Editor's note: Some of the details included in the story below may be disturbing for some readers.
Court documents released Tuesday morning include gruesome new details about the death of Harmony Montgomery.
The disappearance of the 5-year-old girl and subsequent arrest of her father, Adam Montgomery, for murder, has gained national attention. On Tuesday, a document was unsealed that includes significant new information about the murder investigation. The sealed document was filed by prosecutors in October when they initially charged Adam Montgomery with killing his daughter.
WMUR-TV filed a motion seeking to unseal the document in May, and a judge ultimately ruled it could be unsealed 10 days after Adam Montgomery stood trial for unrelated weapons charges. That trial ended on June 8 when Montgomery was found guilty on six firearms-related counts.
Get Connecticut local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC Connecticut newsletters.
Read the Harmony Montgomery court documents below:
'I think I really hurt her this time': Horrific new details about Harmony Montgomery's death
U.S. & World
The documents released Tuesday include specific details about when and how Harmony was killed, as described by her stepmother Kayla Montgomery to investigators. She said that while Adam, Kayla, Harmony and the couple's two other boys were living in their Chrysler Sebring in December 7, 2019, Adam struck his daughter three times because she had a bathroom accident in the car. They were living in the car after being evicted from their apartment that November.
Kayla said Adam was driving the vehicle, and Harmony was in the rear seat on the passenger side, and while Adam was driving, "he turned his body and delivered sets of three-to-four blows with a closed fist to Harmony's face/head on three separate occasions over the course of a few minutes." Kayla said after the final blow, Adam said "I think I really hurt her this time. I did something."
She said Harmony began moaning, which continued for about five minutes before it stopped. No one checked on her or sought medical attention for her, and shortly after noon, Kayla said she and Adam discovered that Harmony was not breathing and had died.
Kayla said Adam went to the trunk of the car, removed clothing from a black and red Under Armour duffle bag and placed Harmony's dead body into the bag and walked it back to the parking lot of the Colonial Village apartments, near where the car had broken down. She said they stayed in a friend's vehicle for the next two days, leaving Harmony's body inside the trunk.
She told investigators Harmony's body was moved to various locations over the next several months. When they stayed with Kayla's mother and her mother's boyfriend in Manchester, the body, still inside a duffle bag, was placed inside a cooler left in the common hallway of the apartment building. It was left there the entire time the family stayed at the apartment, until the end of December 2019.
During this time period, Kayla said Adam Montgomery repeatedly told various friends that Harmony had gone to live with her mother.
Stepmother Kayla Montgomery outlines the days after Harmony Montgomery's death
After leaving Kayla's mother house, around Dec. 30, 2019, Adam, Kayla and their two boys went to stay at a Families in Transition shelter in Manchester. Kayla said the Under Armour bag with Harmony's body was brought to the shelter as well, and that Adam placed it in the ceiling vent in the bedroom.
"Kayla stated that during this time, there was liquid coming from the bag containing Harmony's dead body, and there was an odor," court documents say. "She said Adam placed a trash bag around the bag to keep it from leaking."
Kayla said the body was then moved to an apartment on Union Street in Manchester when the family moved again. She said that Adam put the Under Armour duffle bag with Harmony's body into a plastic bin storage container, which he pushed from the Families in Transition shelter to their new apartment.
"Kayla said that Adam then at one point took the Under Armour bag out of the plastic bin storage container, and that the Under Armour bag was leaking." He then put another trash bag around the Under Armour bag and put it in the refrigerator of their new apartment.
At some point, Kayla said Adam transferred Harmony's body from the Under Armour duffle bag into a new bag while in the bathroom. She said Adam spent four to six hours inside the bathroom with the shower running and then put Harmony's body into a Catholic Medical Center maternity bag. She said the bag was much smaller than the duffle bag and it wouldn't have fit Harmony's body "unless it was dismembered or grossly distorted." When he was done, Adam placed the bag in the apartment's freezer.
On that same day, she said she brought the maternity bag containing Harmony's body to Adam's workplace, the Portland Pie Company restaurant on Elm Street in Manchester, at his request. She said Adam kept the bag in the walk-in cooler at the restaurant for about a week before bringing it back to their apartment. An employee at the Portland Pie Company told investigators he recalled seeing the bag in the cooler on a couple of occasions but never asked Adam about it.
Kayla said at one point, Adam took Harmony out of the maternity bag in the Union Street apartment so he could add lime to it to help with the decomposition of the body.
She said Adam kept the bag with Harmony's body inside of the freezer at the Union Street apartment until sometime during the spring of 2020, either March or May. She said Adam rented a U-Haul and during the overnight hours made a trip to "an unknown destination" to dispose of Harmony's body. She said Adam returned in the early morning hours but never told her where he went.
The U-Haul was rented out of Willow Street in Manchester and the total rental mileage was 133 miles, investigators later learned. Information from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation showed that the U-Haul registered three toll violations in the early morning hours of March 3, 2020, two of them on the Tobin Bridge northbound and one southbound.
What's next for Adam Montgomery
Adam Montgomery pleaded not guilty last year to second-degree murder, falsifying physical evidence and abuse of a corpse charges. Authorities allege that he killed his daughter, Harmony, by repeatedly striking her in the head with his fist.
He is scheduled to stand trial on those charges in August.
Harmony was last seen alive in 2019, when she was 5, but her disappearance only came to light in December 2021. Since then, the case has received national attention. Authorities announced last August that they believed she had been murdered in early December 2019.
Harmony's mother, Crystal Sorey, has been saying since the investigation began that Adam Montgomery must have had something to do with the girl's disappearance and death.
"We've known all along he murdered her," Sorey said last year. "Now we know how, but the huge question remains, where is she?"
In April, police from New Hampshire and Massachusetts searched a wetlands area in Revere as part of the investigation into Harmony's disappearance. But nothing was found.
Authorities are still asking for the public's help finding Harmony's body or providing information about how she was killed by calling or texting 603-203-6060, the state and local police 24-hour tip line.
