Adam Montgomery's Murder Conviction in Harmony's Death OVERTURNED, a "Spellcaster" Trial in Maya Millete's Disappearance, a Soldier's Bride

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, you're listening to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it is Monday, June fifteenth, twenty twenty six. Three cases today. First, the New Hampshire Supreme Court has reversed Adam Montgomery's second degree murder conviction in the death of his five year old daughter, Harmony Montgomery, ruling the trial judge wrongly combined that charge with a separate assault charge. He remains in prison on his other convictions. Second, in San Diego, Larry Molette is on trial for the first degree murder of his wife, Maya, who vanished in twenty twenty one and has never been found, and jurors are hearing about hundreds of pages of messages he allegedly sent to online spellcasters.

0:51 He has pleaded not guilty. Third, in Anchorage, Alaska, Army soldier Zarius Hildebrand is on try in the death of his bride, Sarah Barney, whose body was found hidden in a drain pipe. He is pleaded not guilty and his trial resumes today. Here's where I want to start. Two and a half years ago, a jury in New Hampshire listened to weeks of testimony and decided that Adam Montgomery murdered his own daughter, Harmony, five years old, a little girl with one good eye and a smile you've probably seen if you followed this case at all, because her face became the face of every kid who falls through the cracks. She disappeared in twenty nineteen. Nobody reported her missing until twenty twenty one. Think about that gap two years where a child simply stopped existing in the world and almost no one with the power to do anything noticed. A jury heard all of it and convicted him, and last week the New Hampshire Supreme Court took that murder conviction and threw it out. Now before anybody panics, Adam Montgomery is not walking out of a prison today, not even close. But the headline is real and it matters, and we're going to walk through exactly what happened and why, because this is one of those rulings that sounds like an injustice until you understand it, and then it sounds like something else, a system being careful, even when being careful feels unbearable. We've got two more after that, a

2:24 murder trial in San Diego that called actual spellcasters to the witness stand and no, I'm not exaggerating. And a soldier in Alaska whose new wife turned up in a drain pipe on trial right now with her mother on the stand describing the days her daughter vanished. That one resumes in a courtroom today. Let's get into it. Let me give you the shape of this case first, because most of you are meeting it here for the first time, and you need the whole picture before the legal part makes sense. Harmony Montgomery was born to two parents who could not take care of her. Her mother, Crystal Sorry, lost custody because of substance abuse, her words, the court's record not a smear, and custody went to Harmony's father, Adam Montgomery. That's the decision that set everything in motion.

3:15 A little girl handed to a man who the evidence would later show, did not see her as someone to protect. She disappeared in twenty nineteen. She was not reported missing until twenty twenty one, when Crystal Sory, who had spent months trying and failing to reach her daughter, finally raised the alarm. By then, Harmony was long gone. In twenty twenty four, a jury convicted Adam Montgomery of five things, second degree murder, second degree assault, falsifying physical evidence, witness tampering, and abuse of a corpse. At trial, he admitted admitted to helping dispose of his daughter's body. His defense was that his wife at the time, Kayla Montgomery, was the one who actually killed Harmony, and that he only helped cover it up. Caylea testified against him. Her account was the only direct evidence that Adam was the one who delivered the fatal blows. Hold on to that, because it's the whole ballgame. Here's what the New Hampshire Supreme Court did.

4:17 In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Brian Gould, the court ruled that the trial judge made a legal error by joining combining the murder charge with a second degree assault charge in the same trial. That assault charge came from a separate incident in July of twenty nineteen, when Adam Montgomery's own uncle reported seeing Harmony with a black eye. And here is the part that I think is actually the heart of it. The court looked at the evidence behind each charge and found they were wildly unequal. On the July assault, prosecutors had three witnesses who saw the black eye and four witnesses who said Adam Montgomery admitted hitting her. Seven people on the murder itself. One win fitness Kayla, her testimony, and DNA and fingerprint evidence that backed up what happened to Harmony's body after she was already dead. The court's reasoning, and I'm going to paraphrase Justice Gooled closely here. The physical evidence supported Kayla's account of what Adam did with the body after the killing.

5:18 It did not corroborate her claim that he caused the death by punching his daughter in the head, and it wasn't inconsistent with his defense that Kayla did it and he helped hide it. So the worry legally is this. You put a mountain of evidence about a July black eye in front of a jury right next to a much thinner case about a December killing, and the danger is that the jury convicts on the murder because they're furious about the assault. The strong case contaminates the weak one. The court said that risk was real and it was enough to reverse. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. The first time you read murder conviction overturned in a case about a dead five year old, your stomach drop mine did But this is not a court saying Adam Montgomery didn't kill Harmony. This is a court saying the trial that convicted him of it was run improperly. And a man does not lose his liberty on a flawed trial, not even this man. That principle has to apply to everybody, or it protects nobody. And here's the thing that should bring your blood pressure back down. The court left every other conviction in place, the assault, the abuse of a corpse, the falsifying of evidence, the witness tampering his own attorney conceded guilt on the lesser charges in her opening statement.

6:37 Those stand. He is also serving time on prior weapons convictions. Adam Montgomery remains behind bars. The state can decide whether to retry him on the murder charge. One more thing happened just this past week, and it deserves to be said out loud. A New Hampshire judge ruled in favor of Crystal Story in the wrongful death lawsuit she brought against Adam Montgomery. The criminal and civil systems run on different tracks, with different burdens of proof, and on the civil track, Harmony's mother got a measure of what the criminal tract just complicated. Nobody was paying attention to her for two years. That's the part I can't put down. A court can reverse a verdict, it cannot reverse those two years. All right, San Diego, And I promise you I am not making this up. Larry Molett is forty four years old and he is pleaded not guilty to first degree murder in the death of his wife, Maya Milette. And I want to be clear at the top, because he's entitled to it.

7:45 He is presumed innocent. He has denied this, and what I'm about to describe is the prosecution's case tested by his defense in a courtroom. Maya's body has never been found. Maya Millette was thirty nine years old when she was last seen on January seventh, twenty twenty one, in Chula Vista, California. By the accounts of the people who loved her, she was a woman trying to leave her sister, Mary Chris Drouaille told Court TV that Maya had said she wanted a divorce and said something that lands like a stone once you know how this ended. If anything happens to me, look at my husband. She was afraid for herself and for her kids. Now to the trial. A judge has barred cameras from inside the courtroom, so what we know comes from reporters in the room, and what they've described is frankly one of the strangest evidentiary records I've come across.

8:39 Jurors were shown more. Than five hundred pages of text messages that prosecutors say Larry Millet exchanged with an online spellcaster, a man named Frank Peavey who operated under the names Mystic Lunar and Tess. Five hundred pages in the weeks before Maya disappeared. Prosecutors say Larry was sending this spellcaster rick requests that his wife would want sex with him constantly, that and I'm paraphrasing his alleged words, she would get sick and stay sick until she realized how much she loved him and needed him. That everyone would be banished from her life except family. The spellcaster himself testified he described the man behind those messages as someone who wanted total control, the victim's full attention, instant gratification. And here's a detail that tells you something. Peeve eventually blocked Larry Millet. The spellcaster, the guy selling love hexes on the internet. Found the volume of these messages too much to deal with. Prosecutors go further. They alleged Larry didn't stop at love spells.

9:44 They say he hired spellcasters to try to hex harm or incapacitate his wife so she'd be more dependent on him. When the spells didn't work, Prosecutors say he didn't turn inward and ask what was wrong with him. He got frustrated that the magic wasn't delivering his wife. And then there's the part that doesn't need any mysticism at all. The ordinary chilling digital trail. Prosecutors presented online searches they tied to Larry through an anonymous email account created in March of twenty twenty, among them, how much space does my wife need? How can you tell if your wife had sex with another guy? Hypnotize while you sleep, losing my wife? And two that I'll just let sit there, shot in the heart, instant death and wife doesn't want to be intimate anymore.

10:30 There's more. Maya's coworkers testified that after she vanished, someone got into their private Facebook group chat and started replying as Maya. One message dropped the act entirely. It read Christine, this is Larry. I know you're a great friend to Maya. I know I haven't been the best husband, but I'm trying. Please help us keep our family together. Christine Timmers, the coworker, testified that the group kept wondering whether the message is coming from Maya's account, were really Larry. On the last day Maya was seen alive, Timers said Maya told her she'd argued with Larry that he wanted one hundred percent custody of their children, that he wanted the house, and that Maya told him he'd have to buy her out.

11:14 I'll note in fairness that on cross examination, Timer said she had never personally seen Larry behave violently. And then the moment that broke the courtroom open. Maya's father, Pablito Tablanza, testified that Larry once told him at a family party, Papa, I have a gun. I want to kill someone. And on the stand the grief took over. This father stood up, accused the defendant of killing his daughter, and then collapsed back into his chair with his hands over his eyes. The judge had to call a recess so the room could pull itself together. Here's my honest read, and I'll keep it to what the evidence is pointing at because a jury hasn't spoken yet. Strip away the spellcasters and the hexes and the mysticism, and what the prosecution is describing is the oldest story. There is a man who could not stand that a woman wanted to leave. The spells aren't the bizarre part. The spells are just the wrapping paper. The thing underneath is control. There's a playbook for this, and the magic words don't change the chapter you're reading last story today, and the trial we're about to talk about resumes in an Anchorage, Alaska courtroom today, So this one's live. Zarius Hildebrand is twenty four years old.

12:42 He's charged with first degree murder, second degree murder, and tampering with physical evidence in the death of his wife, Saria Barney. He is pleaded not guilty and he is presumed innocent, and I'm going to hold that line carefully as I lay this out, because the facts here are heavy. Start with Whosaria was, because she gets named first in this house. Saria Barney enlisted in the National Guard to become a combat medic, someone whose whole training was about keeping other people alive. She met Zarius Hildebrand in boot camp. He was army. They knew each other less than a year before they married. She died less than eight months after the wedding. Here's the night it happened. August fifth, twenty twenty three. It was Hildebrand's twenty first birthday. He, Saria, and a group of friends went out to celebrate. They hit a dave in Busters, then tried to get into a club, and a bouncer turned Hildebrand away because he seemed too intoxicated.

13:39 The group split up. Hildebrand and Saria got in an uber to head home, and that ride home is the last time anyone saw Saria Barney alive. The two sides tell you opposite stories about what happened after that door closed. Prosecutors say that once they were home, Saria found evidence her husband had been sending photos to other women on social media, even offer to fly them out. Investigators say Hildebrand shot her. The defense says something very different, that he went to sleep, woke up and found that his wife had taken her own life, and that what he did afterward he did out of fear and panic. His attorney, Lacy Jane Brewster told the jury her client made poor choices but did not kill his wife. I'm going to handle that defense theory with the care it deserves, and I'm not going to dwell on it graphically.

14:27 It's a claim the jury will weigh. But I'm also going to tell you what the victim's mother said on that stand because she knew her daughter. Meredith Barney testified that the idea of Saria taking her own life made no sense. Her daughter was excited, excited for the birthday. They were celebrating, and excited because Meredith was flying up two weeks later for her own fortieth and they had plans. People with plans two weeks out, plans with their mom are telling you something about where their head was. And then there's the behavior. After Saria vanished, Hildebrand told her friends and family that she'd walk to work the morning of August sixth, but had forgotten her phone.

15:07 Her coworker said she never showed up. Her best friend, Marie Wenz, said that was strange on its face because Saria had told her she was going to call out of work that day, so why would she be walking there at all. Hildebrand didn't report his wife missing until August seventh, and the way he did it was to call her mother in Utah to break the news. Meredith Barney got on a plane to Alaska. Immediately, she and her sister and her mother started making missing person posters. And this is the detail her mother said caught her attention and would not let go. Hildebrand wasn't happy about the posters. He asked them to change Saria's last name on the sign to Hildebrand, and to swap his own phone number in place of her mother's. He was, in Meredith's word, rigid, paranoid, full of excuses for why he couldn't come hang posters, or go to the police station or joined the search.

16:01 And when they. Did search, he didn't want Meredith and her sister out of his sight. Saria Barney's body was found behind the couple's apartment complex, hidden under a pillow stuffed into a drain pipe. I'm gonna let that sit, and I'm gonna be careful about what I say next, because that's for a jury. But a combat medic, a young woman who signed up to save lives, ended up concealed in a drain pipe behind her own home. Whatever a jury concludes about how she died. Someone made the choice to put her there. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. The trial resumes today and will be following it. Three cases and one thread running through all of them, if you want it. Harmony Montgomery, who nobody reported missing for two years, Maya Malette, who told her own sister to look at her husband if anything ever happened, and then something did.

16:55 Saria Barney, who had plans for next month. Three people who, at the moments that mattered most needed someone to be paying attention. Someone has to say their names, so I will Harmony, Maya, Saria before I let you go. Today's show touched on suicide. And if any of that hit close to home for you, please reach out to someone in the US. You can call or text nine to eight eight anytime and talk to a real person you matter. And that line exists for exactly this. If this episode meant something to you, do the one thing that actually helps a show like this grow. Tell a friend, share this episode with one person who follows these cases.

17:37 The way you do. Word of mouth is the whole game. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. Tell me which of these three you want us to stay on as it develops. We read them and they shape the show. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily Crime and Justice until tomorrow. Do better a few notes before we close, because getting this right matters. In the Montgomery case, the New Hampshire Supreme Court reversed Adam Montgomery's second degree murder conviction on a procedural ground, not an improper joining of charges, not a finding that he is innocent of his daughter's death. His convictions for second degree assaults, abuse of a corpse, falsifying evidence, and witness tampering still stand, along with prior weapons convictions, and he remains incarcerated. The state may seek to retry him on the murder charge. We described the wrongful death ruling in Crystal Story's favor from reporting reviewed this past week.

18:35 Larry Malette has pleaded not guilty to first degree murder and is presumed innocent. Maya Maleetti's body has never been found, and the spell messages, online searches and account activity we described are the prosecution's allegations, presented a trial and contested by the defense. One coworker testified she never saw mister Millett act violently. Cameras are barred from that courtroom, so courtroom accounts come from reporters presence, including Court TV, Courthouse News, and San Diego outlets. Our sources gave conflicting dates for when Maya was last seen. One reference said January twenty twenty one and another said twenty twenty, and we use the date in the body of the reporting. January seventh, twenty twenty one. Zarius Hildebrand has pleaded not guilty to murder and tampering charges and is presumed innocent. The account that Sarah Barney found evidence of his contact with other women and that he fired the fatal shot comes from prosecutors and investigators.

19:33 His defense maintains. She died by suicide and that he reacted out of fear. That portion of the case touches on a sensitive subject and we've tried to treat it that way. The trial is ongoing. We're a podcast, not a court room. We work from Court TV and corroborating reporting. This is commentary and not legal fact, and when we get something wrong, we correct it on air. This is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher.