ON THE MORNING of Sunday, October 20, 1991, in the south-central Nebraska farm town of Hastings, Leo Stohler walked through Chautauqua Park, an open field surrounded by clapboard houses, wafting a metal detector over the dewy grass. Head down and following an indistinct crackle, he suddenly stumbled upon something awful lying flat in his path: a decapitated corpse wearing nothing but shoes. Stohler recognized the body. He found a phone and called his neighbor, Gene Fleming. Ten miles away, Fleming was sipping coffee in his kitchen with his wife, Nadine. It was their son's birthday. They had plans to celebrate with friends later on and were taking the morning slow. The phone rang. Fleming answered, listened, then set down the receiver. He went to check on Andy in his room. But the room was empty. Fleming dialed 911. Downtown, the sheriff's deputy, Mike Peterson, picked up. "There's been a murder," Fleming said. "Somebody get me an officer." ¶ "Calm down," Peterson said. "Who's been murdered?" "Andy," Fleming said. "My goose."

GENE FLEMING WAS well known in Hastings. An eccentric inventor, he had turned the profits from his “cattle-oiler”—a metal cylinder covered in insecticide, meant to help cows ward off flies—into Fleming Manufacturing Co., a livestock-equipment company that would employ more than 70 people (its slogan: “For Whom the Bulls Toil”). Fleming lived on a sprawling, unusual estate—a Navy ammunition depot he and his wife had renovated just outside town. He filled the cavernous rooms with bullfighting memorabilia, a push-pedal organ, and taxidermied elk, a bobcat, and eagles; he built a hydroponics garden for growing vegetables in the winter. Outside, he installed a tennis court plus a small model lighthouse for stray cats to live in. He kept geese and goats in the garden. In the '70s, he moved his son and daughter-in-law onto the compound; a few years later, they had a daughter, Jess.