MANCHESTER, NH – A retired Manchester police detective testified Wednesday that he “knew it was a dead body” when he removed the ceiling vent from a room where the Montgomery family had stayed in the winter of 2020 at Families in Transition shelter.
Riley, who still works part-time for the police department, said when he first entered the room in June of 2022 he could smell something but couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
When he removed the ceiling vent, however, he knew it was decomposition, explaining that was when a person dies and the body starts to degrade.
“I could smell decomposition. It’s a smell you just don’t forget,” he said.
Riley said he had experience with that odor. “I’ve been to many death scenes, autopsies. I’ve smelled it many times,” he said.
Riley said he then spent about two hours cutting out a large portion of the ceiling “with an old-school serrated knife.” The ceiling, he said, was stained.
It being a hot June day, Riley said he was sweating heavily so he later gave a voluntary swab for DNA in the event his sweat had dripped onto the panel.
Riley was part of a team of detectives who went to the Families In Transition family shelter on Lake Avenue to search Room 1 where Adam Montgomery, his wife Kayla and their two sons stayed from late December 2019 until Feb. 20, 2021.
Kayla Montgomery, Adam’s estranged wife, had told investigators that Adam beat his 5-year-old daughter Harmony to death in the back of his Chrysler Sebring on Dec. 7, 2019. He then put her body in a Duffel bag and took the body with him each time the family moved from place to place in the city. One of the places where he put her body was in the ceiling of that room, above the bed where he and his wife slept.
On Wednesday, in the corner of the Hillsborough County Superior Court North courtroom, was a pile of evidence, all bundled in brown butcher paper and sealed with red duct tape.
In the morning, Manchester police detective Ray Lamy, who was the lead crime scene processing investigator, and David Dydo, a police evidence technician, unwrapped the packages that were later admitted into evidence as full exhibits. One parcel contained a large section of the stained ceiling from the FIT room where the Montgomery family stayed and the metal railings that held the drywall in place.
Lamy testified about the ceiling panel being reexamined at the police station after it was returned from processing at the NH State Police Forensic Laboratory. The state lab did not find enough evidence to support the ceiling drywall had DNA on it, Lamy said. So police decided to send a couple of pieces for testing to DNA Labs International in Florida.
Later, Riley and two other officers would drive a rented van with the full panel and other evidence down to the Florida lab for further testing.
“They (the couple of pieces) came back as testing positive for blood,” he said to which the defense objected. After a bench conference, that line of questioning was not pursued.
Lamy said at the police station, when they placed the ceiling panel across two tables covered with craft paper and removed the metal rails from the drywall, there was darker staining underneath it. “There was a noticeable foul smell,” he said.
Lamy said he associated the odor with the stain itself.
Kevin McMahon, a criminalist and expert serologist who retired last year after 40 years with the state forensic laboratory, said tests he took of stains on the red and white cooler were negative for blood.
However, several areas he tested on the large section of ceiling were positive for blood, he said.
Among the items admitted into evidence on Wednesday were the red-and-white wheeled Igloo cooler that Kayla testified Adam stored Harmony’s body in when they lived with her mother for two weeks in December 2019; a large section of the ceiling at FIT, which was tested for blood and fingerprints; the metal straps that held the ceiling.
Late in the afternoon, criminalist Martin Orlowicz, fingerprint expert with the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory, testified he found Adam Montgomery’s fingerprints on the ceiling vent, the drywall and the metal framing. His left palm print also was found on the drywall panel. Orlowicz had compared the prints found on those items to the fingerprints of both Adam and Kayla.
Fingerprints of the drywall installer were also discovered, he said.
Montgomery, who is serving a lengthy sentence for being an armed career criminal and on weapons offenses, has chosen not to appear in court. He is charged with second-degree murder; second-degree assault; falsifying physical evidence; abuse of corpse and witness tampering.
The trial, which is being live-streamed on WMUR and Court TV, resumes Thursday.
