
Plains Road in Harrison, the town where Harmony Couillard lived for much of her late childhood. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
A local police officer knocked on Harmony Couillard’s door in the spring of 2022.
Couillard was out for a run in the South Florida suburb where she lives, so her husband answered, nervous at first because of the uniform. Cops don’t often make house calls with good news.
The officer told her husband that a prosecutor in Cumberland County, Maine, was looking to speak with her because she “may have witnessed a crime.”
For much of her late childhood — a period marked mostly by trauma — Couillard lived in the Lakes Region town of Harrison.
At first, she couldn’t think of what crime she may have witnessed.
The next day, she dialed the number for District Attorney Jonathan Sahrbeck, who told her that her stepfather, Brian Manson, had been located at a hospital in Massachusetts.
Couillard was leveled by the news. She hadn’t seen or talked to Manson in 35 years. Not since they sat together in his old pickup truck, where he told her he had to leave because people found out about the bad things he had done, to her and others.
She assumed he was dead.
That call opened the door to a past Couillard, now 51, spent decades trying to put behind her. It revived a complicated and frustrating criminal case that stretched across two states. And it left her feeling like justice, even when well-intentioned, often fails victims.
“I guess it’s been a reminder of how much shame and guilt I still carry,” she said.
HIDING OUT IN MAINE
Couillard spent her early childhood in rural Vermont.
Her biological father disappeared when she was 2. Three years later, her mother, Cheryl, started dating Manson. They soon married and had two children together.
The blended family of five lived in the Northeast Kingdom town of Westmore. The house didn’t have indoor plumbing for the first two years they lived there.
The details of that time are fuzzy, as childhood memories often are. Couillard recalled Manson’s long hair and long beard, how he loved to fish and always smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes.
She was about 6, she said, when Manson began to sexually abuse her.

A young Harmony Couillard, left, with her stepfather, Brian Manson, taken in the 1980s before they moved from Vermont to Maine. Harmony was about 6, she said, when Manson began to sexually abuse her. Courtesy of Harmony Couillard
Both adults in the house were heavy drinkers and drug users, and their relationship was volatile. Couillard often had to care for her siblings at a time when she needed parenting herself. She found solace in the woods and her imagination.
Manson, meanwhile, found her.
She didn’t understand it, but he made her feel protected, and he was the only stable adult presence in her life. So, it became their secret. Now, she understands that his behavior was textbook grooming and manipulation. And rape.
“I think I was 8 when I spoke to my mom about it, and she confronted him,” she said. “But he convinced me to say I was lying, and that was it.”
Couillard’s relationship with her mother was already fractured and never recovered.
One night in 1983, when Couillard was 10, Manson told her to pack some clothes. They were leaving. Her two young siblings came along, but their mother stayed behind.
They drove east for three hours through the White Mountains and into Maine. Couillard said it felt like they were hiding out.
“I think I was 8 when I spoke to my mom about it, and she confronted him.
But he convinced me to say I was lying, and that was it.”— HARMONY COUILLARD
They eventually settled in Harrison, a small rural town 40 miles northwest of Portland at the north end of Long Lake. They lived in a shabby house there at the end of a long driveway. It had no mailbox and no phone.
Manson enrolled Couillard at a local elementary school under the name Harmony Manson. She was in fifth grade.
ABANDONED AS LAW CLOSES IN
Manson continued to sexually abuse Couillard through middle school.
Although she doesn’t know with certainty, Couillard suspects Manson was a drug dealer. He never worked but seemed to have enough money for beer and marijuana and food. And drugs were always around.
This was her life. Until everything changed one day in December 1986.
Manson had taken Couillard, then 13, and her two young siblings to stay with a friend the night before. She doesn’t know why.
The next day, he returned but wouldn’t go inside. Instead, Couillard went outside to meet him. She remembers he had a gun with him in the truck — a signal to her that something wasn’t right.
Manson then told her that he had touched a local girl in the same way he touched her. He needed to leave because people found out and were going to harm him. He handed her a wad of cash and instructions on what to do next and who to call.
“I remember they were written on paper plates,” she said.

Harmony Couillard, left, when she was 10, around the time that her stepfather, Brian Manson, right, moved Harmony and her two young siblings — without their mother — from Vermont to the rural Maine town of Harrison. Three years later, Couillard says, Manson told her that he had sexually abused a local girl the way that he abused her, then fled, abandoning the three children. Courtesy of Harmony Couillard
He said he’d be back in a few months once things settled down.
She went inside and started making the phone calls to people who could help them.
Her little sister would stay with the family of someone who sometimes helped clean the house. Her little brother went to some neighbors.
Before she entered foster care, Couillard appeared before a grand jury that was investigating Manson for sexually abusing her and others. It’s not clear what prompted the investigation, and there is no public record.
She doesn’t remember all the details of what she told them or what they asked. It’s possible she blocked that memory, she said.
According to court records, a grand jury in Cumberland County returned an indictment for Manson in 1987 on 10 counts of gross sexual misconduct (rape) and four counts of unlawful sexual contact. Couillard was named as the victim on 12 of those counts. Two other victims, both girls under the age of 14, were named on the other counts.
An arrest warrant was issued for Manson on April 21, 1987. By that time, he was four months gone.
STABILITY AND RESILIENCE
Couillard’s teenage years shifted from tumultuous to routine.
She lived with a foster family in nearby Norway for a couple of years until they had what she called “a big falling out” after she sneaked out to meet a boy.
The thing she remembers most about leaving that house: When the couple first came to see Couillard in a youth shelter for girls before taking her back to their home, they had brought a Care Bear stuffed animal as an icebreaker. When the couple packed up Couillard’s things, the stuffed bear wasn’t among them.
Couillard then lived with a second family in Harrison that she said was wonderful.

Harrison, the town where Harmony Couillard lived for much of her late childhood. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
She started playing field hockey and joining school clubs at Oxford Hills High School, developing a sense of normalcy that had been elusive.
When she was 16, she got a car, and once a month, she would pick up her siblings from their foster homes and take them to a bookstore in Windham and then Pizza Hut.
She reconnected with her biological father and his family, who had been absent since she was a toddler.
She also changed her last name from Manson back to Couillard.
In the superlative section of her 1991 high school yearbook, she was voted “most school spirit.”
She enrolled at College of Our Lady of the Elms, a small Catholic school north of Springfield, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1991 — something that seemed unlikely when she arrived in Maine eight years prior.
She majored in English and played field hockey all four years.
By the time she graduated, she had shed a label that had followed her for nearly a decade. She was no longer a ward of the state.
TRYING TO MOVE ON
Couillard moved to Greater Boston after college and began teaching in an affluent suburb.
At one point, she hired a private investigator to find Manson, but that effort failed. Manson was a ghost.
She continued spending more time with her biological father and his family, making up for lost time. She’s now her father’s legal guardian. They talk every day.
Couillard never tried to contact her mother again. Public records for Cheryl Couillard indicate she was living in Northfield, Vermont, but had been evicted from an apartment there last year. The number associated with that address is disconnected.
In 2003, Couillard saw an ad campaign for a school district in a growing area of Florida that sorely needed teachers. She jumped at the chance to move to a state that has long been a destination for people seeking a fresh start.
Three years in, she met her husband. They had a son, who is now 15.
Couillard couldn’t fully leave behind the scars of her childhood, though. She often wondered how much time police in Maine spent looking for Manson back in the late 1980s.

In 1987, a grand jury in Cumberland County returned an indictment for Brian Manson on 10 counts of gross sexual misconduct and four counts of unlawful sexual contact. But by then, he had long since vanished, his stepdaughter says. Courtesy of Harmony Couillard
Manson has no criminal record here, and it’s likely he doesn’t have a record elsewhere either because an arrest would have alerted authorities to the outstanding warrant.
One of the lasting effects of Manson’s abuse was a sexually transmitted infection. Couillard had to go to the doctor for treatment at the time (she was 12), but Manson told her to lie and say she was sexually active with a boyfriend. So, she did.
Because the infection has no cure, she’s lived with it her entire adult life.
“My health is like a lifelong reminder (of him),” she said.
In 2020, during the pandemic, Couillard wrote a series of stories recounting her memories of childhood, which she self-published. Many of those stories are filled with details of abuse, neglect and abandonment by the people who were supposed to care for her and keep her safe. But some of the stories are lighter. A visit to a country fair in Vermont. The rescue of her Raggedy Ann doll.
“Believe it or not, there were things I remembered that were good, and it was important to document those, too,” she said.
The process was cathartic — the closest she’d been to reconciliation.
BACK FROM THE DEAD
In February 2022, an elderly man checked into Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth, Massachusetts. There is no public record of why he went there or how he got there.
The man was confused and couldn’t — or wouldn’t — identify himself. He was registered as a John Doe.
The local sheriff’s office was called to take the man’s fingerprints to see if that would help identify him.
It did.
But it also turned up something else: an outstanding arrest warrant out of Cumberland County, Maine, from 1987. Warrants don’t expire.
Brian Manson was ordered to be held without bail as a fugitive from justice.
He was arraigned on March 7, 2022, from a hospital bed. The court appointed him an attorney, Sabrina Bonanno.
Court records indicate that “due to significant physical and cognitive issues,” he could not be cared for at a local jail. Instead, he was transferred to a correctional unit at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain.
Massachusetts officials contacted Sahrbeck, who was district attorney for Cumberland County at the time.
“We had limited information, but based on the allegations, we took it very seriously,” Sahrbeck recalled in a recent interview. “We wanted to know if it would still be a viable case, but all we really had were names in an indictment. That forced us into a situation where we would have to contact victims, find out their memory of events and whether we could go forward.”

Jonathan Sahrbeck, then the district attorney for Cumberland County, was contacted in 2022 when Brian Manson was arrested in Massachusetts. He set out to find the victims named in the original 1987 warrant. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald
That’s when an officer knocked on Couillard’s door in Florida.
The next step was a two-hour interview with a detective from the DA’s office. Couillard would have to recount, in painful detail, decades-old abuse.
On Aug. 31, 2022, Sahrbeck obtained a warrant seeking to extradite Manson to Maine to face the charges.
SEARCH FOR JUSTICE
Lawyers for Manson and for the commonwealth of Massachusetts appeared in court the next day.
Bonanno questioned whether Manson would be able to stand trial or challenge extradition based on his medical condition, which is not detailed in court documents.
Over the next two months, two different doctors examined Manson and arrived at the same conclusion: He lacked the mental capacity to understand the charges and participate in legal proceedings.
On Nov. 23, 2022, a judge in Plymouth Superior Court formally ruled that Manson was not competent.
Sahrbeck communicated the news to Couillard weeks later, but she said he also told her the case was continued into February. Sometimes, defendants who are not competent can be returned to competency over time.
Sahrbeck soon left office, having been defeated in a Democratic primary that summer. He’s now a defense attorney.
On Feb. 1, 2023, Manson’s court-appointed attorney filed another motion.
“Given the defendant’s significant medical issues — both cognitive and physical — both complaints should be dismissed in the interest of justice,” the attorney wrote.
Justice for whom, Couillard still wonders.
Bonanno did not respond to several messages and an email seeking an interview for this story.
In April 2023, a judge approved a motion by Manson’s attorney and a Massachusetts prosecutor to dismiss the charges against Manson. It also stipulated that a competency report should be provided to the new Cumberland County district attorney, Jacqueline Sartoris, “as proof of the Defendant’s significant cognitive and medical issues.”
But the order prohibited Sartoris from sharing that evaluation with anyone, not even staff.

District Attorney Jacqueline Sartoris, who took office in early 2023, said she didn’t know about the case involving Brian Manson until Harmony Couillard sent her a lengthy email in September 2023 detailing her frustrations. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
Sartoris, who had taken office only months earlier, said she didn’t see that report for months. Her office gets dozens of documents every week, and if it wasn’t flagged for her, she wouldn’t have known to look for it, she said.
Sahrbeck also had created an electronic file in the Cumberland County DA’s office in December that included notes about the case. But Sartoris didn’t know it was there.
As a result of the apparent miscommunication, Couillard wasn’t told that charges were dropped.
The April 2023 order that dismissed charges also included this line: “Dismissal of the charges does not lead to Maine’s warrant being cancelled or recalled. Rather, Maine’s warrant will still remain in effect and the defendant will still be subject to arrest of the warrant (if) he returns to Maine.”
That means that, while he is no longer in custody, the Maine case is still technically open.
CHILDHOOD WOUNDS REOPENED
In September 2023, Couillard wrote a lengthy email to Sartoris detailing what had happened to her and asking why there was no resolution.
Sartoris said that was the first time she was brought up to speed on the case.
When they finally spoke by phone that October, a sympathetic Sartoris told her that there was little she could do. Couillard was angry and assumed Sartoris was ignoring a case that had been reopened by her predecessor.
Couillard wrote to Sartoris again in late February 2024 to again explain how upsetting the process has been.
“I’m devastated. Depressed. Anxious. Traumatized. All my childhood wounds reopened,” she wrote.
Sartoris wrote back on March 4.
“I appreciate your efforts to keep my office informed as you process the extraordinary and life-altering sequence of events we allege were set in motion by Brian Manson,” she said. “From everything we now know, he succeeded in hiding his identity from that time until recently, almost certainly in order to escape the consequences of his actions.”
“From all that his victims have recounted, (Brian) Manson chose to live his life harming innocent girls then lurking in the shadows to avoid justice. You have built a life and a family notwithstanding that harm. Living that life out loud and on your own terms is absolutely your right to claim.”
— JAQUELINE SARTORIS, Cumberland County district attorney, to Harmony Couillard
Sartoris also wrote that the way in which Couillard was notified of Manson’s reemergence was “needlessly traumatic.”
Prosecutors needed to reestablish probable cause for Manson to be held, which meant interviewing his victims again. But Sahrbeck said in an interview for this story that he didn’t know before victims were interviewed that Manson would likely be found incompetent.
“The tough thing about a case like that is that the process can be retraumatizing,” he said, reiterating that he felt his office did all it could do.
Sartoris apologized to Couillard that she couldn’t do more.
“From all that his victims have recounted, Manson chose to live his life harming innocent girls then lurking in the shadows to avoid justice. You have built a life and a family notwithstanding that harm. Living that life out loud and on your own terms is absolutely your right to claim. I encourage you to do so.”
In a final measure of injustice, Couillard was told she couldn’t apply for compensation through the state’s victim compensation fund. While there is no statute of limitations on the criminal charge from 1987, the statute of limitations on a civil action only goes back to 1993.
Couillard believes a well-intentioned attempt to bring justice only caused more harm.
“I thought that my personal struggles with childhood trauma were healed,” she said. “As it turns out, now I feel a greater responsibility to bring awareness to the gaps in our legal, justice and legislative systems that continue to fail its most vulnerable children and victims of child abuse.”
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Sartoris said the case has haunted her, too.
“The scope of the harm to innocent young victims caused by acts such as are alleged in this case are, of course, impossible to overstate,” Sartoris said in a written statement provided to the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.
With the benefit of hindsight, she said different choices could have been made, but she also said everyone involved was acting in good faith. Prosecutors had to consider the possibility that Manson was faking his condition, she said.
“I thought that my personal struggles with childhood trauma were healed. As it turns out, now I feel a greater responsibility to bring awareness to the gaps in our legal, justice and legislative systems that continue to fail its most vulnerable children and victims of child abuse.”
— HARMONY COUILLARD
Sartoris said the lessons from this case are partly why she pushed to hire another trained victim advocate in her office. She also updated policies in her office to ensure communication with victims in sexual assault cases happens both verbally and in writing, and to make sure cases like this don’t fall through the cracks and victims aren’t left waiting for answers.
“This office will continue to maintain our charges as active until we can file a dismissal accompanied by Brian Manson’s death certificate,” she said. “I believe it is the only fitting end for this horrific case.”
One of the things Couillard thinks about often is what Manson did between 1987 and 2022 and where he was.
There is no public record of him in Maine or Massachusetts, and it’s possible he wasn’t even living under that name.

“I knew he was a bad dude, but I didn’t realize there were all these other girls,” Harmony Couillard said. “I thought it was just me.” Courtesy of Harmony Couillard
Couillard also thinks about the other victims Manson was charged with leaving behind in Maine decades ago.
“I knew he was a bad dude, but I didn’t realize there were all these other girls,” she said. “I thought it was just me.”
She wonders if there might be more.
The Press Herald was not able to interview Manson. A spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which oversees the hospital, said she could not even confirm whether Manson was still in the hospital because of federal privacy laws.
Couillard, however, called the hospital this month and described herself as a family friend of Manson’s. She wanted to know if he was there. A nurse confirmed that he was and told her the visiting hours.
“Sometimes he can respond, and sometimes he can’t,” the nurse told her.
Couillard has fleeting thoughts about trying to go see Manson in the hospital before he dies.
She doesn’t know what she’d say.
IF YOU NEED HELP
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, call 1-800-871-7741 for free and confidential help 24 hours a day.
To learn more about sexual violence prevention and response in Maine, visit the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
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