families of missing children dread seeing it: one of the most painful facts in New Hampshire remains unchanged. Harmony was declared missing in December 2021, and her body has never been found. Massachusetts’ Office of the Child Advocate also said she had been in DCF custody since 2014, when she was two months old, underscoring the long-running scrutiny of the child-protection systems that were supposed to keep her safe. For now, the murder conviction is gone, but the case around Harmony’s death is far from over.