Crime Weekly - Harmony Montgomery | The U-Haul, the Freezer, and the Final Cover-Up (Part 3)
Episode Date: July 10, 2026In October of 2021, the body of five-year-old Elijah Lewis was found buried in a Massachusetts park. And when Crystal Sorey heard what had happened to that little boy, something inside her panicked- �...�because she had been trying, for months, to get people to listen to her about her own missing child. Her daughter, Harmony Montgomery. Harmony was supposed to be in first grade. She was supposed to be wearing her glasses. She was supposed to be getting medical care for the condition that left her blind in one eye. She was supposed to be protected. Instead, by the time anyone officially started looking for her, Harmony had not been seen in two years. Harmony did not disappear from a life where everything seemed fine. She disappeared after years of warning signs, reports, custody battles, missed appointments, police calls, allegations of abuse, unstable homes, substance abuse, homelessness, and adults pointing fingers at every other adult in the room. Her mother failed her. Her father failed her. Her stepmother failed her. The courts failed her. Child protective services failed her. The systems built specifically to catch a little girl before she fell through the cracks watched those cracks open wider and wider. This was a child who had already spent so much of her tiny life being moved from place to place, plan to plan, home to home. A child with medical needs. A child with a little brother who loved her, missed her, and kept looking for her at playgrounds because he believed, the way children do, that if he looked hard enough, maybe she would just be there. But Harmony wasn’t there. And for years, the people responsible for knowing where she was, and making sure she was safe and cared for, simply didn’t. Try our coffee! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod ADS: https://www.Ladder.fit/CrimeWeekly - Get a 7-Day Free Trial and $10 off your first month! https://www.TryFUM.com - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY for a FREE gift with your Journey Pack! https://www.MintMobile.com/CrimeWeekly - Get Premium Wireless for only $15 a month! Text WEEKLY to 64000 for 20% off ALL IQBAR products and FREE shipping! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello, everybody.
Welcome back to Crime Weekly.
I'm Stephanie Harlow.
And I'm Derek Lavasser.
So today we are diving into Harmony Montgomery, part three.
And I'm just going to kind of give a quick little reminder of where we were at when we left off at the end of last episode.
It was a very hard episode, admittedly, that we had last week.
We went through what happened to Harmony, according to Kayla Montgomery, at the hands of Adam Montgomery.
and then basically some of the moves that Adam and Kayla made after Harmony's death to hide and conceal her body until, I guess, they figured out what to do.
And when we last left off, they were in the fit shelter, the family in transitions shelter in Manchester.
And at that time, they were storing Harmony's body in kind of like a gym bag and then...
The canvas, then the canvas bag.
And then the canvas bag.
yes, and that was being kept in the ceiling of their room at the fit shelter. So while Adam,
Kayla, and their two sons were still living at the fit shelter in Manchester, while Harmony's body
was still being stored in the ceiling of their room there, DCYF in New Hampshire received an anonymous
report. So this is crazy. While they're living at the fit shelter, after Harmony is dead,
and her body's there, DCYF gets a call about them. And this report came in on January 7, 2020. And the
reporter expressed concerns that Adam and Kayla were using drugs in front of their children.
So DCYF requested that the Manchester police perform a welfare check at the fit shelter, which
happened on the evening of January 7th. Officers located Adam, Kayla, and their two young
biological sons. They did not see any immediate overt signs of severe danger or an emergency
that legally allowed them to remove the children or make arrests on the spot.
And this is something that happens.
I've been to these calls numerous times where it's not what you know, it's what you can prove.
You'll get a report of something.
You walk in there.
And unfortunately, the evidence that you need in order to act just isn't there.
And there are even cases where I've gone in and it's been right on the line there.
And even then, I don't have the legal right as a sworn officer unless there's like an immediate danger to remove those children.
I have to call out DCYF.
and then they have to make that determination.
So there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through.
It's not as simple as, hey, this is not a good environment for these kids.
I'm going to take them.
And I mean, at this point, the police go there.
They see the two boys who seem fine.
They see Adam and Kayla.
They're at a shelter.
So they know that the kids at least have a roof over their heads.
Right.
There's other people kind of keeping an eye.
But this anonymous hotline report that triggered the check had only mentioned drug use in front of the children.
and the call did not explicitly name Harmony.
And because the police did not have a manifest list of every child supposed to be in Adam's custody,
and because Harmony's name was never brought up by the caller,
the responding officers did not realize that a fifth family member was entirely missing.
They saw the two boys deemed the immediate situation stable enough to leave them in the parents' care and cleared the call.
So this is, to me, once again, one of those.
administrative things that should be addressed because if a police officer is going to visit a family
and that family's been on the radar of DCYF before and the police are going there to check on
the children and there's no specific children named in the call, the police should do a check
with DCYF beforehand and be like, hey, or DCYF calls the police and says, hey, can you check on this family?
These are the children that are in their care. Make sure all three of these children are okay.
No, I agree. If DCYF makes the call, they have to inform you of the information, like, give you some context.
On the other hand, realistically, police officers are responding to well-being checks daily.
The break in the chain here is there's not one internal database where an officer can type in an address or type in a person and find out if they've ever had contact with DCYF.
The only way to do that would be for the police officer to...
No, but I don't think the police did anything wrong.
DCYF got the call.
DCYF called the police and said, can you check on this family?
Yeah, so you're saying at that point they have to give them the information they need.
Oh, I agree with that.
No, they have to give them the context behind it.
Hey, can you go check?
Here's who you may encounter.
Even though this wasn't the issue here, what I was going to say is there should be a point
where there would be like an internal system that police officers, if responding to an
address kind of like IMC or like NCIC where if you run someone, it comes up with a warrant,
it would be great if when a police officer checks someone's name.
So when he checked Adam Montgomery's name and logged it, something would pop up and say,
hey, there's a case file attached to this with DCYF.
Maybe give them a call, right?
And then I can step outside with my cell phone and say, hey, we just responded to this address
for a well-being check.
I'm seeing in my internal systems that there's maybe something going on with you guys.
I don't have access to see it for privacy reasons, but can you inform me what's going on
so that I know I'm dotted my eyes and crossing my T's here.
That would be convenient.
Yeah, I agree.
And you might not say, you might say like, oh, well, you can't have a database with these
kids' names.
They're minors.
DCYF has a lot of those records, like, sealed, you know, so that's fine.
The records are fine, but maybe just the names?
What do you think about that?
Yeah.
Or a flag where it's like contact DCF for specifics.
That's what I'm saying.
Like, if you pop someone's name in there, one of those parents or one of the kids,
something pops up on my screen that says, hey, contact DCOF, caseworker, Stephanie Harlow.
But in this case, the caseworker would be Demetrius Toros.
Oh, man, we're doomed.
And that's where the true failure happened the following morning when DCYF caseworker,
Demetrius Toros, followed up on the police check.
So remember, DCYF's getting the call.
DCYF calls the police.
The police go there.
Seems like everything's fine.
Demetrius Toros now is going to do a follow-up.
He didn't go to the shelter.
He didn't go and see them himself.
He called Adam Montgomery on January 8th, 2020.
And he was like, hey Adam, what's up, buddy?
Everything okay over there?
And Adam confirmed the police had been there.
And then Demetrius Toros asked if he could stop by the shelter and see the family.
He asked, like he wanted to get permission from Adam to go and do his job.
Now, at that point, Adam told Toros that his family had been evicted from the Guilford Street
house and because they were going to be homeless, he had made the decision that Harmony should go and live with her mother.
So Adam's like, yeah, you can come, I guess, but like we're homeless and Harmony's not even with us anymore because of the homeless thing. I sent her back to live with her mother. Now, did Toros ask if a legal custody arrangement had been made to support this change? Because, you know, Adam Montgomery has full custody of Harmony. Technically, just like when Crystal Sori let Harmony go and spend the night with Adam and DCYF was like, you can't do that.
Yeah.
Because you are the sole legal guardian of Harmony right now, and you can't just let her go and be with anyone else.
And the fact, and with Adam being her main legal custodian and DCYF not really being involved anymore,
I guess that it would have been fine.
But because Harmony had been removed from Crystal's care before, this was still something Adam should have talked to DCYF about or made arrangements about or notified someone of.
So did Demetrius Toros ask if that's what happened? No. Did he call Crystal Sorry to verify that Harmony was with her?
Yes, technically, but not until 12 days later on January 20th, at which point he left a voicemail and he never followed up on that voicemail.
Okay. So Adam says, yeah, I know the last time you saw us, it was because I was being accused of beating Harmony and doing horrible things to her, but she's not with me anymore.
She's with her mother. And Demetrius Toros is like, okay, and like roughly two weeks after he took,
talks to Adam. He calls Crystal to confirm this, but he never spoke to Crystal. Crystal never
confirmed this to him. And that was it. He never did anything else. Twelve days later. That's the big
thing here. Twelve days later. Why not a call that day? I know. What are we doing? And nothing would ever
happened, by the way, to Demetrius Toros for the major role he played in what happened to Harmony.
He left DCYF quietly in September of 2021. He started working for the U.S. Postal Service. So basically,
really roughly like four or five months before the police started searching for harmony,
Demetrius Toros was already out of DCYF.
So really nothing ever happened to him.
And the crazy part is, and this goes for police officers and attorneys, right,
this wasn't the only case that he was working.
And so you have to imagine, it'd be safe to assume,
that this type of behavior, this just incompetence,
borderline criminal was being applied to numerous cases, just like harmonies, where Demetrios was in
charge of their well being and failed them as well. It may not have resulted in their death.
Luckily, yeah.
But you have to imagine the horrific situations that these kids were put through because Demetrius wasn't
doing his job.
I agree.
Allegedly, in my opinion.
It's not just your opinion.
I mean, we'll talk about, you know, different civil lawsuits that happened afterwards.
No, the guy's an absolute scumbag. There's no doubt about it. Like I have some other things I'd like to say, but I like my job and I don't want to get sued, so I won't. But you guys all know what I'm thinking because you're thinking the same thing. The fact of the matter is if the first time he'd been called to the Gelford Street House to check on Harmony because she had a black eye in July of 2019, if that had happened and he'd done his job, which was to physically lay eyes on her, he would have seen the black eye that day.
She'd be alive.
But instead he let Adam leave with her.
Yeah.
And if he had done his job and removed Harmony from her father's care on that day, Harmony would be alive.
Not a stretch.
Not hyperbole.
If he had intervened, there's that fork in the road, right?
Not even intervened.
Done his job.
Yeah.
Done his job.
Let's not act like this is like a good Samaritan walking by and he has a choice and it's not his job and it's not really his responsibility.
And he's like going to intervene.
This was Demetriotoros's basically when they say, that's your warm.
job? Yes, that's your one job. Yeah, that his job would be to intervene, right? Like, hey, listen,
you have her, but I'm intervening. You're no longer going to have her. I'm taking her back. I'm
putting her back with Crystal, whoever, and we got to get her in a good situation. Or give him back to
Michelle and Tim, who, from everything we know, they were doing a great job. Yeah, Harmony's foster parents,
and they wanted to adopt her. The rafters, yep, right? And you know who else wanted to adopt Harmony?
The same couple who, and we'll talk a little bit more about them in the final part next week,
but the same couple who adopted her brother Jameson because when they adopted her brother
Jameson, Jameson started talking about Harmony because he missed her.
Right.
And he was like, I miss my sister, blah, blah, blah, and they were going through this whole thing.
And that couple was, you know, attempting to try to figure out how they could also adopt Harmony
to bring her home to her brother Jameson who really missed her.
So there was people who wanted her.
Now at some point, people at the fit shelter were starting to complain about the smell and maintenance
was being called to check on the room that Adam, Kayla and their two sons were
living in, and at this time, Adam was working at a restaurant called the Portland Pie Company,
and Kayla testified that she pushed her two sons in a stroller to that restaurant,
while the bag containing Harmony's body sat between them.
She did this at Adam's request because he wanted to keep Harmony's body in the walk-in freezer there,
which he did for about a week.
So an employee at the Portland Pie Company, Cameron Gibney,
recalled seeing a CMC canvas bag in the cooler on a few occasions,
both on the floor and on a shelf, but she never questioned Adam about it because she knew that he had
children. So this was like a maternity hospital bag. And so she was probably like, oh, he's maybe keeping
his lunch in there. I don't know. But Gibney testified that she had seen Adam bringing the bag in,
and she had only ever seen him handling it. In February of 2020, Adam, Kayla and the boys were getting
ready to move to an apartment located at 644 Union Street in Manchester. And they were most likely able to
secure an apartment at this time because their tax refunds had come in. And it should be no surprise
to anyone that Adam and Kayla had claimed Harmony on their 2019 taxes, which would come back to you
at the beginning of 2020. Now, according to Kayla, because she was asked about this during the trial,
why would you do that? You knew that Harmony was dead. Kayla said this was because Harmony had lived
with them for six months during that year and also because Adam told her they were claiming Harmony,
so she just went along with it.
You know, he was like, that's what we're doing.
She lived with us for six months, so legally we can.
And so she went ahead and did that.
So they moved into the new apartment on February 20, 20, 2020.
And at that time, the CNC canvas bag was brought from the walk-in freezer at the restaurant
to the new apartment, where Adam put Harmony's body in the refrigerator there.
And I asked you earlier, and I think you said he began to discuss dismembering Harmony.
Yes.
What did he say about dismembering her?
That he just wanted to put her, and he would put her in pieces to get rid of her.
And was that at the Union Street apartment?
Yes.
Did he ever discuss using tools on Harmony with you?
He said that he was going to try and use a saw.
He wanted to use a hand saw
or a neutral bullet
And a neutral bullet
And a neutral bullet
Neutral bullet
It's like a blender
That you can make smoothies in
Or any kind of
Puray
food item
He said that it would be
Good to use
it would help get rid of her.
It'd help get rid of harmony.
Yes.
That's disturbing.
This guy is just the absolute bottom of the barrel,
Adam I'm referring to.
I want to make sure that the blame is at the feet
of the person responsible,
but man, it is really hard to listen
to her describe this
and basically hide behind the ignorance,
or I guess being complicit.
Like she's somehow a victim here as well.
I mean, all of these details
I mean, we shouldn't even have gotten to this point, but being next to the, next to Harmony in the car and hearing the details about how they're going to, how he's going to dispose of her body.
At what point do you say, I got to let someone know.
This guy's not only a killer, but he's, he's insane.
He's insane.
Like, I have to make sure I get away from him and let other people know that he's out there.
Like, yeah, I'm glad.
You got kids with him, man.
Yes.
So you're thinking he can do this to his biological child.
Yes.
Yes.
So he could do that to his other biological children, which are also my children.
And I understand that she is critical to this case, right?
Because she's the only other adult present.
She knows where all the bodies are buried literally, right?
Unfortunately, this is the world we live in where in order to get Adam, you have to give her a deal.
Because without her testimony, you don't get Adam.
Yeah, I agree.
You have to make a deal with the devil.
But also, she's the devil.
No, no doubt.
We're not going to frame her as a hero.
here. Absolutely not.
She was complicit and she basically helped him.
The reason she knows that he did all of these things is because she helped him.
She pushed a stroller.
So I would assume that Adams are work at this point, right?
Because Cameron Gibney said, I saw Adam come in with the bag and he was the only one I saw
handle it in the restaurant.
But Kayla testified that she took the CNC tow bag from the fit shelter, put it in
the stroller between her other two sons, which is horrifying.
to think about in general and pushed it to the restaurant so that he could now take it and put in
the walking freezer. Once again, you had chances here. You could have pushed it to the police station,
bitch. You could have called somebody. You could have gotten help. All right, but that is not what
she did. So here we are. She's horrendous. So I suppose, though, after further thought,
Adam decided the whole hand saw and neutral bullet plan was kind of half-baked. So he came up with
another idea. He told Kayla that using lime would help Harmony's body decay so he got some lime,
and he took the CNC bag out of the refrigerator and brought it to the bathroom where he
dumped the bag containing Harmony's body into the shower. Adam was trying to de-thaw her body.
What was he doing specifically? Taking the clothes off of her, putting her in the bag,
of lime. And when he was trying to de-thaw her body, where was Harmony's body at the time?
In the bathtub. Did you see Harmony's body in the bathtub? Yes. I want you to tell the
jurors what you saw of her body in that bathtub. I saw Harmony in the bathtub still folded together
the same way that she was left in the bag
when he took her out of the car.
And she just looked like she had
just barely any skin.
Like she was just a layer of skin and bone.
And she was all bruised up.
He had the hot water running from the shower.
Was the hot water touching her?
Yes.
He was running it over her?
Yes.
And what was he doing to Harmony's body during this process?
Taking the clothes off of her.
Was he touching her at all during that process?
Yes.
He was cutting the clothes off of her
and just defawing her.
Did he tell you to help him at some point?
Yes.
Did you obey him?
Yes.
Why?
Because I was scared.
I helped him take the clothes off of her
and cutting him with scissors.
What did he do with her body
after he cut the clothes off of her?
Put her in the bag.
of lime.
So let's take a shot every time Kayla Montgomery says that after she did something absolutely horrendous,
that the reason she did it was because she was scared.
We should just take a shot every time that happens.
But there's a lot to talk about in that clip.
Let's take a quick break.
Give ourselves some time to collect our thoughts and we'll be right back.
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This is what Kayla is saying.
This is at the in the bathroom of the apartment that they went to after the fit shelter.
So basically when they're at the fit shelter,
Kayla brings Harmony's body to the restaurant.
It's kept in the walk-in freezer there.
So obviously it's pretty frozen.
And then when they move to the new apartment,
they bring the bag from the walk-in freezer of the restaurant to the new apartment.
Adam puts it in the refrigerator there.
And so pretty shortly after that, I would assume this is when this whole bathtub thing, which once again, this is just horrific to think about.
So it's not that you just killed your daughter.
You didn't just stuff her into a bag because Kayla said when she came out of the bag, she was folded like she was when she went into the bag.
Yeah, yeah.
But now you're like actually tampering with her remains.
I just don't see how any person could do that.
Committing a crime, by the way.
Even with an adult.
Yes, committing a crime.
But even with an adult who's not related to you, you know, we've heard about people do this like, oh, they kill someone and then they have to do stuff to the remains to make it easier to hide.
How could you do that to a child, much less your child?
I don't understand.
And Kayla's admitting and acknowledging, yeah, I helped.
I helped him do this because he told me to because I was scared.
The whole thing is disgusting.
And I'm not going to repeat everything you just said because you nailed it.
I, the only piece, the only piece and it's small and it's just kind of like grasping at straws here is that I keep reminding myself that harmony didn't feel anything.
Harmony was gone.
She was in a better place and we still have to talk about it, but she wasn't suffering at this point.
And that's the only way I can listen to this and not punch a hole through my camera.
So that's where I'm at on this.
But I just, I don't want to be a broken record, but Kayla wasn't just sitting there in the background.
She was actually assisting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I get it.
I totally get it.
And I understand it.
If you told me today, we got to give her a deal to get him.
I would say yes.
But man, it doesn't make me feel good.
It doesn't make me feel good.
I don't even know how this person is like, I got to say.
If I was involved in a situation like this, I don't know how I'm going to continue on.
like living.
You know what I mean?
No, I'm with you.
It's going to mess with you.
Yeah.
And like at this point, I didn't show you this part of her testimony, but when she starts
testifying, she testified for like two or three days straight, they ask her, you know,
you were on drugs.
She's like, yeah.
And you're clean now.
And she's like, yeah.
This is a reason to stay on drugs at this point because I don't know how you go on with
a sober mind after doing something like this.
I would see it every time I close my eyes.
Maybe we just send letters to every one of the prisoners that Adams,
going to be in prison with eventually
and let them know what he did.
They should know.
I'm joking. Oh, they will know, Stephanie.
They will know. And I'll tell you what,
because a little inside baseball here,
the correctional officers there will make sure everyone knows
because they'll be referring to him as baby killer
his entire time in prison.
Like, I totally respect him going after this technicality
because he knows that if he stays in prison,
it's not going to end well for him.
He can be tough with a little girl.
he ain't going to be tough with these prisoners,
especially ones that have nothing to lose.
I think we should actually have them play this series
at the prison in the common area.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Listen, take the ads out of it.
We're going to let it for free consumption.
Yes, we will give it to the prison
because, you know, I'm sure they're probably sick of like what they have.
Yeah, I mean, that same TV channel.
Yeah, the same TV channel, Walker, Texas Ranger over and over again.
Yeah.
Here you go.
Let's change it up a little bit.
Some Crime Weekly.
All right. So Kayla said at some point she left the bathroom. She was asked why. And she said, well, because I had to check on the kids. And then she pauses. And she's like, and also because I just couldn't be in there anymore. You know, it was just too hard. She said, Adam remained in the bathroom with Harmony's body for several hours. He never left the bathroom. He never had to even take a break. And like she said at some point he closed the bathroom door. She could hear the water running in the shower because he's running the water over Harmony's body to de-thaw her.
And remember, Adam had bought some lime.
And here's where things get a little sketchy for me.
And I think Adam did this intentionally.
So Kayla was asked, you know, Adam had been talking about dismembering Harmony's body.
Did he do that when you were in the bathroom?
And Kayla's like, I don't know.
I didn't see it.
I wasn't in the bathroom.
So it sounds like she was kind of in the bathroom.
She helped Adam remove Harmony's clothing.
And then that's when she was like, all right, I'm out.
I got to go see the other kids.
I think Adam was like, go take care of the other kids, leave the bathroom.
He did not want her to see what he did next and not because he didn't want her to think
differently of him or anything for a different reason.
So Kayla was then asked like, well, what did you see in the bathroom?
And Kayla said she saw three large trash bags in the bathroom, each with lime inside of
them.
So she said she never saw this happen, but she knows.
that Adam put Harmony's body back into the CNC bag that now had lime inside of it.
She said she knows that he took Harmony's clothing and the underarmored duffel bag
that remember they put Harmony's body into when she was dead in the car.
Yeah.
And they put that or Adam had put the clothing in the duffel bag inside one of those trash bags.
Okay.
And then he told Kayla he intended to throw them away, but not in their trash area.
and she doesn't know where he ended up disposing of the garbage bag with the clothes and the
dupel bag inside of it.
She said that Harmony was put back into the CNC bag with the lime in it, and then Adam
put that bag back into the freezer of the apartment.
Now, this is interesting to me because during the trial, Kayla was asked to remember her testimony
about seeing Adam put Harmony in that same bag at the fit shelter and how she had testified
that he had to squeeze Harmony into that.
that bag because her body didn't fit. And then Kayla was asked, and this was Adam's attorneys asking
her, because they're trying to make her look like a liar. And I do think that she's incorrect about what
happened, but I don't think it's because she's lying. I think it's because Adam lied to her. So she was
asked by Adam's lawyers, well, how did her body not fit into the CNC bag at the fit shelter, but then
at the Union Street apartment, how was Adam able to fit Harmony's body into the CNC bag with like
several pounds of lime in it? And Kayla said she doesn't.
No. Okay. Now, obviously, at the time that Harmony's body was at the fit shelter, from when it was at the Union Street apartment, it wasn't like a ton of time, but there would be more decomposition happening, more fluid loss. There would be a smaller volume of her. I hate talking about her like this, but a smaller volume of her to put into the CNC thing.
Correct. Yeah. I mean, you're not, that's the truth. With decomposition and over time, the mummification, I mean, it's a long process.
But we've seen it before where you have a body that's found 10 years later and it's the size of a baby, even though it was a small child at first.
That's just, that's just naturally what happens.
Still, though, this was not a year later.
It's only.
No, but the process happens quickly.
Okay, but here's what I think happened.
Okay.
Remember, Kayla said she saw three garbage bags with lime in the bathroom.
Now, Adam's defense team is going to seize on this part of Kayla's testimony.
They're going to say she's lying because Harmony plus the lime, all the lime that Adam bought would never fit into that CNC bag.
And I agree.
Here's what I think.
I think Adam had three large garbage bags with lime in them.
And Kayla said that he used one of the bags for the doffel bag and Harmony's clothes.
But what if Adam used the other two bags for Harmony's remains?
And then he told Kayla that Harmony was still in the CNC bag that he placed in the freezer
for the explicit purpose of not wanting Kayla to know exactly where Harmony's body was
or be able to describe the bag the body was in.
Because if she does something like this and turn on him and you're going to find out,
Adam at this point, by the time they're in the Union Street apartment, he's going crazy.
He's starting to, according to Kayla, and there's eyewitness testimony and lots of stuff to back
it up.
He's becoming abusive.
He's accusing her every day.
He thinks she's talking to the police.
He thinks she's telling on him.
He thinks that people are following him in vans.
He's, like, destroying the apartment because he thinks there's recorders and cameras
hid there.
He's this paranoid when they're at the Union Street Department.
He's doing this to Harmony's body when they're at the Union Street Department.
So he doesn't want Kayla at some point to tell the police, well, I saw her in the CNC bag.
And then if Harmony's body is found in the CNC bag, well, that's because what Kayla said is true.
So I think he told Kayla Harmony was in the CNC bag.
And he put Harmony in those other garbage bags and then did something with the other garbage bags, whether at that point or later when he gets the U-Haul, which we're going to talk about in a minute.
Yeah.
I don't disagree with you.
I think that's a very good theory.
And I think it would make sense.
It's like the decoy bag, right?
I don't know if people have seen the Italian job.
Yeah, or like the Ocean's 11 or something like that.
Yeah, where you send out three different brink trucks and you don't know which one the merchandise is actually in.
Here, he doesn't trust anyone.
He's paranoid.
And there's certain things that he can't hide from her.
But this is one of those areas where he can hide the body in a location that nobody other than himself is aware of.
And nobody, no homicide.
At least that's what he's thinking.
Unfortunately for him, he's wrong.
I mean, his conviction was overturned.
Well, on a technicality manifesting it, that asshole's going back to prison.
With all of this, manifesting it, yeah.
With everything that you've described already, he's done.
I mean, this woman is implicating herself.
She's putting herself there.
It's not hearsay.
She witnessed all of this.
What would be the incentive?
Yeah, but she got a deal for her testimony.
And if the defense, like, listen, the defense was not good in the first trial.
I'm going to be honest with you.
If he was smart, he would get new lawyers because they were awful.
Not awful, I'm sure lawyers, but in a trial atmosphere.
boring, didn't really know the woman who kept questioning Kayla didn't really know kind of where
she was going. She always lost her train of thought, whereas the prosecutor was very good at
questioning. You've heard her question or him questioned Kayla before. He's good at what he does,
whereas Adam's defense lawyer was not so great in a trial atmosphere, but let's see he gets better
lawyers who are good in a trial atmosphere. And they say, well, Kayla implicated herself, yes,
but she got a total deal of immunity. And she's along the way, every step of the way.
right? And so if our defense is true where Adam helped Kayla because he didn't want to
break his family apart or lose his other children or whatever, then yeah, his fingerprints would be
in the ceiling because he helped Kayla. He was taller than her. So he was the one who put
harmony in the ceiling. But that doesn't mean he killed Harmony. So if they can maybe even make a
shadow of a doubt in a jury's mind. I still think with everything you have here, totality of circumstances
his previous history with violence. And then also remember his previous history with violence was
the technicality, technically.
When you think about the injuries, now she could be making that whole thing up, but if that's,
if we had her, we would be able to go back and maybe determine that based on.
Harmony's body.
Harmony's body, yeah, we'd be able to tell from injuries to her skull, because even though
a decomposition, the last thing to go would be the bones.
And so if she had a fracture in her skull, we would be able to see that.
And when you look at Adam in these interrogation videos, and this isn't meant as a compliment,
but he's, he's a stocky guy, right?
it would take a lot of pressure to fracture someone's skull like that to create that internal bleeding.
And I don't know if Kala would have been able to do that.
I mean, Harmony is also five, though.
I don't even know if.
She's little, but there also could be something else that happened here.
But if I'm a jury member, she's malnourished, you know.
If I'm a jury member, this is just a foregone conclusion.
If the same facts are presented, they should both be in prison.
But if they both can't be because one came forward and is testifying, the other one isn't.
Yeah.
And I mean, at that point, a jury member might say, well, Kayla has immunity.
one way or the other at this point.
Someone's going to prison for this.
Adam was definitely there.
So why should we let him off, Scott Free?
You know what?
Bingo.
That's the rationale of most rational human beings.
That's what they're going to say.
They're going to go in there and go, oh, someone's going to prison for this.
You both ain't walking.
I hope you're right.
I hope I am too.
All right.
So not long after this, this bathroom shower day, which sounds like an absolute horror movie.
Adam and Kayla stayed at the Ocano Lodge in Manchester with two other people,
Travis Beach and his girlfriend, Brittany.
So Kayla said that Adam brought the CMC bag with them and put it in the mini fridge in the room,
which that's crazy to me because you can't fit much in the mini fridge in the room,
especially when they already have like stuff in there.
And I mean, it's probably it's a different time.
And it's the like econelage, but I know a lot of places you go, they have like stuff in there.
And if you move them, you get charged for it.
And you can't just put your stuff in there yourself.
but this is what Kayla said, and there is testimony from Travis's girlfriend, Brittany, that backs it up.
Okay, we'll talk about that in a second.
So Adam and Travis had known each other since they were 17.
They had lost a touch, but then they ran into each other again at the mall food court in the Manchester, New Hampshire Mall, and reconnected.
And then not long after that, in March of 2020, Adam reached out and asked Travis if he could help him with something.
Adam wanted to know if Travis could rent him a U-Haul, and Travis agreed.
I didn't hesitate.
He's a friend.
I wasn't thinking of anything negative.
I was at his apartment.
I saw everything packed up.
I put one and one together.
I thought it was two, but it wasn't.
He needed to move stuff, and I, yeah, that's it.
And you wanted to help, it sounds like.
Did you, in fact, help him rent at you all?
Not per se myself.
I got somebody to rent them a U-Haul, so in the aspect, yes, sir.
Okay.
And I want you to walk us through that.
You said you got someone to rent him at U-Haul.
Yes, sir.
Who is that someone that you're referring to?
Brendan Middleton.
And the same Brendan Middleton that at that point you'd known for five years?
Yes, sir.
I myself didn't have a license at the time.
so I asked Brittany to get the you,
Brittany Biddard to get the U-Haul.
And she couldn't.
So we had Brandon Middleton rent to the U-Haul
because he's the one that had the license at the time.
Okay, so that was Travis.
Yeah, he seemed like a genius.
Yeah, I have some things to say.
I have some things to say about Travis, man.
I have to tell you, man, all these characters,
it's bringing me back to my police days.
I believe you.
It really does.
Because it's like New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island. It's all the same.
It's, I've dealt with a million Adams, man.
And a million Travis's, I'm sure. So I was actually watching Travis's testimony and I kept
laughing and the other people in my office were like, what are you laughing about? You know,
because usually I'm not sitting in my office laughing. I'm doing true crime stuff.
Nobody's hearing from me. I'm definitely not laughing. If anything, I'm like swearing and
getting angry. I was laughing. And we're going to take a quick break, but we'll come back
and I'll tell you about Travis.
We're about to tell Travis about himself.
Okay, we'll be right back.
Yay.
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Okay, we're back.
So Travis is funny.
Because according to Travis, and I don't believe that he's being 100%
honest. Do I believe that he knew Adam was transporting the body of his dead daughter in this U-Haul?
No. Do I believe that Travis thought it was just innocent and Adam was just moving? No. All right. So
Travis is funny because he says he knew Adam since they were 17. Obviously, Travis is a drug user as
well. He says that they lost touch. And then he sees Adam at the mall and all of a sudden
their best buddies again to the point where literally not long after reconnecting, like within a week
maybe, maybe less. Adam's calling Travis and it's like, hey, buddy, since I was 17 that I haven't
seen in years and just reconnected with like three days ago. I need your help. I need to rent a U-Haul,
but I need you to do it for me. Now, Travis doesn't have a license, but why does Adam need Travis
to rent the U-Haul for Adam? Why doesn't Adam want to do it in his name? Did Travis ever ask
him that? I'm sure, but he didn't tell us about it. So Travis doesn't have a license either.
So he gets this guy who I like to call Brendan Middleman, because that's basically what he was at this point.
He's the middleman. He's Brendan Middleton's got the license, so they're going to use Brendan's license to rent the U-Haul, and Travis's girlfriend, Brittany Bedard, is going to be the one to pay for it on her credit card.
So basically, there is no paper trail at any point to not only Adam Montgomery, but not to Travis either, okay?
So Travis is funny because they kept asking him questions.
They were like, oh, do you know when this call came in from Adam or when this message came in from Adam?
And they were asking about a different message.
And they were clearly asking him, like, what date?
You know?
And he's like, I think it was early in the day.
And they're like, no, like, when, you know, like around what time of the month?
And he's like, definitely early in the day.
He just, I don't know if he's purposely answering these questions this way.
No, these guys aren't rocket scientists.
I'll tell you that much.
Yeah, you can tell.
It's definitely difficult at certain points to just get basic facts out of someone when they're even trying to tell the truth.
It can be daunting.
Yeah.
So basically, Travis is saying, I was already at Adam's apartment before he asked to borrow the U-Haul.
And I saw the things were packed up in boxes.
And so when he asked me for the U-Haul, I just assumed it was innocent because he was moving.
Now, he doesn't say that Adam told him he was moving.
Travis is saying, I saw boxes at an apartment.
He asked for the U-Haul, thought he needed the U-Haul to move.
Now, it's worth mentioning that this is March, right?
When did Adam and Kayla and the boys move into the apartment?
February.
Yeah.
Not moving, right?
At least not at that point.
They're going to get evicted later, but they're not moving at that point.
So Travis says he thinks Adam's moving out of the apartment.
And Adam had also mentioned to Travis that he was having problems with DCYF.
So on the day that he secured the U-Haul for Adam or Travis, Brittany, and Brendan Middellman,
they secured the U-Haul for Adam.
Travis and his girlfriend got a hotel room at the O'Connell Lodge,
and then Adam and Kayla and their kids got a separate room at the same hotel.
They have an apartment, a few miles down the road.
Why are you staying at the hotel that night?
So Travis, Brendan, Middleton, and Brittany went to go get the U-Haul.
They returned to the O'Connell Lodge, and then it was a good time for all involved at that point.
You know, now it's a party because you got the U-Haul, and now you can just relax.
And what did you do when you returned to the Econal Lodge?
We did drugs at the Econa Lodge.
Myself, Brittany Boudard, Adam, and Kayla Montgomery.
And what drugs are you referring to?
What kind of drugs?
Cocaine.
Is that crack cocaine?
Yes, sir.
This is great people.
Just really great people.
That's a part of that had me laughing too because he's like, what did you do when you got back?
And he's like, ah, yeah.
We did drugs.
You already know, we did drugs.
Yeah.
You know, so they're all doing drugs together, right?
Brittany, Travis, Kayla, Adam, just a big drug party while Adam and Kayla's two children were there.
So they do drugs.
They're smoking crack, basically.
And Travis then gives Adam the keys to the U-Haul that he just runs.
for him using someone else's name and credit card.
Then Travis got to spend some time with Adam alone.
And remember that Adam's legal team is going to try and say that Kayla killed Harmony
and Adam was just an innocent bystander.
But the testimony from Adam's friend Travis, who had known Adam since they were 17,
it paints a different picture.
After that, Adam Montgomery and myself went outside to smoke a cigarette.
He was pacing back and forth.
he said he effed up and I asked him what he meant and all he could say and repeat was he
effed up how many times did you repeat four or five times I am I watching I fucked up you repeated
yes sir multiple times I apologize okay thank you yes sir did you ask him to clarify I did and he
did not did he say anything when you asked him
to clarify? All he kept saying was that I fucked up. Where was Kayla during that conversation?
Kayla was in the first floor at the Econa Lodge with Brittany. So Travis is saying, okay,
Adam's pacing around. He says he f***ed up. He apologizes to the judge because originally he had said,
Adam said he effed up. And the lawyer was like, did he use those exact words? And he's like,
Can I see it?
And they're like, yeah.
And then he says, and then he apologizes to the judge.
He's like, I am a good upstanding citizen.
I would never swear in front of a lady.
This is important.
And to have it be verbatim is very important because it goes back to something you said earlier.
And I don't know how much more of an admission we're going to get as we go throughout the story.
But for the people who are out there listening or watching right now who may be asking the question,
is it possible that Kayla killed Harmony and Adam was just covering it up?
Things like this, these spontaneous utterances where they say, where Adam says things like I f*** up or not like Kayla f*** up.
That's important.
It's minor.
And we're kind of, you know, reading between the lines here.
But it is important because now it's another person other than Kayla who may have direct involvement stating something that would implicate Adam as being the primary aggressor here, being the primary offender.
Yeah.
And Travis said he's like pacing.
He's like very on edge.
Now you did all just smoke crack.
So that could have something to do with it.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And also, this is lining up at the same time where Kayla is saying that Adam's paranoid.
He's getting very violent.
He's getting very aggressive.
Is this because he's worried Kayla is telling on him?
Is this because he stressed out about the whole harmony thing?
Is this because they are just actively doing these types of drugs consistently?
Is it a combination of all of these things?
I think it's a combination of all of these things.
Now, I personally think God, by the way, never been around somebody who had just smoked crack or who consistently or like habitually uses crack, cocaine, things like this.
But I'm sure you have seen this, right?
Oh, my God.
It makes you paranoid, very excitable, kind of twitchy, right?
So if you're already, like, stressed out, paranoid, worried, anxious, I'm sure that smoking crack is going to magnify that.
And it's really hard because a lot of the things Adam's doing and his lot of his behavior, like as far as acting paranoid and anxious and stuff, his lawyers could easily say, well, he was on crack.
You know, that's what people act like when they're on crack.
And it was that.
And he wasn't necessarily like nervous or anxious about other things.
And he could be saying I f*** up as in I helped Kayla cover it up and I feel bad.
But really in the in the grand scheme of when you look at all this episode.
evidence together. It seems that he was talking about what he did to harmony.
I agree. We're reading between the lines, like I said, but when you're building a case,
you're building a narrative, Adam doesn't know at this point it's going to go to trial.
So making comments like this, although it may seem minor at the time, it's critical.
Because right now, we know that Adam and Kayla were involved. The only defense Adam could have
would be that Kayla committed the crime. She committed the homicide. And he was a victim here and just was basically forced.
to help her cover up this entire thing, which nobody's buying, but that's the only thing you can go off of.
So these little comments to impartial parties, people who are not directly involved,
it's almost more important than what Kayla has to say.
And it also means the same things that we've been saying about Kayla, which is like,
we're not looking at Kayla, like, some good person.
Okay.
If he, if Kayla did it and he helped her cover it up to this extent where he's like putting
his daughter's body in the bathtub and you're a monster, dude, you're still a monster.
You're still not somebody that I'm like, oh, poor Adam, he got dragged into this.
You helped cover up your own daughter's death.
You also didn't get help.
You also didn't tell anybody.
You also didn't get justice for your child.
And it is pretty much proven that Adam's the one who we're going to talk about in a minute,
left with the U-Haul to allegedly dispose of Harmony's body because Kayla was at the hotel still.
And so you're still the one who knows where she is at the end of the day.
and you're not telling.
So if you're so innocent,
and if you didn't want any of this to happen to harmony,
then why won't you tell anybody where her body is?
That right there,
you're not a detective,
but you're coming to the same conclusion
that investigators are coming to.
If you really are the innocent party,
tell us where she is.
You were the one,
and he's going to say,
oh, well, Kayla hit her.
Come on.
Come on, dude.
You got to give us something here.
You got to give us something.
No, Travis is saying,
I gave the keys to Adam.
Please, Adam's going to let Kayla drive off
in a U-Haul in the middle of the night and trust her, if anything, he would be going with her.
So he'd still know.
He would never let her do it by herself, even if he was helping her.
Because if he's helping her, he wants to make sure that Kayla, who, let's be honest,
isn't the most, like, intelligent person in the entire world that she's disposing of the body
properly because if he's going to help recover it up, he's helping her cover it up because
he doesn't want anybody to find out because he doesn't want his family separated, right?
So he's going to want to make sure that she properly hides the body and the remains so that nobody finds out.
So he's not going to trust her to do it on her own, obviously.
So he'd at least be with her at the very least in the U-Haul and he would still know where Harmony's body was.
Bingo. Bingo.
When you, one plus one equals two, right?
One plus one, like Travis said.
Yeah.
And that's what the jury's going to do here.
This is why I feel so confident and I'm kind of always in the middle, right?
people get aggravated with me with that.
There's a very clear picture here that most reasonable people are going to come to.
And it's that Adam was the primary guy here.
Kayla should be in prison right next to him.
But if you can't have her, he's definitely going down for it.
Because he's the main guy anyways.
That's who you want.
And by the way, that's the way prosecutors are looking at it as well.
They can't stand her either.
But they know in order to get the true monster here, the guy who's at the core of what happened to Harmony,
the whole reason that there was even a world where Kayla had to do these things that we don't agree with.
It's because of Adam.
It's because of Adam.
So they're going for the big dog here.
They're going for the main guy.
Yeah.
And like I really want to have your hope.
And it seems logical.
But I've seen so many times where things seem logical and seem like a foregone conclusion where person gets off.
You know?
Yeah.
So I would just hate to see.
I would go absolutely crazy.
I would go absolutely crazy like Adam after he smoked crack.
All right.
So Travis did testify.
that he did not see Adam with a CNC bag at the motel,
but Travis's girlfriend, Brittany, testified that she noticed that there was a canvas bag
protruding from the motel room's mini-fridge, and she remembered thinking it was weird
because she didn't know why that bag would be in the mini-fridge.
Here's why I don't think Harmony was in that bag.
Okay?
I think Kayla's dumb, first of all.
The bag probably looked like not super full at all.
You can't put remains of a child in there and like several pounds of lime and still put it
in a hotel mini-fridge.
You just can't.
It's not going to happen.
So I think once again, Adam brought the bag along, like, see, I have the bag, see, I have
the bag.
But those garbage bags, he probably hid somewhere like outside or something, right, by the dumpster
thinking when I get the U-Haul, I'll take the CNC bag like I'm bringing it to the
U-Haul and then I'll grab these other bags and Kayla will never see.
Because Brittany never testified like about a weird smell or anything like that.
And she said she saw protruding from the mini fridge, which means the mini fridge isn't completely closed.
It's protruding from the mini fridge.
So the fridge isn't completely closed.
And how could it be with like, you can't even put two bottles of water in these things?
Like, it just doesn't make any sense.
But I think context is important here in the fact that you're giving us the backstory of the paranoia that was going on with Adam.
I think that's relevant here because it wasn't like there was a united front.
As you mentioned, he was paranoid.
He thought that Kayla could be talking to the police.
He had to trust her just enough.
No, there were certain things that because of the close proximity of everything in the small space that they were in,
there were things he couldn't avoid it.
I will even go a step further.
I believe Kayla when she says that Adam was instructing her to do certain things with Harmony,
but I don't think that was because he couldn't do it.
I think he was trying to tie her into what was happening to implicate her to say,
hey, listen, I'm going to make you do certain things so that you're just as responsible as I'm.
I am and now I got you.
Well, he wasn't telling her that.
That's why.
No, no, no.
I don't think he was telling her that, but I think that's what he was thinking.
The same rationale applies when it comes to like a crime involving drugs where they'll
make you try your own shit.
They'll make you do certain things to implicate you as well.
So you can't say, oh, you know, I didn't do it.
By making her do certain things to Harmony's body after the fact, in his mind, he's saying,
oh, she can never turn on me because now I know I got stuff on her.
not actually what happened here, but I think that's his rationale.
But yes, he didn't trust her.
He knew there was a possibility down the road she could turn on him.
And so this was the one area where he could create a little bit of mystery around where her body is.
Because even though he's a dumbass, he's looking at it from a TV movie perspective saying,
well, you know what, even if she turns on me, if they can't find her, they can't charge me.
That's his thought.
And fortunately for us, that's not the case here.
For sure.
And like I really haven't heard anybody talk about this.
And I tried to find it on Reddit.
It seems like Kayla testifying that there was three huge garbage bags, all with lime in
them in the bathroom when Adam was doing this to Harmony has been completely overlooked.
And even the police seemed to kind of be following this CMC canvas bag.
But I don't think she was in the bag for so many multiple reasons.
So Kayla said that Adam with the U-Haul and the CMC bag left around 1 a.m.
and he would not tell her where he was going.
Did he tell you specifically why he wasn't telling you where he was going,
where he was dumping Harmony?
Yes.
He said he wasn't telling me where he was bringing her
so that if anything like this happened and the cops got involved
that I wouldn't be able to tell.
I wouldn't know where she is so I couldn't tell anybody where she is.
Only he would know.
Kayla, where is Harmony's body?
I don't know.
Did he return to the hotel room?
Yes.
And when did he return?
It was like right before the sun came out.
Did he say anything to you when he returned?
That he got rid of her.
That CMC bag, the one that he squished Harmony into?
Yes.
Was it still with him?
No.
In your apartment on Union Street.
At some point during that time frame, early 2020,
Did the defendant begin to suspect that you were informing on him?
Yes.
What did he suspect that you were informing on him about?
About killing Harmony.
He started abusing me.
I want to unpack that abuse.
And you tell the jurors what he did, what he did to you.
When he would accuse me of talking to police or detectives,
he would ask me if I was telling and I would say no and he would say just to tell him the truth
and I wouldn't I wouldn't agree saying that I did and then I thought because he would end up hitting me
and I finally said that I did even though I didn't but you still hurt me anyway how did he hurt
you Kayla by punching me where did he punch you in the head how often did this happen
to you? How often did he do this?
Constantly.
It just kept happening.
Was he doing things to items in your house?
Yes.
What was he doing to the items in your house?
Destroying everything.
Breaking a lot of stuff.
Why was he breaking things, Kayla?
Because he thought that there was microphones in the house
and I was telling on him.
and thought there was cameras.
Yeah, so there you go.
That's exactly what you were referring to.
And listen, regardless of what we've said over this series so far about Kayla,
I don't wish this on anybody.
Nobody should have experience any type of abuse like this.
I will say that regardless of her circumstances,
there are choices you make.
And it's usually a series of choices where you have opportunities to leave and you need to do so if possible.
And I know that's easier said than done.
I've experienced it a lot throughout my career.
There's just, there was multiple opportunities here to remove yourself from this situation.
So I'm not going to sit here and say that I don't feel bad for Kayla, but at the same time,
I do think some of this was self-inflicted.
And we have to, there has to be a point where as an adult, we look at this as, as adults as well and go,
listen, you didn't deserve this, but there were also opportunities for you to remove yourself
from the situation and you chose to stay.
I don't care what the circumstances are.
You got to get out of there.
And I would say that for the majority of people, once this person kills a child and then does the things that she's described to us, that would have been enough for 99.999% of the people out there to get to get out of it.
And she didn't.
Yeah.
I have trouble feeling sympathy for it.
Kayla's going to eventually leave Adam.
Eventually.
Great.
Because he's not in March.
Okay.
So we'll talk about that like a year later in March.
She's going to do it because he was abusing her.
Yeah.
So once again, yes, I don't wish this on anyone.
Of course, completely agree.
But I do not feel bad for her.
If you couldn't leave when you saw Adam kill his own daughter or just kill anyone, okay, when you saw Adam kill someone in front of you and then bring the remains along with you for months and force you to do or not force.
I mean, honestly, really, she wasn't forced if you think about it because she could have at any point said no.
and even on the trip from the to the restaurant where she's bringing Harmony's body to the walk-in freezer,
she could have ran because he wasn't with her.
He was at work waiting to collect the bag from her.
She wasn't being held at gunpoint.
That's what I'm saying.
So I'm sure there was opportunities for you leave even when he went in the U-Ha.
He was gone.
You said from 1 a.m. until early in the morning, you could have left.
So if that wasn't a red flag or a sign to you to leave when you saw Adam kill his five-year-old daughter in front of you,
then, but you can leave when he's abusing you.
Yeah.
You know, so, no, I really, I don't, I don't feel bad for her.
No, it's, it's hard.
It's hard to feel bad for her.
But I, and I, I want people as they watch this episode and they think about their own
situations, we're not saying that this abuse doesn't happen every single day.
We're not saying we don't feel bad for you if you're being abused and you can't
leave because the statistics are that it takes like, I forget, it's a ridiculous amount
of times, sometimes like seven times of leaving and coming back before you finally do leave for good.
We're not saying in general, you not being able to leave, we don't feel bad for you.
We're saying we don't feel bad for Kayla because of what she saw happened to Harmony, how she helped cover it up, how that wasn't enough to leave.
Yeah, I think, I hope we can all get behind the fact that if you witness someone murder a child, even if it means putting your own life in danger, you're going to get out of there.
I think that's kind of where most of us draw the line.
But can we bring this back to the investigative element of this for a second?
Of course.
This is important because we still have an opportunity to find Harmony.
and I have to imagine that law enforcement did this,
but you had mentioned 1 a.m. around the time that approximately that he left,
and he gets up and quote her words when the sun's coming up.
So I'd have to go back and look at the date and time and see when the sun rose that day.
But we're probably looking at a four to five hour window.
We know.
We actually know where the U-Haul went.
Okay.
Okay.
So I'll say this then because that would be my point.
Like I still think at this juncture, even though I think he'll be found guilty again.
For harmony's sake, I would love to find her.
So that's really what I'm focused on.
But I feel like there's more that you can tell me that may change my opinion.
So let me not waste our time.
So I want to also say, like, it's not just Kayla saying he was really weird and paranoid,
not just Travis saying he was kind of paranoid and, you know, pacing around.
Tara Hilbert, the manager of the Union Street apartment complex, testified that during
the time Adam, Kayla and their sons were staying there, Adam did not have a job.
And Tara was feeding them.
And sometimes the kids would play with Tara's kids.
And one time Adam told Tara that he had a daughter named Harmony.
who he hadn't seen in a couple of years because her mother had taken her back to Massachusetts.
Tara also once had to take Kayla out of her apartment because Adam had beaten Kayla pretty badly.
She was covered in blood.
She had injuries to her eyes and nose.
And a resident of the fit shelter, Nicole Gillies also testified about seeing bruises on Kayla.
She said she would see new bruises pretty much every single day.
And Nicole had actually helped Adam and Kayla move from the shelter to the Union Street apartments.
And when Nicole was at the apartment, she testified that she saw wires hanging from the ceiling.
And Adam told her that he was worried about being spied on.
And then she was like being spied on by who.
And he was like the landlords.
Yeah.
Yeah, for a guy who wasn't directly involved with this and it was just a victim like everybody else,
he's awful concerned that someone's going to catch him in the act.
And Nicole also said that Adam had a common fear that like buses and vans that were driving by him had
him under surveillance.
So this is other people who are saying, yeah, like he's paranoid.
He thinks he's being watched.
He thinks he's being monitored.
It's the plot of Goodfellas.
And in that movie, if you watched it, he wasn't innocent.
He was the main culprit, which is why he was so concerned.
Well, Adam did think he was a good fella.
Yeah, I bet he did.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
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All right, the next day, which would have been March 4th, Travis Beach started frantically sending
Adam messages because the U-Haul was supposed to have been returned at 2 p.m. And apparently they
were getting messages saying it had not been returned. So the first message from Travis was sent to
Adam at 3.47 p.m. and Adam didn't reply until 3.20 a.m. in March 5th. So basically Travis is
like, dude, what's going on? Like, where's the U-Haul? You said, you're going to drop it off.
We're getting messages. And the message that Adam sent to Travis said, quote, I dropped it off on
Willow, my word, end quote. And then about 20 minutes later, Adam messaged Travis again,
quote, please don't message me stuff like this on Facebook again, end quote.
He doesn't want this U-Haul connected to him at all, okay?
So the U-Haul had been rented in Brendan's name using Britney's credit card.
The vehicle was a 2019 GMC Savannah cargo van, and investigators tracked the U-Haul using
MassDOT Department of Transportation toll data, which showed three toll violations.
So the first happened on 4.44 a.m. on March 4.4.
going northbound at the Tobin Bridge near Boston.
At 4.45 a.m., the van was going southbound on the bridge,
and at 525 a.m., it crossed the bridge going northbound again.
So overall, Adam had driven 133 miles in that cargo van.
Now, while this did not tell investigators where Adam got rid of Harmony's remains,
it did tell them that the U-Haul went from Manchester
towards the Boston-Rivere-Chelsea area, crossed near the Tobin Bridge,
and then returned.
And after subtracting known rental mileage and the Manchester to Tobin route,
so known rental related mileage is like driving it from the rental place to where it.
Yeah, that's all monitored.
That's all tried.
The mileage when that U-Haul got dropped off by the previous customer is documented.
Yes.
So they know exactly the amount of miles.
Right.
So after subtracting all of that stuff.
And then also the Manchester to Tobin Bridge route,
police believed there was roughly 26 miles unaccounted for of driving where Adam could have gone
while looking for a place to dispose of harmony.
Now, I have a theory about this too.
So search is focused on areas along that route, including Romney Marsh Reservation,
Salas Creek in Revere, Chelsea Creek, areas around North Shore Road.
Now, here's what I'm wondering.
Is the whole Tobin Bridge thing, just a red herring, intentionally done by Adam,
who we have already seen was extremely paranoid at that time.
I mean, we got three toll violations here,
which means the U-Haul passed through a toll point
without the toll being properly paid at the time.
So Adam could have intentionally driven this route
because I think he was from the Revere area.
So he could have intentionally driven this route
knowing that the Tobin Bridge uses an all-electronic tolling system
with overhead gentrace.
Yeah, he would have known that for sure.
Knowing his toll violations would be traced back to the rental company.
And if the police ever did track that U-Haul to him,
and if they ever did come looking, they would believe that they had some insight into his path that night.
Now, is that true?
So what we could really use is a more specific time that Adam left the Ocano Lodge in Manchester.
So during the public trial, Kayla simply said it was the middle of the night.
So when she testified at the trial, she said the middle of the night.
But in her original statement to the police, when she finally spilled the beans, she said it was 1 a.m.
I don't know if that's what time he left.
If Adam left the motel at 1 a.m., in a.m.,
It would only take him about an hour to drive from Manchester to the Tobin Bridge.
That leaves two hours unaccounted for, two hours before he ever even went to the bridge.
And it's very possible that Adam could have disposed of Harmony's body in multiple other places and then just went on a joy ride to the Boston area to throw everyone off.
Absolutely possible.
So that everyone would be looking for Harmony nowhere near where she actually was, right?
Moral the story, literal nightmare for investigators.
And I haven't heard anybody say this either.
Like nobody's saying.
I'm sure they've considered it.
I mean, nobody, like I looked on Reddit because that's usually where the people who
were like really focused on a case and they're really thinking about everything connected
to it.
Nobody's saying like maybe those garbage bags could have contained harmonies remains.
And nobody's saying that maybe he could have disposed for a body.
Why would you go all the way over there and then cross an area where you know there's tolls
and then not pay for the tolls?
Yeah.
Who knows?
You wanted an electronic, you wanted an electronic breadcrumb tree.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
I think with, again, what we have from when we have the context from Kayla as far as his paranoia
and the fact that even with his closest confidant, he took the steps to create a decoy where
there was like those cups on a table in the middle of New York City where you don't know which one the
ball's under.
Yeah, exactly.
Like he was doing that even with someone who is his closest ally.
So to think that if, again, he's sitting up these boundaries for a potential investigation down
the road, it could have been his rationale like, hey, I'm going to put her over here, but then I'm
just going to drive around for a few hours, not only for investigators, but also for Kayla, right?
Because if he goes 20 minutes away and then comes right back, she's going to be able to say he only
left for 20 minutes and he was back home and there's only a certain amount of areas it could be,
even if you draw a complete radius with half the distance being going out and then half the time
coming back. So by doing this and being gone for four or five hours, there's a real possibility
that yeah, she was dumped within the first 20 minutes
and all of this is just a red herring.
But overall, from the detective sitting there watching all of this,
it answers the question for me now
why we have not found harmony yet.
This is not as easy as I would have hoped.
And I have to imagine that the possibility
of what you just laid out when you have a lot of people in the room,
someone behind closed doors as far as one of the investigators
are saying, hey, what if all of this is just a farce?
And even knowing that, it still leaves so many locations where she could be.
And when you consider how tiny she was, we're talking about one little canvas bag being in.
Or a garbage bag.
A garbage bag.
I mean, whatever.
It's very small, right?
She's folded in half.
The possibilities are endless.
He could have thrown her off a bridge while driving by, which, by the way, I don't think he did because you would have found her eventually.
More than likely, he buried her somewhere, which makes it even more difficult.
I have an idea.
Get me with it.
We were talking about like a garbage and he was talking about throwing things out
in garbages.
So obviously he's not going to throw it out on any part, make our no, no residential thing.
No.
So I'm thinking like where's a place where a lot of garbage goes and nobody's looking
through it.
Well, a landfill.
I checked around.
Really no landfills and a lot of them are like open certain hours and they're heavily
monitored by security cameras, right?
So I'm thinking, well, what else?
What else?
What else?
So I did some research and I found out that the I 93 corridor south of Manchester in March,
of 2020, that stretch was part of a long running construction project. It was the Salem to Manchester
widening and reconstruction project. So this was not just a normal highway kind of drive. Parts of that
corridor had been under major construction for years with interchanges, bridges, lanes, and the areas
around it being rebuilt. So in theory, and like I kind of did some like searching through Google
Earth for pictures and stuff too, like that kind of environment is going to create temporary
very pull-offs, staging areas, dirt access roads, construction entrances, and disturbed ground
places where a vehicle could stop in the middle of the night and maybe not immediately look
out of place.
Now, here's the thing.
Did he bury her there?
Because if there's construction happening and you bury her there, things get built over.
Or there's something else, right?
So there's going to be plenty of, like, large roll-off dumpsters that are there that are being
used for construction projects this expansive, where, like, tons of.
like brick and plywood and plaster and all sorts of stuff are going into those dumpsters and they're
enormous, right? You could stand next to it and it's like you can't even reach in. You'd have to
crawl up or do something. And no one's looking in those. They're huge. Nobody goes in. They just
throw garbage in and then that's it, right? They're not, they're not looking. So this is interesting
to me because the I-93 corridor sits directly along the Manchester to Tobin Bridge route. So if Adam left
to Manchester and drove south, he would have traveled.
He would have traveled.
He would have traveled through or near that reconstruction corridor before
reaching Massachusetts.
So you're just adding another wrinkle, right?
Yeah, because we have two hours.
If he left at one, we have several hours before he even reached the Tobin Bridge.
So many wrinkles here, so many possibilities.
And you're literally talking about a needle in a haystack.
It's unfortunate.
But you can see why prosecutors went forward with what they had, because,
the likelihood of finding her now after all these years, especially if it's what you're referring to,
where she could be in a thing of concrete at this point for all we know.
And March 2020, COVID, okay?
So people probably weren't like there as much, like especially not in the middle of the night,
but maybe there was even a kind of thing where it's like, yeah, the construction workers aren't coming in every day.
So, you know, they wouldn't be necessarily that policed or noticed if there was tire tracks there
or if there was disturbed ground there.
It's an uphill battle.
The only way you're going to find her,
and I hate saying this, is if he tells us.
If he tells.
That's it.
Yeah.
So, okay, the U-Haul van that Adam used that night
had been sold at auction on or about May 14th, 2021.
The police were able to get the current owners.
They had a business, I think, like a carpet cleaning business,
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
And they consented to a search of the van on September 11th, 2020.
So Manchester detectives traveled to Lancaster,
to process the van with Blue Star, and there did appear to be a reaction on the right side
of the interior step on the driver's side.
Also a faint reaction on the passenger side floorboard and two reactions approximately halfway
up the back of the passenger seat along the side of the seat closest to the door.
And the affidavit says that each of these areas was swabbed, and the swabs were pending
further forensic testing.
As far as I can tell, nothing substantial came from this, which means they probably didn't
find any usable DNA profile.
But once again, that Blue Star could have been picking up on anything because it was used as a cleaning van afterwards.
Yeah.
So who knows?
So bleach and things like that would also be.
Or bodily fluids just from what the places they're cleaning or from their own.
Bodily fluids for sure.
They could also use LCV.
LCV is something where, no, it would still react the same way, although cleaning agents it wouldn't react as much to.
Yeah, because this is two years after, you know.
Yeah.
It's not going to be great forensically.
No.
Investigators also seized multiple items from the Union Street apartment, including the refrigerator,
even though there was some indication from the owner of the apartment complex that it may not have been the same refrigerator that was present in the apartment when Adam Montgomery lived there.
And Manchester detectives processed the refrigerator with Blue Star.
And the affidavit says there appeared to be a small reaction on the bottom right side of the interior of the refrigerator,
along with three significant circular reactions and some smaller reactions on the bottom of the interior of the refricer.
refrigerator once again. The areas were swabbed. Once again, they didn't really get anything from it.
Now it's a refrigerator. This could be from ground beef. You know what I mean? It's blood, right? Like,
could be from anything. Yeah, all blood. It doesn't pick up the difference between human blood and
animal blood. So you're right. Yeah, I would still have the same reaction. And obviously, Blue Star,
Luminol, I think we said it last episode, it's going to react under an alternate light source,
black light, like you guys see in the TV shows, the movies. But yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't
differentiate between human blood and animal blood. So they also see.
sees the mini fridge at the O'Connell Lodge room, and that showed what was referred to as a small
quick reaction with Blue Star underneath the interior freezer space, as well as a small quick
reaction on the area of the interior door where the can holders were located and a small quick
reaction at the bottom of the door. Swabs were taken, sent for forensic further testing.
It looks like all of the forensic testing for these items came back inconclusive.
a complex mixed DNA profile that just could not be definitively connected to either Adam or Harmony Montgomery.
Yeah, that's the issues we face.
And as technology and science advance, I mean, this is still pretty recent.
So you would think this is the best we got.
But every year that the science is getting better.
And it's a possibility that they could go back for this new trial and retest this stuff.
But I don't know if it's necessary.
Everything you have is the better.
The more amount, the better.
but it's an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence here.
You have multiple people corroborating stories,
a pattern of behavior by Adam that is indicative of someone
who's at minimum showing a consciousness of guilt.
So for the next year and a half,
Adam and Kayla lived as if Harmony had never existed.
Whenever anyone asked where Harmony was,
they stuck to the prearranged lie that Harmony was with her mother in Massachusetts.
Katie Moran was a woman that Adam had met in rehab at some point before 2019.
They had become friends,
and this eventually turned into them becoming
romantically involved, as she described it. And Katie testified that one day she had been having
lunch with Adam and they were talking about their kids. And Adam told her the worst thing he'd ever done
was backhand Harmony after walking out of the bathroom and seeing her suffocating his baby's son.
Adam told Katie that he had hit Harmony's glasses, so she had ended up with a black eye.
Now, Adam also talked to Katie about his wife, Kayla.
Were you aware of whether or not the defendant was married at that time?
I was.
And what do you recall him saying about his wife?
That she would do anything for him.
For the record, this woman was having sex with Adam while he was married.
It's a choice.
She's talking like he said Kayla would do anything for him, including help him cover up the death of his daughter.
She didn't say that, but you know what I mean.
So then a woman named Rebecca Mains testified that in 2021, Adam Montgomery was her best friend.
they saw each other every day.
At the time in 2021, did you ever talk with Adam Montgomery about a daughter named Harmony?
I did.
Okay.
Where did he say she was living in 2021 when you talked with him?
He told me that he dropped her off to her mother in 2019 at a rest area.
What did he say about how often he was seeing her back in 2021?
He said her mother would not allow her.
him to see her and that he had been trying for some time. What, if anything, did he say to you
about her having any sort of toilet problems or bathroom issues before she went to live with her
mother? He said she was constantly wetting her pants or using the bathroom. He put her in the
corner, in her soiled pants, but that she would repeat it. When she'd get in the car, she'd have
an accident, but he said it was on purpose.
On purpose?
Yes.
That's what he said.
Correct.
What did he say about why he decided to send Harmony back to her mother?
Because she continually shit her pants.
Sorry.
Are those his words?
Yes.
Okay.
With regards, again, to his words, did he ever tell you about a physical incident
between himself and Harmony?
He did.
So he told me that he was in the bathroom, or the kids were in the bathroom.
or the kids were in the bathroom.
I don't remember the circuit.
But he was in the bathroom
and he had walked out to find harmony
with her hands over the baby's mouth and nose
and that the baby was not breathing and turning blue.
And he said he saw red and he just backhanded her.
Did you say when it was?
Spring, summer, fall, winter?
It was right before he returned Harmony to her mother.
Who, if anyone,
And did he ever say Harmony reminded him of?
Her mother.
And did he tell you how that made him feel?
He said he hated her right to his core.
All right.
Fascinating testimony here, super important.
Again, it's just, we're building the case here.
We're getting multiple admissions of child abuse now from different witnesses other than Kayla,
who are corroborating Kayla's story, but most importantly.
And corroborating Kevin's, Uncle Kevin's story of seeing Harmony with the black eye where...
This is third or fourth person.
who's all corroborating that, Adam was abusive toward Harmony.
In July of 2019.
And then this particular video that we're watching here, if you were to describe this
interaction in one word, I would describe it as motive.
That is what this prosecutor is presenting right here and presenting, most importantly,
to the jury.
He's explaining that in the eyes of Adam, one, he was frustrated by her going to the
bathroom in the car.
But most importantly, Adam believed that these actions.
actions were deliberate. Intentional. Yeah. Harmony was doing it on purpose, which would infuriate someone.
If you were aggravated that this person was going to the bathroom purposely in the car,
he's saying, that's how I viewed it. I didn't view it as a young child who couldn't hold it any
longer. She was doing this on purpose. And then cherry on top, cherry on top, if that's not enough,
the prosecutor brilliantly ties together that in Adam's mind, when he looked at Harmony, he saw
Crystal and he hated Crystal.
No, he hated Harmony.
So I want to be very clear.
I want to be very clear.
For the record, she says, he said he hated her to his core.
This was followed by a flurry of objections and nonsense from the defense team.
But I want to clarify, Rebecca Mains was testifying that Adam was saying it was harmony he
hated.
Oh, interesting.
Because I took that as he hated Crystal and saw Crystal in harmony.
But you're saying when Rebecca made that comment and he said, I hated her, he
was actually referring to Harmony? That's what she believed. Now, here's the thing. So he is telling everyone,
I let Harmony or I gave Harmony back to her mother because we were homeless. And of course,
like, we just couldn't provide, but he's telling his best friend who he's seeing every day.
No, I sent her back to her mother because she was pissing in the car and having accidents intentionally
in the car. Now, go back to what you said about motive. So when he's saying, I sent her back to
her mother. In reality, and in his head, he's like, I got rid of her. So I got rid of her by sending
her back to her mother's. I got rid of her by killing her. And I did that because of this. So the real
motive was not, oh, we didn't have a good place for her to live. It was because of what she was doing
in the car and consistently that he believed was intentional and to simply vex him and to piss him off.
And here's what you're doing as a jury member, right? If Kayla and Rebecca had not talked to each other,
they're both saying the same thing without knowing each other, without having these previous
conversations.
So one of two things are happening here.
They're both telling the truth.
Or there's this collaborative effort taking place behind the scenes where they got together
to implicate Adam for no reason where they both don't really know each other.
And yet they decided this is the route they were going to go.
And Rebecca was going to protect Kayla.
What's more likely?
I mean, I believe that Rebecca vaguely knew Kayla, but it was Adam.
Not to the point where she's going to.
Adam was her best friend.
Yeah, she's going to frame Adam, someone she's close to for Kayla.
Kayla's telling you the same story.
It all lines up, and then you have an impartial party saying the same thing.
So now, where there's smoke, there's fire.
All right, we're going to take our last break.
We'll be right back.
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So let's now move to St. Patrick's Day of 2021 when Kayla finally left Adam.
Now, according to Kayla, Adam's abuse towards her had started in early 2020.
And during the trial, a photo taken on March 17, 2021 was presented to the court.
And undoubtedly, this photo shows Kayla with a pronounced black eye.
And she said that from early 2020, until the day that picture was taken, Adam was consistently hitting her,
and this coincides with Adam's paranoid behavior that he was being followed, or that Kayla was snitching on him to the police.
So Kayla testified that Adam told her that he would be able to have her killed and cut in pieces,
and no one would be able to find her if she told anyone what had happened to Harmony, which once again, he probably did, but still, once in it, not enough reason to kind of not to do the right thing.
So Roseanne Smith, she's a woman.
She worked for Pelican Transportation, a non-medical emergency medical transport company.
And so she had started driving Kayla and Adam Montgomery sometimes with their two sons to the methadone
clinic on December 14th, 2019.
That's the day she started driving them.
Now, on a day in March of 2021, Roseanne drove Kayla and Adam to the clinic.
The boys were not present for this ride, but it was a day that Roseanne Smith remembered vividly.
Would you or would you not agree that this incident was not like other incidents?
I'm sorry, this driving was not like other driving that you've done for them.
Absolutely. It was something I will never forget.
I'd like to ask you, when you first saw, did you see Kaila Montgomery on that day for this particular ride?
Yes, I did.
When you saw her face, how did she appear to you?
Her left eye was badly bruised and starting to swell shut.
Had you driven Miss Montgomery the day before?
Yes, I had.
Did she have that black eye the day before?
No, she had not.
Who else was in the car with you and Ms. Montgomery?
Adam.
Adam.
How was she moving in a car?
Could you describe physically what you saw in terms of her movements?
She didn't move very much, and she didn't say very much because Adam was in the car.
Let me ask you.
The event that I want to ask you about, did that occur when you were back at Union Street?
Yes.
Okay. When this event occurred, where was Kayla?
In the front seat beside me.
Okay. And where was Adam at this point?
Walking away from the car.
What, if anything, did you try to give Kayla?
I tried to give her my phone.
What did you believe she was going to do with the phone?
She said, well, I can't do what she said.
He wanted to call for help.
Okay. Where was Adam when you tried to give her the phone?
He was walking back towards the car.
But and so at that point you said he was walking back towards the car I didn't see Adam there I saw rage
So pure rage walking towards me he reached into the window of the car and twisted my phone out of my hand
And said you're not giving my wife that phone
What did you say to him when he did that to you? I looked at him and I said Adam I love you
Please give me the phone back
I'm trying to help you guys.
He then gave me the phone back and I was able to give it to Kayla.
So Roseanne had talked about how she picked Adam and Kayla up.
And then it was like a very weird ride to the methadone clinic because no one was talking and it was all silent.
And Kayla was like kind of cowering and, you know, she just didn't look good.
And then they get back to the apartment and Adam gets out of the apartment.
and Adam gets out of the car, but Kayla stays in the car.
So Adam's walking, you know, getting out of the car and starting to walk away thinking
Kayla's following him.
And that's when Roseanne tries to hand her the phone.
And that's when Adam turns around and comes back to the car and he looks, you know, very angry.
So like she said, a difference, it wasn't Adam or it wasn't the person who had she had seen.
It was Adam.
That's who he really is.
Yeah, because she's been driving them since December of 2019.
So this is March of 2021.
She's known them for a while.
Right. Unfortunately, his mask came off for a minute there.
Yeah, his mask slipped. And she got to see the real Adam.
She got to see the real Adam. Yeah. So Roseanne Smith went on to report this incident to her supervisor at Pelican Transportation. She said she was terrified and she refused to transport the family ever again. And I mean, you can tell she's shaken in this testimony. Even years later. She testified that the encounter with Adam was so deeply disturbing that she began carrying pepper spray everywhere she went, which is not like a bad idea, by the way.
because you see Roseanne Smith.
She's like this cute older woman.
She's very small and she seems like a good-hearted person.
I mean, she's telling Adam, I love you guys, like, don't do this.
And he realized like, oh, I'm looking bad in front of somebody.
I shouldn't look bad in front of.
Yeah.
So, but I mean, I'm not saying that drug addicts are inherently dangerous,
but the kinds of people that you're driving to methadone clinics and stuff,
it's not that the fact that they're doing drugs is that sometimes drugs and, like,
violent behavior and criminal activity are seen in the same sorts of people, right? So you should
probably be carrying pepper spray. In fact, I don't want Roseanne to be working for Pelican transportation.
Okay. So Roseanne, you need to be home with their grandkids. You're a nice woman. And don't put
yourself in these positions because it could have gone bad with Adam. I think even people who are
fans of ours and have watched this show and are listening right now, if they've had previous
substance abuse issues would acknowledge that sometimes due to addiction, you sometimes do things
that are out of character for you. And if you're going through withdrawals or whatever it might be,
so in no way are you saying drug dealers equals violent offenders. But what we are acknowledging
is that when you're in a bad place, you can make some really poor choices. And so for Roseanne,
whether it's driving people to the methadone clinics or even now, I'm talking Uber drivers,
taxi drivers, or whatever it is.
When you have people in your car that you're not super familiar with
and that you don't have personal relationships with,
you got to protect yourself, man.
Having self-defense instruments, weapons on you,
not a bad call.
No, that's what I'm saying, yeah.
And she never obviously wanted to drive Adam again.
Understandable, understandable.
Obviously, Adam was not happy about what happened in Roseanne Smith's car
and things between himself and Kayla escalated.
Adam would tell me that I couldn't leave the house
and I ended up leaving and running out of the house
and I had my daughter in my arms
and I ran to Tara's apartment
which was right next door
and asked her if she could call my mom
and then Adam came out and followed me
and put me in a chokehold
and said to tell her to not call my mom
don't make that phone call or else he's going to hurt me.
Gaila, why couldn't you leave the house?
Because he thought that I was trying to tell on him.
And let me ask you this, Gaila.
When you left the house,
were your two small sons still in the house with her?
Yes.
Why did you only take your daughter?
Because she was in my arms.
I was already feeding her and I just ran.
I just ran out to find help and I could go back and get the kids.
So finally on March 17th, St. Patrick's Day, Kayla took all of her children, called the police,
and eventually ended up in a domestic violence shelter.
She stayed with her mother first.
We're going to talk about that.
So Adam spent 30 days in jail, but roughly four months later in July of 2021,
he found Kayla staying at her mother's place.
A neighbor witnessed Adam creeping around near.
their house and tapping on windows around 8 p.m. on July 2nd, Christina Lubin, that's Kayla's mother.
Her boyfriend apparently spotted Adam, made eye contact with him, and then Adam crossed the street.
But Christina Lubin called the police saying that Adam was kind of pacing back and forth across
the street from her home. And when the police arrived, they were like, well, we can't, like,
arrest him because he's technically not doing anything wrong. And there's no order in place that
he has to stay away from Kayla. So they advised Christina Lubin to file for a restraining order,
she did end up doing. Now, three days after this, while going out to get the mail, Christina's
boyfriend found a steak knife on the ground where neighbors had spotted Adam tapping on windows.
So it's kind of like we don't know, did he have a knife that day when he was there and he was
tapping on windows or did he return with a knife at a later time? But either way, they kind of think
he had a knife when he was dead. I mean, it's also possible just to put it out there that the knife
wasn't related to it. But, you know, when you're starting to try to figure out what's going on here,
we're talking about a specific person.
It's not a unreasonable assumption to assume that it might have belonged to Adam.
And maybe he dumped the knife when somebody spotted him.
At that point, after this time, Adam and Kayla would never live together again.
And although Kayla claimed she was terrified of Adam and he was evil,
and although Kayla felt like Adam was seeing someone else, which we'll talk about,
they continued communicating often, even after she claimed she was so afraid of him
and she had to flee with the kids,
they continue talking. In fact, Adam was seeing someone else, Kelsey Small, who we talked about
previously, but that relationship had actually already started in late 2020 while Adam and Kayla
were still actively together and living together. And you contacted Adam. Yes. You contacted him
quite a bit while he was gone, right? Yes. Because he was in jail for a bit and then he went to
Farnham Center, right? Yes, I gave him a ride. So our transportation drove him to the Farnham Center.
And then he went to a sober house.
Yes.
And while at the sober house, you two communicated.
Yes.
But you thought he might be fooling around on you then?
Yes.
And you'd get mad at him.
Yes.
And you'd tell him he couldn't see the kids.
I don't remember that.
Sometimes you'd get mad at him.
Yes.
And you'd communicate your anger to him.
Yes.
And then sometimes you got jealous.
Yes.
And you'd communicate your jealousy to him.
But that I didn't know that he was with a girlfriend at those times.
Right.
You just were jealous.
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Whether it was Kelsey or not, you didn't know it was going on.
Because he was accusing me too.
Right.
Right.
It was sort of a back and forth relationship between the two of you, right?
And you'd get mad at him or he might get mad at you, right?
Yes.
But when things were, but you were actually, both of you sort of trying to get together, too, right?
Yeah, we were trying to have our family back together.
Yeah.
You considered him your best friend when things were good.
Yes.
It was the same way with me too.
Right.
You two were pretty connected when things were good, right?
Yes.
And sometimes even when things were not so good.
Right.
Pretty solid with each other.
Yeah.
How romantic.
Yeah, Kayla's annoyed by this questioning from Adams' attorney, by the way.
She's like, yeah, I considered him my best friend, and he thought I was his best friend.
And when things were good, they were good.
And when they were terrible, they were terrible.
But it's like, you saw him kill his daughter, and then he beat you consistently, and you had to flee with your children.
But you're still talking to him, and you're still trying to, like, make it work for your family.
That's what the defense attorney is doing it.
she's trying to paint Kayla in a certain light to the jury.
That's all she's doing like to basically saying,
hey, listen, is this the person that you're going to believe?
I think it just shows a trauma bond, which we've seen a million times.
I would agree with you.
And I think Kayla was also going through her own stuff where she wasn't making the best,
the most sound decisions.
But no, you can, you know, and I think that's why Kayla's annoyed with the questioning,
is she knows how it looks as well.
She knows how it looks.
And she's hearing it out loud.
She's going, yeah, this sounds terrible.
But it doesn't.
To any woman who's ever been in a relationship like this, it doesn't necessarily sound terrible.
I mean, the whole him killing his daughter in front of you part, yeah.
I'm not going to want to ever talk to you again.
That's the point she's making like, this is all after allegedly he killed his daughter and you witnessed it.
And yet you're still communicating with him when things are good, even when things are bad sometimes.
You're still having a relationship.
So if he's a murderer.
But that's why I'm saying she's just as bad as he is.
Like she's just as messed up as he is.
We agree.
We agree.
But for the purposes of this cross-examination,
the defense is trying to say, if you really did in fact kill his daughter, why would this woman
stick around? That's exactly what she's doing here. Listen, if I was at defense attorney, I would have
definitely done a better job with the questioning and made that more clear. But yeah, not a bad thing
to point out. So like I said, I think anybody in a domestically violent relationship, any woman
can understand like going back and having a hard time breaking free. I think it's an average of seven
times or something like that, but just saw him kill his daughter. That's a different ballgame.
Yeah, different ballgame. If you could do it to that,
to that child. It can do it to you and your kids. That right there should be enough to get out.
So as we know, Adam did live in Maine with Kelsey for several weeks in November of 2021.
But on December 30th, 2021, detectives were at Kayla's door. Remember asking her questions about Harmony.
And we know that Kayla lied and protected Adam. And then the detectives are like, well, you know, do you know where Adam is?
And she's like, I think he might be in Maine, whatever. They said, do you know how to contact him?
She said, no. And then when she was not with the detectives,
anymore. She did know how to contact Adam because she urgently called him.
But you got in touch with him. Yes. And you said for him to come back to Manchester.
Yes. You said that he needed to deal with this too. Yes. And you said that you were not
dealing with it by yourself. Yes. And you said this is not my fault. Yes. And Adam came when you
contacted him yes and he came to Manchester yes but he came to Manchester with a woman yes
Kelsey small yes and so when Adam showed up with this woman in December of
2021 when you called him and told him to come back he didn't like her
No.
I think you called her thing.
Yeah.
But you needed to work with Adam to get through this investigation, right?
That's not why I was being nice to him was not because of this situation.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Not a good look for Kayla, though, right?
You can read between the lines, everyone.
You get part-time detectives out there.
You're reading between the lines.
What this defense attorney is doing is simple.
She's saying, hey, listen, Kayla's up here trying to tell you that she was in her own right, a victim in all of this.
And Adam was the bad guy.
And yet when law enforcement came to her and was looking for Adam, she lied to them, immediately called Adam and said, hey, you have to come back and we need to get through this together.
Yeah, but you know where I think the defense attorney made a mistake?
She said that Kayla told Adam, this is not my fault.
Yeah, Kayla was like, yep.
No, I agree.
That statement right there, acknowledging that Kayla told him to his face.
This is not my fault.
This is not my fault.
We got to deal with this together.
I take it as,
Kayla knows she's up Shits Creek without a paddle here.
She knows everything that she did and how she was involved.
She doesn't know she's going to get a sweetheart deal at this point.
So she's thinking, hey, if you go down, I go down.
We're in this together.
We got to get out of this together.
I'm not going to sit here and deal with this by myself,
having these police at my door every day because I'm the only one.
And she's probably thinking at this point, if he goes down, I'm screwed too.
So for self-preservation reasons, we got to stick side by side here.
when in fact she brought him back to the exact same place where the detectives would find him.
Yeah.
A few weeks after this on January 5th, 2022,
Manchester police detective Adam Bergeron Rosa used a program called Leeds Online
to look up any pawn activity for Kayla and for Kelsey Small.
And so this is a pawn database that law enforcement uses to monitor secondhand transactions
with pawn shops, jewelry stores, and eco-atMs.
And we dealt with an eco-at-tm in what case?
that we talked about. Megan Trussell. So the records showed that Kelsey Smalls had pawned four
items at the Eco ATM inside the Manchester Walmart on December 30th, 2021, the same day that the
police were talking to Kayla, the same day Kayla called Adam and said, get back here, the same day
that Adam got back there, bringing his girlfriend, Kelsey with him. So they pawned, or Kelsey technically
under her name, pawned a Samsung Galaxy 12, a Samsung Galaxy A1 cell phone, a Samsung tablet,
and an Alcatel phone. So those four devices were seized from Eco-Atm and surveillance footage from
that Walmart location was also obtained and the video showed two women, one in a light blue long-sleeve
shirt and one in a dark blue jacket at the Walmart Eco-Atm for 33 minutes. And throughout those 33
minutes, a man in a tan hat would be standing next to them. He would leave and then return to the
Eco-Atm. And after all three individuals walked away from that Eco-Atm, they wandered through the
store and their faces were visible on surveillance video as they walked down the cosmetic aisle.
And the three people were obviously Kelsey Small, Kayla Montgomery, and Adam Montgomery.
So Kayla's like, get back here.
And then he comes with his girlfriend.
And then Kelsey and Kayla, the two girlfriends of Adam, they go together with Adam
to do this transaction.
Now, once again, did Kelsey know what was going on?
We don't know because she passed away from an overdose.
I would say probably not exactly.
Not all the details, no.
But probably once again, she's doing drugs.
Adam's doing drugs.
Kayla's doing drugs.
At this point, Kelsey's like, yeah, whatever you want, man.
I'll use my name to pawn some phones.
Whatever.
She's not thinking or understanding what it's about or she did know and we just never know.
I don't know.
I doubt it though because I doubt Adam would be honest with her about that because then he's got
someone else to worry about.
Another person that, yeah.
Yeah, it was quite a long time for them to be at the EcoATM, 33 minutes.
The police said that in average.
transaction takes roughly five minutes and they'd been there for quite a while. At least one of the
devices pawned was connected back to Adam Montgomery, a Samsung phone that at one point had his
Facebook logged into it, which is how the prosecution was able to retrieve messages centering around
the December 2019 car breakdown that lined up with the date of Harmony's death. So basically,
Kayla left Adam, called the police. Her mother got a restraining order, but Kayla was still actively
in touch with Adam and was feeling complicit.
enough in what happened to Harmony that she did not tell the police how to contact him,
even though she knew his number.
She then called his number, told him to come back and help her figure it out, and went
with him with his new girlfriend to Walmart to dispose of evidence in this eco-at-M.
And, you know, thank God they found it because, once again, those messages of the car
breaking down and it being this specific car and the timing that all helped with the police and
prosecution lining up the timeline of what happened to Harmony.
Well, you can see all of it, right?
I've said the phrase a lot, consciousness of guilt.
There's just a ton of it throughout this episode where the behavior after the fact is indicative of somebody who committed said crime that's in question, which would be the homicide.
The question here is not a matter.
It's not a who done it, right?
It's they know who's involved.
And the two main people are Kayla and Adam.
So the real question is, to narrow it down, is which one of them actually did it?
And they have deduced through their investigation and through the history of Adam and his predisposition to violence.
that it was him.
And then you have Kayla's statements being corroborated by outside parties,
some who barely even knew her.
That's how they've narrowed it down to Adam being the primary aggressor here,
to being the offender who actually committed the homicide.
And they know that Kayla has also done things to try to cover it up.
And in another world, they wouldn't have needed her,
and they could have charged her as well.
But unfortunately, without her testimony,
a lot of what you've covered throughout these past three episodes,
we wouldn't have.
I agree.
Yeah.
So it's a crazy case.
Is it all completely true?
No.
No, I'm sure she's saying things about her part in it that aren't true.
But I think what she's saying about Adam's part in it is true.
And what we have so far where there are certain points in this investigation where detectives can take her statements and then go back and check them and validate them against technology.
For example, the system that they used or the cameras or the toll booths and Tobin Bridge, everything is lining up, right?
everything is lining up with what she's saying.
So until you catch her in a flat out lie, you have no reason not to believe her.
And to her credit, there are things that she's admitting, right?
She's obviously giving a poor justification for it.
But there are things that are, she's talking about that does not paint her in a positive light.
And yet she's still saying it, which is also a sign of credibility.
Because if she really was just trying to depict this completely innocent person,
she wouldn't admit to things like I helped with Harmony in the bathtub, right?
she would just omit those facts.
But yet, even though it doesn't make her look great,
she's adding that in there, which for a jury, I think, is going to, you know,
they're not going to like her, but it makes her more believable.
Yeah, I mean, I think she's just, she's kind of just telling the truth because I don't think
she, she thinks she has a choice at this point.
And Adam, on the other hand, is, we go back to the interrogation video from last episode,
just lying through his teeth.
Yeah, and like I said, okay, you claim that you didn't do this and, and you would
like to prove it, tell us where Harmony's body is because either you went in that,
that you haul alone or you and Kayla went, right? But, but you were there. You would
never have let her do that on her own, you know? I just don't think he would have. Well,
here's the problem. If now he goes and tells them where she is, more than likely it's going
to align with Kayla's story. That's why he's not telling that. More importantly,
his movements on that day in question where if he's, if Harmony's found over the total,
Bridge, along one of these construction sites where we know Adam was on that morning dead to
rights. So he knows by acknowledging and pointing out where Harmony is, it's only going to come back to
one person. And so he can't even give you that because now he knows that you know he was in that
area and he's dead to rights. He has to die on that hill at this point. I hope I don't think this is
going to happen. But at some point, if convicted again for the sake of Harmony and the rest of her family,
finally says, you know what, appeals are over.
It's not going to happen.
Let me just say where she is.
But you and I both know the chances of that happening.
We got a better chance of seeing Santa Claus.
Come sit next to me and give me a present.
No, it's not going to happen.
It's just not.
Not going to happen.
Unfortunately.
No.
So that's where we'll end today.
Now we have one episode left.
And trust me, there's more to talk about.
Full disclosure.
Full disclosure for you guys.
Just to break the fourth wall a little bit here.
There is probably another 10 pages that's all.
already written that I can see, but we're stopping it here. And this is a little inside baseball.
But because Stephanie's like, there's so much that they're downloading this episode,
meaning you guys, we want to digest this section and then move on because we could go for
another two hours right now. But I agree with you. There's been so much to process here.
And this is the stuff that I actually, I guess, enjoy going through the investigation itself and
how they paint the picture that we have to shut it down here and save it for next week. So good call,
Miss Harlow. I agree with it. Good call. Yeah, it's a, and it's a completely different gear we're
switching into. And I want to talk about the overturned conviction. So there's a lot to talk about still.
Yes, yes. We'll be back next week. We appreciate you guys being here. Appreciate the love and
support. Until next time, stay safe out there. We'll see you soon. Bye.
