Volunteers Search North Shore for Body of Harmony Montgomery

The body of Harmony Montgomery, a 5-year-old girl whose father fatally beat her in 2019, has still not been found. While Adam Montgomery refuses to reveal her final resting place, her mother says she refuses to give up.

“That’s the acceptance that I’ve had to work through in my grief, just accepting the fact that he’s never going to do the right thing for her,” Crystal Sorey told reporters Saturday as a team of volunteers searched the Rumney Marsh Reservation in Saugus and Revere.

Sorey organized the search, which she told WCVB, will take place monthly in the salt marshes and surrounding areas.

“I’ve had a lot of dreams, and this area is one of my dreams,” Sorey told the news station.

Harmony was reported missing in late 2021, two years after she was beaten to death by her father, who was convicted of second-degree murder in her death in February of this year.

Prosecutors allege Montgomery and his wife Kayla Montgomery placed Harmony’s body in several places, including a cooler, a ceiling fan in a shelter and the refrigerator in their apartment.

Then, on March 3, 2020, Montgomery took a U-Haul on an overnight trip and dumped Harmony’s body, prosecutors said. New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney General Ben Agati said after the sentencing that he drove 133 miles from Manchester through the Tobin Bridge Tollway three times. He said Montgomery did not drive through New Hampshire toll roads.

“She’s somewhere along that route,” Agati said after Montgomery was found guilty, “specifically in the Rumney Marsh Reservation in Revere, around the Sales Creek area, the Chelsea Creek area, behind North Shore Road.”

Montgomery, originally from Revere and familiar with the area, was sentenced to life in prison in May. Prosecutors offered to reduce his sentence if he would reveal the location of his daughter’s body, but he refused. At the time, his attorney called the offer a “stunt” and said his lack of response did not reflect a lack of remorse.

Sorey asked a judge in March to declare Harmony legally dead as her first steps toward filing a wrongful death lawsuit. While she has not said who she plans to sue, her child’s death exposed weaknesses in multiple child protection systems.

A report from the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate found that Harmony’s medical and special needs “were not central to decision-making,” especially when courts decided to award custody to Adam Montgomery in 2019, the year of her death.

Sorey told The Boston Globe during Saturday’s search that Montgomery will most likely never reveal where he hid Harmony’s body.

“That’s the only power he has left,” she said. “That’s the only bit of control he has left in his life.”

Anyone with information about the case can call the case’s tip line at 603-932-8997.

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