Volunteers continue search for Harmony Montgomery’s body in North Shore marsh

Harmony's father, Adam Montgomery, was sentenced to life in prison in May for murdering her, but refuses to say where he hid her body.

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 to give up.

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

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

“I’ve had a lot of dreams, and this area’s been in 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. He was convicted of second degree murder in her death in February of this year.

Prosecutors believe Montgomery and his wife Kayla Montgomery moved Harmony’s body between multiple locations, including a cooler, a ceiling vent at a shelter, and their apartment’s refrigerator.

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

“She is 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, who is originally from Revere and is familiar with the area, was effectively sentenced to life in prison in May. Prosecutors offered to lessen his sentence if he revealed 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 is not a lack of remorse.

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

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

Sorey told The Boston Globe at Saturday’s search party 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 one piece of control he has left in his life.”

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