This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Adam Montgomery is expected to be retried next year for the murder of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony Montgomery, after the New Hampshire Supreme Court overturned his conviction.
At a scheduling conference on Monday at Hillsborough Superior Court North, attorneys for both the state and defense agreed to set October 2027 as the start date for the retrial.
Montgomery was not present at the hearing.
Ben Agati, an attorney with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, said the search for Harmony’s remains is still ongoing. She was killed in 2019.
“We still do not know where she is,” Agati said. “There have been searches, I can say as recent as about 30, 45 days ago now, in another area.”
If the trial date remains unchanged, and if Harmony were still alive, she would be 13 years old by the time the retrial began.
Montgomery was convicted in 2024 on second-degree murder charges in connection with Harmony’s death. In June, the New Hampshire Supreme Court reversed the murder conviction, ruling that Judge Amy Messer had improperly allowed jurors to consider the murder and assault charges simultaneously during a single trial.
“We conclude that, under these circumstances, trying the second-degree assault and second-degree murder charges in a single trial jeopardized the defendant’s right to a fair trial,” the judges wrote in their decision.
Although the murder conviction was overturned, Montgomery’s convictions on the remaining charges — second-degree assault, falsifying physical evidence, witness tampering and abuse of a corpse — were upheld.
