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 set up a playground of his own inventions: swings and teeter-totters welded to cattle-feeders. Next came a Japanese garden with a man-made pond and an arched wooden bridge. 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.
In September 1988, Fleming drove to visit his brother-in-law, Ivor, who owned a farm a few miles from Hastings. In the gravel driveway, he noticed a new goose — it didn’t have feet and was struggling to get around. Ivor had named it Rock ’n’ Roll. The goose was unpopular with the other animals, Ivor told Fleming, and frankly depressing to watch. But Fleming was enamored with the strangely deformed creature. He offered his brother-in-law a trade: two healthy geese in exchange for Rock ’n’ Roll and his mate, Polly. “Sure,” Ivor said.
Once home, Fleming strapped Rock ’n’ Roll to a skateboard. The goose toppled off. So he went out and bought a pair of size-zero patent-leather baby sneakers from a local shoe shop, filled them with rubber padding, and fitted them over the goose’s stumps. The transformation was immediate: The goose could walk. Within hours, he was tearing across the lawn and slicing through the surface of the pond. Pleased with himself, Fleming introduced the goose to Jess and suggested the bird needed a new name. Jess said, “How about Andy?”
Word quickly got out in Hastings that Gene Fleming had a footless goose. On October 10, 1988, the Hastings Tribune published an article, called “Goose Steps in Style,” chronicling Andy’s unlikely journey to ambulation. Later that week, the Associated Press picked it up. Within weeks, Andy’s presence was requested in malls, schools, and nursing homes across the state. Fleming grabbed his briefcase and fedora, sat Andy in the passenger seat of his Triumph TR7 convertible, and the two of them went on tour. After decades of making sales pitches at trade shows and one-on-one to farmers in their fields, Fleming was a seasoned orator. He knew how to captivate an audience. The duo’s act was straight-forward: Andy stood, mostly still in his shoes, as Fleming delivered an impassioned speech about the power of self-belief. He always finished with a quote, which he attributed to Andy. “I felt bad when I was born without feet,” he would say, “but worse when I met a man without wings.”
Back in Hastings, Fleming brought Andy everywhere — to the park, to city hall. When he went to the bank, he brought Andy inside: They were both making deposits, he liked to say. At a town meeting, Andy was declared an honorary ambassador of the Chamber of Commerce. Responding to popular demand, Fleming started a fan club and printed certificates, which he mailed to children who wrote Andy letters. Fleming’s wife, Nadine, designed and commissioned buttons, key chains, T-shirts, and sweatshirts bearing Andy’s likeness, which were sold whenever Andy visited the local mall. On the streets, merch-clad Andy fans strolled past Andy’s Cafe, a pre-Andy eatery that had adopted his image as its logo. At the depot, Fleming moved Andy out of the garden and into his own pen.
At the end of January 1989, Andy appeared in People magazine. Days later, he was on The Tonight Show. Across the desk from Johnny Carson, Fleming presented Andy’s growing bespoke-footwear collection: boots, flippers, cleats, and special contraptions he used to grip Polly while they mated. When Andy waddled out from behind the curtain, the crowd broke into earsplitting applause. Later that year, Andy appeared in Reader’s Digest and was gifted a lifetime supply of baby sneakers by Nike; a pair of his sneakers was immortalized in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! collection. He was featured in the German magazine Der Spiegel. Fan letters came from Australia, Denmark, and China. Evidently, there was something cross-culturally amusing and inspiring about a footless goose wearing shoes. Toy manufacturers, a publishing house, and a licensing company began courting Andy, sending Fleming effusive letters that promised percentages for seemingly endless permutations of Andy’s effigy. It seemed inevitable that he would soon ascend to the highest plane attainable for a goose — or a person, for that matter — in postindustrial America: He was on the cusp of becoming a brand.
On the October morning Andy was found decapitated, Fleming met Deputy Peterson at the park. The two men stood over the corpse. Fleming was in shock but invited the deputy back to his property to look for clues. In the mud outside Andy’s pen, the two men found what looked like two sets of human footprints. Inside, they found blood spattered on the door and on a box on the concrete floor. Whether the blood belonged only to Andy was unclear. Polly, with whom Andy had spent the night, was gone.
Based on the blood and Andy’s wounds, it seemed likely that he was killed in his pen. Afterward, the culprit seemed to have transported his body to an unknown secondary location, where the person or persons removed his head — nowhere to be found — and most of his feathers. After that, Andy’s remains appeared to have been driven ten miles into town to Chautauqua Park and deposited on the path leading to the central pavilion, where Leo Stohler found him the next morning. Peterson took statements from Gene and Nadine. Did they have any enemies? Not that they were aware of. Did Andy? None. With nothing left to do, the deputy departed.
Hastings was an unusually safe town, a place where residents did not lock their doors, where people left their car keys in the ignition. Now many citizens were alarmed and outraged. Rumors emerged. Since Fleming was a successful businessman, people speculated that an envious employee — or ex-employee — might have killed Andy. Gene and Nadine rented out part of the depot, so a former tenant was floated as a possibility. Some theorized that the murder might have been the sick joke of a gang of listless teenagers. Others suspected something stranger. Reports had arrived from Colorado of a string of mysterious bird mutilations — sacrifices, it seemed. Was a Satanist coven migrating east across the U.S, ritually dispatching birds en route? The editor of the Hastings Tribune spent the night in the cemetery on the lookout for witches. As days turned into weeks, residents started spontaneously bringing in envelopes of cash to the sheriff’s office; a reward fund was established.
Public outcry was such that an official investigation was launched, and Peterson was appointed lead investigator on the case. A young officer with only six years on the force, Peterson was used to solving the kinds of mysteries common to small towns, like burglaries and car thefts. There was nothing in the handbook about how to handle a crime involving an animal, so he began with the basics. He interviewed Fleming’s employees and tenants. They described him as kind and generous, not someone who would do something to inspire revenge. Some teenagers did brag about killing Andy, but their stories fell apart under interrogation. The deputy waited for a credible accusation to surface.
As news of Andy’s death spread to his fans around the globe, the reward fund swelled to $8,000. Previously, the highest reward in Hastings history was $100. Besides monetary contributions, Andy’s fans sent letters to Fleming by the hundreds. “Scumbag,” they called the killer, “creep,” “lunatic,” “subhuman,” “bozo.” Even elementary-schoolers and children too young to understand Andy’s death joined the indignation. “I am sorry that Andy died,” a girl named Teresa Anderson wrote. “I just wish that they would leave him alone.”
After Andy’s death, Fleming wasn’t the same. He paced and puttered, looking lost, no longer spending his days innovating in his warehouse. After months and no leads, the sheriff’s office declared the case still unsolved. The reward money went toward a children’s shelter and school-library books. A local mason donated a headstone for Andy, which Fleming placed near the side of his house. Over the years, the prairie pushed in on the Flemings’ property, threatening the playground, the lighthouse, and the Japanese garden; Indian grass ensnarled the grave.
I recently stumbled upon a story about Andy and his shoes in an old newspaper article. Delighted, I Googled him and was disturbed to learn of his gruesome death. Weeks went by, and I couldn’t put the case out of my mind. The beginning — a footless goose inspires disabled people around the world — contrasted so sharply with the ending. What was the motivation? I decided to insert myself. After some sleuthing, I discovered that Gene Fleming’s granddaughter, Jessica Korgie, now 49, had spoken to reporters intermittently about Andy. I pestered her via email, offering to try to find the goose’s killer. Finally, this past October, she replied and explained that she had conducted her own halting investigation over the decades. To this day, she said, she desperately wanted to know what happened, but there was something holding her back from digging too deeply — an intense reluctance. It felt almost existential. She had leads but was afraid to follow them.
Still, she said, I’d caught her at a good time. In a few weeks, on the 33rd anniversary of Andy’s murder, she would be performing a one-woman show about the goose’s life and death — Andy Interrupted — in which she would tell his story and present some of those leads. She was terrified to go onstage, she said, but the story was such a big part of her life that she felt obligated to tell it. She invited me to Nebraska to watch.
So on October 19, I sat in a chatty theater in Hastings with a hundred locals. People compared pictures of their grandchildren and talked about their home-security systems. The lights went down, and Korgie appeared to scattered applause. For the first half of the show, she chronicled Andy’s rise to fame and reminisced on her teenage years at the refurbished ammunition depot alongside her father, mother, grandparents, and Andy. After a brief intermission, Korgie projected images of Andy’s mutilated body onto a 65-foot-wide screen behind her. The audience gasped. Ever since Andy was killed, she explained, the question of his death had been stuck in her mind. And gradually, over the years, the mystery became an obsession.
After Korgie graduated from high school, she moved to Nashville to join a band, which she followed to Chicago. Then she traveled the country for years working odd jobs in videography. But eventually, reluctantly, she moved back to her home state; she had landed a steady job in the National Park Service in Beatrice, a small town a hundred miles east of Hastings. She began spending a lot of time at the local dive bar reminiscing about her childhood. One day in 2009, she met a man named Jack who’d worked as a “scrapper” in Hastings for decades. He told her he had an Andy story of his own, which he’d heard from a worker at a Hastings junkyard. That worker told Jack that a few days after Andy’s murder, an older man had come to the junkyard, pulled out a pair of high-top baby shoes, and hung them by their laces over the prong of a forklift. Then he looked around and said, “I killed Andy the goose. And if anyone crosses me, you’ll be next.”
Jack couldn’t remember the man’s name or even the name of the junkyard where he had worked. But Korgie felt compelled to investigate. Soon after, she drove west to Hastings to speak with the former president of the local Chamber of Commerce, Don Reynolds, who had managed Andy’s reward fund. They met at a McDonald’s. A tall older man wearing a trench coat, Reynolds drank his coffee and told Korgie a second strange story. He said that mere months after the murder, police chief Jim Ruberson told him he had actually caught the killer: a young man with a severe mental disability. Ruberson didn’t want to punish the man or embarrass his family, so he had left the revelation unreported. He told only Reynolds so he could quietly repurpose the reward fund.
Onstage, Korgie told the audience that for years, she’d accepted Reynolds’s story. There was something tidy about the idea that Andy was killed by a disabled person, a member of the very group he stood to inspire. But over time, her certainty unraveled. How had the man known where Andy was housed on the Flemings’ expansive estate? How did he leave two sets of footprints? And how did he drive ten miles to dump the body in Chautauqua Park? She couldn’t explain these seeming contradictions. They ate at her, she said.
After the show, Korgie and I met backstage and made plans to begin our joint investigation the next day. I didn’t tell her that I already had a lead of my own. That afternoon, just after arriving in Hastings, I’d had lunch with a reserved older woman named Linda Cooke, who was the crime reporter for the Tribune in 1991. At the time, Cooke followed Andy’s investigation closely. Each week, she would check in with the police to see if they had discovered anything. They always reported that they had nothing concrete. One day, she asked Chief Ruberson if he had anything non-concrete — any hunches? Ruberson didn’t respond, but Cooke sensed that if she posed her own theory, he might confirm or deny.
She said, “You think Gene did it?”
“Yes,” Ruberson said.
The morning after the show, Korgie took me to the cemetery where her grandfather is buried, at the edge of town. Grain silos rose over the headstones. Fleming died on New Year’s Eve in 1999. By the end, he was deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s, a disoriented shell of the man Korgie knew. Hastings had moved on from Andy. “After Andy, everything became about Kool-Aid,” Korgie said with a hint of bitterness. Kool-Aid was invented in Hastings in 1927, a fact nobody seemed to care about until Andy died. Then, suddenly, there was a Kool-Aid festival with a parade and Kool-Aid chugging contests. If we could crack the case, Korgie said, maybe Andy could stand beside the Kool-Aid Man as a symbol of Hastings. And maybe she could get the funding to build what Fleming had once wanted: a bronze statue of Andy in the center of town.
I waited until we drove out of the cemetery to reveal the police chief’s theory to Korgie. Without turning away from the road, Korgie laughed nervously. Then she took a deep breath. “I can’t deny,” she said, “that when I heard Andy had died, my first thought was that Grandpa had snapped.” I asked her why. Was Fleming a violent, unpredictable man? “No,” she said. He was gentle. She couldn’t explain her initial reaction, and she didn’t trust it. She didn’t believe Ruberson’s theory.
“The way Andy was mutilated,” she said, “that wasn’t Grandpa. That wasn’t him.”
The next day, I visited Korgie at her home in Hickman, just south of Lincoln. It was packed with Andy artifacts, a reality she says her husband and teenage sons tolerate. The basement, in particular, was a shrine, strewn with newspaper clippings, fan letters, merchandise, and photos. Korgie plucked a loose piece of paper from a cardboard box. She explained it was one of her prized pieces of evidence, an unsent letter addressed to Deputy Peterson, written by Fleming, which her mother had found only several years ago while cleaning out old boxes.
According to the letter, a month or so before Andy died, Fleming found himself in a feud with two local brothers, Bill and Jack Gormon. The Gormons had been collecting scrap metal from the ammunition depot — debris from the factory and from Fleming’s many inventions, which had accumulated over the years — selling it and splitting the profits with Fleming. Apparently, Fleming had pointed out a small, unaccounted-for metal box in their truck, and the brothers had thought Fleming was calling them thieves. In Fleming’s telling, Bill had told Fleming his brother was so angry he could kill him. After selling the scrap metal that week, they never returned with Fleming’s cut of the cash. Then, a few weeks after Andy’s death, Fleming wrote he was drinking at a bar in town when an acquaintance named Dean Kennedy, who worked at a local junkyard, winked at him and said, “Check out Bill Gormon on Andy.”
Korgie set down the letter, and we discussed its implications. The two brothers would explain the pair of footprints. The dispute over the box provided a motive. Most compellingly, Fleming’s story about Kennedy matched the story about the guy in the junkyard who bragged about killing Andy. Maybe Kennedy was the man and Bill Gormon was the braggart. But why didn’t Fleming ever send the letter to Peterson? And what about the mentally disabled person supposedly caught and released by the chief of police? Had the chief originally suspected Gene and later caught the real killer? Or was the story about the disabled man a cover for Fleming?
Again, Korgie assured me of her grandfather’s innocence. He wouldn’t have even known how, she said, to mutilate Andy in the manner the goose had been found. It was clearly the work of a seasoned hunter, and Fleming never harmed an animal in his life.
Still, Korgie admitted, there was one persuasive piece of evidence against Fleming: a photo she believes he took the morning Andy was killed. It showed a pair of white sneakers, adult size, lying on a slab of concrete, caked in mud.
I asked Korgie if she believed Fleming pressed the shoes into the mud to make it look as though there were two killers. That was exactly what she’d thought, she said — at first. But later, she decided that her grandfather must have been using the sneakers to estimate the culprit’s shoe size. Fleming was shrewd. Even if, somehow, he had killed Andy, he never would have incriminated himself by photographing the evidence.
The next day, I arrived home in New York. Thus began a series of odd and exasperating phone calls. First up was Bill Gormon. There’s no tactful way to ask an 80-year-old man whether he murdered a goose three decades ago, so I decided to wing it. Gormon turned out to be cheerful and alert. He outright denied knowing Fleming personally. So I asked what he had thought when Andy died. “To be honest,” Gormon said, “I didn’t give it much thought one way or another.” Next, I called Dean Kennedy. If Gormon wouldn’t confess, maybe Kennedy would elaborate on the accusation he made all those years ago. He answered, but when I mentioned Andy, he immediately hung up the phone.
While frustrating, this struck me as ominously promising.
Putting a pin in the Gormon-brothers theory momentarily, I decided to pursue my own cover-up hypothesis. Could the police chief, Jim Ruberson, have made up the story about the disabled killer in order to protect Fleming, whom he’d discovered as the true killer? Ruberson died in 2011, but while I was in Hastings, I’d spoken to his daughter, Terry. She told me her father mentioned once that he had found the culprit — though he was a discreet person who refused to reveal the killer’s identity, even to his own family. But what if Ruberson had an accomplice in the cover-up? I tracked down police officers who had worked alongside him and retired city officials. All seemed shocked to hear that Ruberson may have caught the killer and kept it a secret. If he did that, they said, he must have acted alone.
Thwarted, I called Kennedy back. Again, he answered. This time, instead of hanging up, he breathed heavily into the receiver for several minutes while I tried to entice him to say something. I told him about Fleming’s letter, my investigation, and Korgie’s desire to solve the mystery that has plagued her family for three generations. He hung up.
The case seemed to be coiling tighter. Could it be that the truth had died with the police chief? His story about the man with disabilities seemed implausible. And if the killer was Gormon, why was Kennedy protecting him? With no leads left to follow, an array of potentially irrelevant details nagged at me.
Revisiting the photos I’d taken of Fleming’s archive, I made a few strange non-Andy discoveries, like a photo album titled My Life, which he compiled when he was 16 and features captions written in the third person: “Little Eugene is almost ready for school”; “My, hasn’t he grown, and that face would stop a camera.” It’s the kind of book an adoring mother makes, to her son’s shame. But Fleming made it himself. Reading it, I felt deeply sad and uneasy. I also found another letter, written in the ’90s before Andy’s death and addressed TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, chronicling the rise and fall of Fleming’s company. Apparently, by the mid-’80s, the business was flailing. The local farmers had been bought out, and the conglomerates weren’t buying equipment from family factories like his. Sooner or later, he knew he’d have to sell. And though Korgie had assured me that Andy was on the brink of stardom when he died, it seemed that in the months before his death, the Andy business had been in sharp decline. He hadn’t made a major TV appearance in a year. Branding and licensing deals Fleming had been attempting to close were going in circles.
Then, a few weeks later, I found something else. Mere months after Andy’s murder, it seemed Fleming had adopted a second disabled goose, which he called Sparky, from another local farm. Sparky was missing only one leg, but Fleming fashioned a shoe for him and sat for an interview with a local paper about his new pet. “I’ll get twice the mileage out of this goose,” Fleming said to the reporter.
A hypothetical story began to take shape in my mind: A little boy grows up to invent an ingenious cow-oiling gadget, achieving the American Dream. Flush with cash, he spoils himself, like Michael Jackson, with adolescent pleasures — a pool, a playground, his own stuffed eagles. Then the economy tanks. His empire begins to crumble, until, impossibly, he strikes gold for a second time in the form of a footless goose. He gives the goose shoes, and once again he’s a sensation. Then, after a few years, the novelty fades. Facing another failure, he grows desperate and does the unthinkable: He kills his goose to prolong its fame. To cover his tracks, he mutilates the body, dumps it ten miles away, fabricates two sets of footprints, and blames two brothers in a letter that he conveniently never sends. A young deputy investigates but gets nowhere. Somehow, instead, the police chief cracks the case but takes pity on him. Together, he and the chief concoct an unlikely but seemingly unfalsifiable story about a “mentally disabled” killer. He eventually puts a shoe on another goose, but nobody cares. And then he dies.
In January, Deputy Peterson called me back after weeks of emails and voice-mails. Other than Dean Kennedy, it seemed he was the last living person who might know something, anything, about Andy’s killer. Peterson revealed that he always thought Fleming did it. But only because it was the simplest explanation. He’d never heard about any brothers or any cover-up.
I asked if he still thinks about the case. Does it eat at him?
“No,” he said without having to think. “It was just a goose.”
“But surely,” I said, “it was one of the strangest homicides you’ve ever investigated.”
“Homicide?” he said. And we both laughed.
But for Korgie, Andy was much more than a goose. When I broke the news to her — that there was no news, that I hadn’t figured out much of anything — she decided, in a last-ditch effort, to call Kennedy herself. He picked up. Voice trembling, Korgie introduced herself, explained the investigation, and rambled about the forklift and the junkyard and the letter. Silence. And then a voice. “Oh yeah,” Kennedy said, “I remember all that shit.” Korgie was astonished. She almost laughed. But then, seizing the opportunity, she read her grandfather’s writing aloud. “Check out Bill Gormon on Andy,” she said, repeating Kennedy’s purported words from 33 years ago back to him.
“It was crazy back then,” Kennedy said.
“But did somebody really come into the yard spoutin’ that he did it?” Korgie asked.
“Nobody really knows,” Kennedy said. “There was a lot of crumbs back then.”
“A lot of what?” Korgie asked.
“Crumbs,” Kennedy said. “That’s what I call a guy who wasn’t worth his shit.”
Korgie tried to pin Kennedy down. Were the Gormons crumbs? Did they kill Andy?
“Who knows,” Kennedy said. “A bunch of crumbs.”
