Delisted stock pages to return a 404 page rather than redirecting to homepage.

The php web site has stock pages listed in the search engines that no longer exist. Currently when products are removed, the code or server is redirecting the user to the homepage with a 302 header... We would like to serve to our custom 404 page instead so that when products are removed, Google will revisit the URL, find a 404 and then remove the page from its index. An example page is below showing the 302(soft404) seen by Google: " Fetch as Google This is how Googlebot fetched the page. URL: [login to view URL] Date: Friday, December 14, 2012 5:05:15 AM PST Googlebot Type: Web Download Time (in milliseconds): 216 HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:08:00 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.21 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/5.3.8 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.8 Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=3aee32458288bdb420d850919a3fd09f; path=/ Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache Location: /[login to view URL] Content-Length: 154 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html Fatal error: Call to a member function getDisplayText() on a non-object in /home/simplyr1/views/[login to view URL] on line 2 "