A 67-year-old man was found shot to death and with stab wounds on Sunday evening at his home on a rural road in Canaan, and detectives spent Monday interviewing neighbors for leads on what police later labeled a homicide.
The body of William Colao was discovered at his property on Sawyer Hill Road around 6:15 p.m. by police when they went there to conduct a welfare check, the state Attorney General’s Office said in a news release.
Following an autopsy on Monday, the state medical examiner’s office determined that Colao suffered multiple stab wounds as well as a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
Authorities released no information about when Colao’s death is believed to have occurred, but they maintained that there is “no known threat” to public safety.
Sunday evening’s police response at Colao’s was described as massive, with witnesses posting on social media that more than 20 vehicles were seen at the scene.
But by Monday morning the scene had changed markedly. Only a New Hampshire State Police Major Crime Unit truck and a sole police vehicle remained parked in front of Colao’s Sawyer Hill Road property on a bucolic Canaan road.
Yellow police tape cordoned off the home. An orange Kubota tractor was next to the house and a Porsche SUV was parked in the driveway.
Police at the scene declined to comment on Monday, but neighbors of Colao’s on Sawyer Hill Road said he lived by himself at the property, which previously had been the home of his parents, for as long as they could remember and largely kept to himself.
Neighbors said that Colao could often be heard yelling to no one in particular and firing a gun on his property and act unfriendly toward people walking their dogs along the unpaved road in front of his home.
“We all know that Will had an unstable past,” said Priscilla Geoghegen, who has lived in the area for 40 years and on Monday was visiting her son’s house down the road from Colao’s.
When news broke across social media that a large police response was amassing in front of a white farmhouse on Sawyer Hill Road, “everyone around here immediately thought ‘Will,’ ” she said.
“People would hear him screaming,” she said, and his sometimes threatening behavior resulted in “calls to the police.”
Canaan police Chief Ryan Porter directed all questions about Colao to the state Attorney General’s Office.
“I don’t think Will would ever hurt anybody. He was not a bad person,” Geoghegan said.
Another neighbor, Louise Burnett, said that she and her husband would hear Colao “yelling” and gunfire from his property “often on Sundays.”
“I was very intimidated by that man,” said Burnett, who has been neighbors with Colao for four years.
Burnett said her husband only last week met Colao for the first time and had a conversation with him out in front of his house. She said Colao talked about the history of the property and his parents.
Will Colao was the son of Rudy Colao, a noted American landscape and still life painter, according to an obituary of his father.
