Cassian
Creed

Explainers

Finding the Remains: How Investigators Use Timelines, Cell Pings, and Geography

Some of the hardest searches of all begin after a case is, on paper, solved. The perpetrator is known — sometimes convicted — but a family still has no one to bury, because the remains were hidden and the truth was never told. These searches become a problem of time and space: rebuilding where a body could have been taken, from the trail an offender couldn’t help leaving behind. Here is how investigators approach that problem, and why it is sometimes heartbreakingly unfinished.

When the answer is a place, not a name

Harmony Montgomery was five years old. In 2024 her father, Adam Montgomery, was convicted of her murder, along with falsifying physical evidence and abusing a corpse, and sentenced to at least 56 years in prison; in 2026 he was also found civilly liable in a wrongful-death suit brought by Harmony’s mother, Crystal Sorey. And yet, years later, Harmony has never been found. Authorities say her remains were moved between several locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and her father has never disclosed where she is. Her case is the clearest, most painful illustration of a specific kind of search — one where justice has been done in a courtroom but a mother still cannot lay her child to rest.

We approach a case like Harmony’s the way a responsible investigator does. The analytical work — rebuilding the timeline, reasoning about the movement corridor, weighting the geography — is exactly the work we do. What we won’t do is broadcast an unverified guess about where a murdered child lies, because a public “dig here” can torment a family and derail the real search. Findings like that belong with the people who can act on them — investigators, trained searchers, and the family. What we share openly is how the search works, because understanding it honors the effort, and because the same methods recover other victims every year.

Rebuilding the timeline

Every remains search starts by anchoring the last confirmed moment — the last time the victim was verifiably alive or present. Everything that matters happens in the window after that. Investigators reconstruct it minute by minute from receipts, messages, witness accounts, and digital records, because the disposal of remains happened somewhere inside that window, and narrowing the window narrows the world.

Following the digital trail

This is where the modern search lives. A phone is a near-constant beacon:

  • Cell-site data. As a phone moves, it connects to the towers around it, leaving a historical record of which sectors it touched and when. That sketches a corridor of movement — not a pinpoint (a tower sector covers a wide wedge, and this is a real limitation investigators are careful about), but enough to say this region, in this hour, not that one.
  • Device and app location history, where lawfully available, can tighten that corridor.
  • Vehicle movement. License-plate readers, toll records, and gas or store transactions place a car in time and space — and remains are often moved by car.
  • Financial and behavioral traces. A sudden purchase (cleaning supplies, a storage unit, tools), an out-of-pattern trip, a gap where normal activity should be — each is a thread.

Layered together, these don’t name a dump site. They build a map of where a body could plausibly have gone in the hours that matter.

Once there’s a corridor, the geography takes over. Geographic profiling and Bayesian probability mapping — the same search mathematics used to find lost hikers and downed aircraft — weight the candidate ground, prioritizing the highest-probability areas first. Then the physical search tools go in: cadaver dogs, ground-penetrating radar and other geophysics, drone and aerial imagery, and, in cases where remains were discarded as waste, painstaking landfill and transfer-station searches — among the most grueling recoveries in all of policing.

Why some searches stay open

Even done perfectly, these searches can fail. Remains moved multiple times blur the trail. Time and weather erase evidence. Cell data has gaps and only ever gives a region, not a grave. And an offender’s silence is its own wall — the one piece of information that would end a family’s anguish, withheld. That is the cruelty of cases like Harmony’s: the who is settled, and the where is locked inside someone who won’t say.

But these cases are not closed in the way the word usually means. Cold-case and remains-recovery units keep working them for years; advances in DNA, mapping, and search technology reopen old ground; and the public record (through systems like NamUs) keeps the search alive. People are found years later. Hope, here, is not naïve — it’s a strategy.

Why this matters most

Finding a victim’s remains is one of the most comforting things anyone can do for the people who loved them. It turns the unbearable not-knowing into a grave they can visit — a place to bring flowers, a way to say goodbye. We believe in doing everything we responsibly can toward that, and in never exploiting it. We are investigators: we build the timelines, the movement corridors, the geographic analysis, and we put that work where it can help — with the people running the search and with families who want it. What we refuse to do is turn a family’s worst day into spectacle: no graphic detail, no reckless public guessing about where a child lies, no grief mined for clicks. Harmony Montgomery deserves to be found and brought home. Our part is to keep the truth — and her name — in the light, and to point real analysis where it does some good.

Frequently asked questions

How do investigators search for hidden remains? They rebuild the timeline of the disposal window, then use digital evidence — cell-site data, device and vehicle movement, financial traces — to define a corridor of where a body could have been taken, and apply geographic profiling and probability mapping plus cadaver dogs, geophysics, and (when needed) landfill searches to prioritize the ground.

How accurate is cell phone “ping” data for finding a location? It gives a region, not a pinpoint. Historical cell-site data shows which tower sectors a phone connected to, which can be a wide area; it’s powerful for narrowing a search corridor but is not GPS-precise, and responsible investigators treat its limits seriously.

Why haven’t Harmony Montgomery’s remains been found? Her father was convicted of her murder but has never disclosed where she is, and authorities say her remains were moved between multiple locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. That combination — moved remains and an offender’s silence — is what keeps such searches open.

Do these cold remains cases ever get solved? Yes. Remains are recovered years and even decades later as search technology, DNA, and renewed effort reopen old ground, which is why these cases are worked persistently rather than abandoned.

This is a sensitive subject involving the death of a child. We’ve written it to explain the search and honor the victim, without graphic detail. If a case like this is personal for you, please reach out to people who can support you — you don’t have to carry it alone.

Sources