Testimony paints Adam Montgomery as paranoid abusive spouse

MANCHESTER, NH – A reluctant witness, a possible new mystery witness, and Adam Montgomery making an appearance in the courtroom on video, not in person, was only a portion of what happened Friday in Hillsborough County Superior Court North.

It was the eighth day in the trial of Montgomery, 34, accused of killing Harmony, his 5-year-old daughter in December 2019; hiding her body for months in duffel bag, mutilating it so it could fit in a smaller bag and then disposing of it after driving into Boston.  He has opted not to attend his trial, leaving prosecutors to have witnesses identify him from a photo.

Testimony ended earlier than usual on Friday but once the jury was dismissed, attorneys discussed a potential witness the prosecution only learned about last week and the possibility the defense may call Paul Garrity, Kayla Montgomery’s attorney, to testify.

New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Agati said someone on Tuesday called the tipline after watching the trial for several days.  A detective interviewed her at the police station, audio and video recording the questioning.  Within 10 minutes of receiving that report, Agati said prosecutors forwarded it to defense attorneys.

Agati told Judge Amy Messer that it is not clear if the state will call her.

Agati said the state will reach out to the woman who called the tipline to tell her to stop watching the trial and to not read any media accounts.

Earlier in the day, jurors watched a video – without the sound – of Adam Montgomery’s interaction with police on Dec. 30, 2021.

Manchester police officer Craig Stanzel said that morning police had issued a BOLO – be on the lookout – for Montgomery as part of the investigation into the disappearance of Harmony who family members hadn’t seen in more than two years. Officers were told to look for a Pontiac with Maine plates registered to Douglas Small.  Kelsey Small, his daughter, was Montgomery’s girlfriend at the time.

Stanzel said he checked hotels on the West Side and then a parking lot near Wolf Park where he knew the houseless sometimes slept in their cars.  He located Montgomery sleeping in the car; Small was in the passenger seat.  Stanzel’s interaction with Montgomery was recorded on his body-worn camera.

While the audio was not played, the video has been public for months. In it another officer tells Montgomery that he is not in trouble, there are no warrants for him and all they want to know is where Harmony is.

“I have nothing to say,” Montgomery told the other officer.

Other witnesses on Friday included:

• Travis Beach, 39, of Concord, the first witness of the day, who has known Adam Montgomery from the time he was 17 years old.  He said the two reconnected in February/March 2020 at the Food Court at the Mall of New Hampshire.  Later that same day, Adam asked him to rent him a U-Haul that he needed to move “stuff” and Beach said yes.  Beach said he didn’t hesitate.

“He was a friend,” Beach said.  “I wasn’t thinking anything negative.  I was at his (Union Street) apartment and everything was packed up.  I put one and one together and thought it was two but it wasn’t.”

Beach said he got Brendan Middleton, a co-worker at Accurate Tree Service, to rent the van because Beach didn’t have a driver’s license at the time.

Beach said he and Britney Bedard, his girlfriend, were at Adam’s apartment the evening of March 1, 2020.

On March 3, 2020, he stayed with Bedard at the EconoLodge.  Adam and Kayla stayed there as well.  All four did crack cocaine.

That night, he and Adam went outside to smoke cigarettes.

“He was pacing back and forth and saying, “I fucked up.” He repeated that four or five times, Beach said, but he didn’t explain what he meant by it.

The next day, according to text messages on his Facebook account, Beach received a text that the U-Haul had not been dropped off by 2 p.m. as required. He sent a Facebook message to Adam asking if he dropped it off.

“Please don’t message me stuff like this on Facebook again,” Adam replied.

Tarah Hilbert, the property manager at 644 Union St. in Manchester (where Adam Montgomery formerly lived) points to the apartment of Mongomery at 644 Union St in Manchester during day eight of the Adam Montgomery trial at Hillsborough County Superior Court in Manchester on Feb. 16, 2024. DAVID LANE/Union Leader/Pool

• Tarah Hilbert of Manchester, who helps manage four buildings including the 644 Union St. apartment building where Adam and Kayla lived, also testified.  She became friends with Kayla because, she said, they had children about the same age.  Hilbert cried as she recounted an incident in April 2021 when she said Adam had hurt her pretty bad.  “She looked really bad,” she said.  She had black eyes and her nose was bloodied, according to Hilbert.  Hilbert said she took Kayla and three children, two boys and an infant daughter, to a motel.
• Nicole Giles was the reluctant witness.   Prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant for her as a material witness when she failed twice to appear. A court bailiff brought her into the courtroom from a side door.  As she stood at the witness stand, she folded her hands across her chest and as she spoke quietly with the judge, she cried.

According to court documents, Giles’ concern was if she could leave the courthouse safely and about her face being televised due to what she “represented to be an ongoing restraining order.”  Giles was told, via text, that she would not be asked where she lived, but that the cameras could not be turned off.  Giles then responded, via text, that there was no mention of anything being videoed.  “I’m sorry but I cannot do it I understand if you have to put a warrant out for me but I’m not putting mine and my children’s life on the line.” A portion of her text was blacked out in the public record.

On Friday morning, Messer ordered the courtroom cleared – including the media.  When the courtroom was reopened, she said no photographs were to be taken of Giles nor was her face to be broadcast.

Agati, before beginning his questioning of her, told her he understood her difficulties in being there.

Giles, under his questioning, said she was living at the Families in Transition shelter at 177 Lake Ave. at the time that Adam, Kayla and their two sons were residing there.  At the time, Adam was working at the Portland Pie Company.

She said she spoke with Adam and Kayla on a daily basis.  Whenever she saw Kayla, she said she had bruises on her.

“On her face, abdomen, arms, legs,” she said.  When she asked her about the bruises, Kayla would tell her she fell, or one of the boys had hit her with a toy or a baby bottle. When they were alone, however, she would say, “Adam did it and that she needed to get out of there but she was afraid.”

Giles said the bruises were different colors, sometimes purple or yellow. Some were small like fingerprints, she said.  “There was like a new one pretty much every day,” she said of the bruises.

Judge Messer instructed the jurors that Giles’ responses cannot be used for the truth of what Kayla said, but to determine her credibility.

Giles also helped the family move into their Union Street apartment and visited visit them there occasionally.

The one-bedroom apartment, she said, was cluttered, messy and infested with cockroaches.  There were holes in the wall.  One time, she said, it looked like the “living room was torn apart.”  Light fixtures were hanging from the ceiling.  Adam, she said, thought the owners were spying on him and listening to his conversations.

One day while there, she went to use the bathroom and noticed the tub was dirty.  Adam said the tub had backed up and he was waiting for the landlord to fix it.

Under cross-examination, Giles said she did not tell police when initially interviewed in June 2022 about the bruises or that Kayla had confided in her about domestic violence.  She told investigators about the abuse when she was reinterviewed this past January. She said what changed was “just flashbacks and memories of different things and situations.” Giles said she was a mother and that what she testified to Friday was the truth.

• Michael Dobe of Londonderry worked security at Walmart in Manchester in 2021 and filled a request by police for security camera footage around Dec. 30-31, 2021.  Police wanted to know who deposited a Samsung Galaxy phone in the ECO ATM.
  The video showed Kayla and Adam Montgomery, along with Kelsey Small, on Dec. 30, 2021, at the ECO ATM.  The video also recorded Adam and Kayla as they walked around the store. In all, four electronic devices were exchanged that day.  On the recordings, Adam is wearing a Coors T-sheet with STAFF written on the back, the same T-shirt he had on when encountered by Officer Stanzel.
• Detective Adam Bergeron-Rosa testified about the processing of pipes from the Union Street apartment building.  Police cut out four to five-foot sections of the pipes, took them back to a bay at the highway department where they used a high-pressured hose to clean them out.  Debris from the pipes was caught through a filtering system but Bergeron-Rosa did not say what, if anything, was collected.  A forensic anthropologist was there in the event “any kind of human remains” were found.  “She would be able to assist us in identifying them if, in fact, there were remains,” he said.
  Bergeron-Rosa was also the one who, in checking Leads Online, a site used by law enforcement to track property sold at pawn shops, discovered Small’s exchange of the electronic devices at Walmart.
• Detective Louis Krawczyk testified how he extracted Facebook messages from that Samsung Galaxy cell phone including Montgomery’s text to Matthew Gendron on Dec. 8, 2019, saying he needed a jump and jumper cables, that his car died and “we’ve been sleeping in my car.”

Before dismissing jurors, Judge Messer told them that evidence had been admitted more quickly than anticipated.  She said closing arguments and instructions could be given to them as early as next week, a week earlier than the court had anticipated.

The trial will resume on Tuesday since Monday is a holiday.