Open Road Leads to Mystery : Vanished: A retiree whose dream was to travel disappears in Oregon. A couple is charged with using his bank account and vehicles.

Gordy Johnson had looked forward for years to his retirement. Every detail was carefully planned, meticulously researched.

A bachelor, the former Glendale banking accountant would sell his home of 27 years and the old, beat-up green Volkswagen that he had driven to work, day in and day out.

Proceeds from his life’s labor would be invested in a $219,000 luxury motor home with a new four-wheel-drive Suzuki towed behind. After a career marked by punctuality, Johnson looked forward to a nomadic life without a timetable.

When he retired last April, just after his 62nd birthday, his co-workers at a Glendale Federal Bank subsidiary presented him with a mixed black and brown Labrador-shepherd puppy to keep him company in his travels. He named the pup Rocky.

After making several short treks in his new rig, Johnson telephoned relatives on Oct. 14 from Bend, Ore., saying that he was headed south to visit a friend in Los Angeles.

“That was the last anyone ever saw of him or heard from him again,” said Sgt. Robert Cosner of the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department in Oregon. “He has disappeared from the face of the Earth.”

A month after relatives notified authorities, Gordon Theodore Johnson--born April 15, 1927; 5-foot-9; 170 pounds; fair complexion; balding black hair; blue eyes--officially became a missing person.

He is among 21,996 missing adults on the computerized nationwide list maintained by the National Crime Information Center of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. Since the list was established in 1975, 9,244 adults--less than 30%--have been found, dead or alive.

But Johnson’s is not a typical missing-person case. A couple has been arrested in Las Vegas in the possession of Johnson’s vehicles and most of the missing man’s savings account--partly spent on a trip to Tahiti, lavish clothes and gambling in Las Vegas, according to court papers filed by the FBI.

Because no body has been found, authorities are not openly calling the Johnson case a slaying. But they also do not speak optimistically of locating Johnson.

“I have grave concerns about whether we will ever find Mr. Johnson,” said Dick Whitaker, supervising special FBI agent in Las Vegas, where the couple was arrested March 1.

The 40-foot-long motor home was found Jan. 29 parked in a trailer vacation resort in Surprise, Ariz., just five miles outside Phoenix. Investigators said Johnson’s bank account is virtually depleted. The Suzuki was recovered when FBI agents arrested the couple. Authorities have no clue to the whereabouts of Johnson and Rocky.

The couple being held without bail in a Clark County, Nev., jail, are Stanley Alan Hershey, 46, and his companion, Jan Vicki Fine, 37, who had used a Santa Monica address, investigators said.

Hershey and Fine reportedly have denied knowing Johnson and have refused to talk to authorities.

They have been charged in U.S. District Court in Nevada with relatively minor crimes--illegal use of a banking card and transportation of a stolen vehicle across state lines.

However, Assistant U.S. Atty. Gregory Damm charged that the suspects “definitely had something to do with the disappearance of the victim.” A federal magistrate ordered them held without bail after Damm argued that the pair pose a danger because of the potential seriousness of the crime and may flee prosecution if released. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Friday.

Those familiar with the case admit privately that they suspect Johnson was killed. But they have no clues as to when or where Johnson may have met foul play.

Cosner, the Oregon sheriff who took the missing-person report, is still pursuing the case. He said he has drawn his own conclusions. “A man doesn’t save all his money to retire, then just give away a $220,000 coach, his motor vehicle and his bank account. Everybody who has ever looked at this case knows what we’re talking about.”

However, because there is no body, Cosner says, his department must treat the case as a missing-persons investigation.

Johnson’s relatives--including his sister, brother and sister-in-law in Minneapolis and a close-knit family of nieces, nephews and their children--are trying to remain optimistic.

“We can’t help but be apprehensive, but we have to keep our hopes up,” said Del Johnson, 51, Johnson’s brother. “Until we learn differently, we believe he is somewhere and not able to contact us. We just keep praying.”

In the meantime, investigations into Johnson’s disappearance are complicated by jurisdictional problems. Federal and local authorities in a half-dozen states--where checks were issued on Johnson’s bank funds or cash withdrawn from his account on automated-teller machines--are involved in the Johnson case. Officials are tight-lipped about details because investigations are continuing.

Whitaker, of the FBI in Las Vegas, said: “We are not conducting a murder investigation. One of the main problems is, who would have jurisdiction? Bend, Ore., is still conducting a missing-persons investigation.”

But Cosner said his Oregon-based investigation is limited by a tight county budget in the economically depressed region. “We can’t just fly here and there to chase a case,” he said. “We have to rely on help from other agencies. It takes time to put it all together.”

He credited the Las Vegas FBI office as being “very helpful and cooperative. Somebody had to take the ball and run with it. Not all agencies are willing to do that.”

Murder is not a federal offense unless kidnaping is involved. Because no body has been found in the Johnson case and there is no evidence of a kidnaping, such an investigation is outside the official jurisdiction of the FBI, Whitaker said. However, he said, agents are retracing the trails of suspects in the hopes of finding Johnson.

Johnson’s relatives said they were concerned but not alarmed when the retired accountant failed to call them from Los Angeles. They still set aside their concerns when they didn’t hear from Johnson at Thanksgiving, when the nomadic bachelor had considered visiting friends in South Carolina. “He just wanted to go hither, there and yon,” Del Johnson said. “That was his thing. Gordy said he wanted to be ‘just like a turtle, with my home on my back.’ ”

By early December, Johnson’s relatives said, they could no longer suppress their anxieties. They opened Johnson’s November banking statement that had been sent to his sister and discovered, among other things, a canceled check for $6,100 to a Louisiana travel agency, dated Oct. 15, one day after Johnson’s disappearance.

They found that the check had been issued to pay for tickets to Tahiti for a man identified as Hershey. Relatives contacted sheriff’s deputies in Bend, where Johnson was last seen, and an investigation began.

Cosner said he learned that the tickets, sent to an address in Surprise were used by Hershey and Fine. Further investigation indicated that other checks had been issued to pay bills not owed by Johnson, and that cash was being withdrawn from Johnson’s bank account from automated-teller machines, Cosner said.

In all, up to $160,000--Johnson’s entire cash nest egg--is believed to have been embezzled from his account, officials said.

According to family and friends, Johnson is a kind and considerate man who kept in touch with his Midwestern family and went out of his way to brighten the office for co-workers.

“He was a very careful and meticulous worker,” said Rochelle Gnatz, Johnson’s last supervisor at Glenfed Development in Encino, where he worked as an accounts payable assistant. His career had involved accounting jobs at various Los Angeles firms, including Glenfed during the last five years.

Johnson frequently marked holidays by bestowing gifts on co-workers. One Easter he gave giant stuffed lions taller than a desk to each of the women in his office.

He distributed Christmas towels and potholders and remembered birthdays. “He was the only one who did it,” said Mary Anne Paul, a former Glenfed employee who was Johnson’s supervisor. “He was just a saint, a very warm and loving and friendly and outgoing and generous man.”

He was generous at home, too.

Johnson had allowed an acquaintance, a Vietnam veteran, to stay at his home, even though the man was prone to nightmares that prompted him to punch holes in most of the interior doors of the house, friends and neighbors said. He also had provided shelter recently for a woman who he said had fallen on hard times, they said.

Neighbors described Johnson as a loner who never caused complaints or hosted loud parties.

He had done little to maintain his house since he purchased it new in 1962. The elaborate fireplace was never used, the drab brown paint had faded and the wooden shingles were deteriorated when Gay Faylor purchased the property last August at a “fixer-upper” price of $385,000. The white carpeting was clean but badly worn, Faylor said.

Friends and co-workers said Johnson was an avid backgammon player and often traveled to Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe to participate in tournaments, frequently winning large sums of money.

He also occasionally worked as a dealer for gaming night parties, said Al Bond, owner of Big Al’s Game Rental in South Pasadena, who described Johnson as “a very quiet individual who didn’t drink or smoke.”

Johnson kept all of his personal and financial papers neatly packed in one place--in a camera-bag-like satchel that he always carried with him, friends said.

“He was a sweet, kind, loving guy,” one business associate said. “He trusted people.”