By late afternoon this past Wednesday, Marta Colao had finished writing her brother’s obituary and sent it off to a funeral home to post online and release to newspapers.
William Colao’s death was the result of a homicide in mid-August, his sister wrote in the first paragraph. Anyone who keeps up with local news already knew that, but there was so much more to her 67-year-old brother that she wanted to share.
A graduate of Columbia University with a degree in history, he collected scholarly books and studied Zen Buddhism. He had a “keen appreciation for excellent quality mechanical things, such as cameras, watches, firearms and vehicles,” Marta wrote of her older brother. “These things brought him joy in what was a difficult and mostly isolated later life.”
Colao, who went by the first name of Will, never married or had children. He lived for much of his life in the 19th century Colonial on Sawyer Hill Road in Canaan that his parents, Rudolph and Camila, purchased after moving to the Upper Valley from New York City in 1971.
The house and two barns sit on a 170-acre parcel of mostly open land with picturesque views of forested hills in the distance. Goose Pond, while not visible from the property, is at the bottom of the hill.
This week, a Kubota farm tractor and mowing attachments were still parked near the house. Large maples line Sawyer Hill Road in front of the house. Stone walls mark the edges of the property’s well-kept lawn and adjacent fields.
Her brother “took a lot pride in the grounds around the house,” Marta told me. As for the interior of the house, not so much, she added with a smile.
After visiting the property earlier in the week, I stopped by Marta’s house in Hartland unannounced on Wednesday. Her husband, Jeff Pentland, was working in the backyard, cleaning up the summer remnants of the family’s large vegetable garden.
Police have provided the family with scant information about what took place on the remote gravel road three weeks ago, he said. “We’re as mystified as anyone else,” Pentland told me.
In New Hampshire, homicide investigations are handled by the State Police Major Crime Unit. As of Friday morning, no arrests had been reported.
Canaan police discovered Colao’s body on his property during a welfare check around 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 16, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office said in a news release. An autopsy determined that Colao suffered multiple stab wounds as well as a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
The word on the street (and Facebook, of course) is that Colao was the victim of a burglary or home invasion. Her brother kept his doors locked, Marta told me, which raises the question of how an intruder could have gotten inside the house.
It’s possible that Colao heard or saw something suspicious outside the house and opened a door to investigate. His pickup truck, which had been parked in the driveway, was later found 60 miles away in Vermont’s Rutland County, prompting the welfare check at his Canaan home.
WCAX-TV in South Burlington, Vt., citing unnamed sources, has reported that a 39-year-old drifter from Vermont with a lengthy criminal record is a suspect in the case. Joel Gouin, who lived in Brownsville almost a decade ago, was arrested in West Rutland, Vt., on the night of Aug. 16 — approximately 4.5 hours after Colao’s body was discovered — after he allegedly tried to rob a convenience store minutes earlier. Vermont State Police reported that Gouin “brandished a knife” at two store employees before fleeing on foot and getting caught shortly thereafter.
Gouin is being held without bail at the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility in Rutland.
On Monday, Aug. 18, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, state police and Canaan police issued a joint news release about the Colao case that didn’t mention any suspects. “While the investigation is ongoing, there is no known threat to the general public at this time,” the release stated.
When news of the homicide broke, a Valley News reporter interviewed some Sawyer Hill residents who said that Colao kept to himself and wasn’t always friendly. A neighbor said gunfire could be heard coming from Colao’s property “often on Sundays” and his “sometimes threatening behavior” resulted in calls to the police.
“In the past, we had some calls for service in that area,” Canaan Police Chief Ryan Porter said when I called him Friday. He declined to give details.
Her brother struggled with mental illness, but that “didn’t define who he was,” Marta told me. “He was a very honest and fair person.”
In the 500-word obituary, which appeared in Friday’s Valley News, Marta wrote that her brother liked “target practice, working on the land and good food, but reading was his chief passion.”
Colao’s house on Sawyer Hill Road featured a large library. “He loved books,” his nephew, Henry Pentland, of Hartland, told me.
Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer and historian from the 1800s, was his uncle’s favorite author. Carlyle’s major works included a three-volume history of the French Revolution that was said to have helped inspire Charles Dickens to write “A Tale of Two Cities.”
After college, Colao worked construction jobs before embarking on a career with a private wealth management company in the Upper Valley.
Along the way, Colao developed an interest in Zen Buddhism, which he introduced to his father. (Rudy Colao, who died in 2014 at age 86, was an accomplished artist, known for his still life and floral paintings.)
“My father practiced (Zen meditation), but Will studied it,” Marta said, leading to him traveling to Tibet in 2000. “My brother was an intellectual.”
He had an appreciation, an “obsession,” his sister called it, with “quality things,” which explained the late model Porsche SUV remaining in the Sawyer Hill Road driveway this week.
When his mother was in her early 70s, she decided that it was time for a new car. (She’d been driving a Saturn.) She planned to buy a Volkswagen, but her son persuaded her to test drive an all-wheel drive Audi, and she came away “completely sold,” Marta said. “She loved that car for a long time, but would never had a thought to splurge on something like that. “
Colao was his mother’s primary caregiver in her later years. Since her death in 2012 at 83, he had lived alone in the four-bedroom farmhouse.
“In addition to having a brilliant mind, keen intellect, quick wit and goofy sense of humor, he struggled with mental demons that were all too real to him,” Marta wrote in his obituary. “He was determined to understand and vanquish these forces making his life a quest for understanding reality and the truth.”
His quest ended abruptly, cut short by a senseless act of violence that is almost impossible to understand.