Con Man or Misunderstood Teen? : Identity: Police say a 31-year-old man with an extensive criminal record posed as a student and fooled an Ojai high school and the family he lived with.

For more than a month, according to police, David Michael Murray had an entire Ojai high school fooled into believing that he was Shi Stone, 17, just another senior.

That was before school officials finally grew suspicious and police decided that he was really a 31-year-old veteran con artist with a criminal record in half a dozen states.

But despite the fingerprints, photographs and court and prison records that police say link Murray to crimes in Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Florida, the alleged impostor is sticking to his story that he is really just a very misunderstood teen-ager.

From behind a glass window of a visitor room in Ventura County Jail, where he is being held without bail, the man police know as Murray continues to tell visitors that he really is Shi Stone, the son of an Army officer badly wounded in the U.S. invasion of Panama.

He says he grew up on a U.S. military base in Panama and was himself arrested and beaten by the Panamanian Defense Forces before escaping that country and heading to Ojai to wait for his wounded father to join him.

He explains the fact that he looks much older than 17 by saying that he is a hemophiliac and has to ingest hormones as part of his medication, and he seems delighted that some people are apparently still ready to believe him.

“There’s always that doubt in the back of your mind: What if I really am Shi Stone? Why not?” he challenged during an interview this week.

As the alleged impostor talked, he giggled boyishly at times. But he also bragged openly about his skills as a con artist.

“Ojai was wide open to me,” he said. “I could have taken the entire town.”

Just who this man really is will be determined by a judge at a preliminary hearing today in Ventura Municipal Court. Murray said he will plead not guilty as Shi Stone to charges of grand theft, illegally obtaining a controlled substance and violating parole.

Although the charges may be serious, the bizarre story is still treated almost lightheartedly by the people most involved--including those Murray is accused of conning, the suspect himself and even the police investigators who are intent on keeping him behind bars.

“When sheriff’s investigators first interviewed him, he said, ‘Go ahead, take your best shot. Try to pin me for whatever you can. I’m Shi Stone, I’m 17, and I’m gonna sue you for putting me in jail with adults,’ ” Ventura police Detective Ron Wyatt recalled.

“He’s made a challenge of it so everybody in the three law enforcement agencies involved with the case is set out to catch him in as many scams as we can,” Wyatt added. “He’s thrown the gauntlet at us, and we’re going to throw it right back in his face.”

Even in jail, the man who calls himself Shi Stone continues to laugh.

“What’s the worse thing that can happen to me? What’s the sentence for a grand theft conviction? Five, 10 years? Big deal! Sure, I’m having fun, I’m having a ball!”

It all began with a phone call to an Ojai high school during the first week of January. On the line was a man who called himself John Adams and claimed to be an attache at the U.S. Embassy in Panama.

Adams said he had to place 300 military dependents who had been evacuated from Panama in U.S. high schools as quickly as possible, and that Shi Stone was one of them.

The diplomat was told that Stone could only be enrolled by a parent or legal guardian, and Dorothy Johnson, the school’s secretary, agreed to take the boy in and make the arrangements.

To prepare for his command performance as a high school student, police said, Murray went on a scam spree in the city of Ventura. They said he first passed himself off as a movie star at a hairstyling salon, where he got his hair cut and bleached blond and even signed autographs for several salon employees.

He is also accused of bilking an orthodontist out of $680 in cosmetic braces and running up unpaid bills of $330 at a Western wear store and $337.50 at a surf shop while allegedly posing as a model for an advertising agency.

During the same period, police said, Murray also posed as a stranded airline passenger and made himself at home at four of the city’s finest hotels, where Murray allegedly made preliminary arrangements with Dorothy Johnson and her husband, Ken, for his move to Ojai as Shi Stone.

In most of these scams, police said, Murray followed up the phone calls to his providers with what is now viewed as his trademark modus operandi : he sent official-looking Western Union telegrams with return addresses from the companies that were supposedly responsible for the payments.

The Johnsons finally picked up Murray from the Doubletree Inn in Ventura on Jan. 22. The day after he arrived in Ojai, the Johnsons enrolled him at Nordhoff High School as Shi Stone. By all accounts, the alleged impostor was a model guest.

He was always in bed by 9 p.m., weekends included. His room was always impeccably clean. “He even vacuumed under the bed,” Dorothy Johnson recalled, relishing the thought.

He washed his own clothes and cooked dinner for the family every Sunday when they returned from church. On Sunday mornings, Murray would ride off on his bicycle to attend Catholic Mass. On weekends, he would invariably stay home to watch teen movies on the family videocassette recorder.

And, Murray said, he loved every minute of it.

“I was having a great time,” he said from behind the jail’s glass window this week, bursting into spontaneous laughter. “Best time of my life.”

About every week, the Johnsons would receive phone calls or Western Union telegrams from assorted generals and federal officials inquiring about Shi Stone’s condition. They were impressed.

“When the phone rang, he always answered ‘Stone!’ like they do in the military,” Ken Johnson recalled, grinning at the memory.

Meanwhile, the Johnsons were falling in love with their model guest. When they found out that Murray liked to chew tobacco but would not do it in the house, they brought him a spittoon, wrapped a ribbon on it and left it on his bed, with a note that said, “It’s all right to do it in the house.”

But he never did, aware that, as Mormons, the Johnsons did not use tobacco themselves. “It’s against their religion,” he later said.

On campus, Murray managed to keep a low profile and aroused little curiosity despite his tired smile lines, his icy blue eyes and the crow’s feet surrounding them.

Some students entertained the idea that Stone was an overaged, undercover narcotics agent, but eventually found his hemophilia story more believable, students and teachers said.

He carried a B average, excelled in his homework, enlisted in driving school classes and kept mostly to himself. Like most of the boys, he kept his hair shoulder-length. He wore surfer T-shirts, gym shoes and knee-high fluorescent green shorts, which at least one of his classmates found “rather tacky.”

He never dated, but a 15-year-old freshman gathered enough courage one day and “sent him a note telling Shi that she liked him,” a close friend confided. Stone never answered in writing, but the two shared many lunch breaks.

The school gossip had it that they planned to go out on the night he got arrested. Friends saw the freshman girl cry long and hard when she finally suspected--two days after the arrest--that Murray was an impostor.

During the second week of school, police said, Murray persuaded an Ojai pharmacy owner to fill a $1,600 prescription for a blood coagulant he needed to treat his hemophiliac condition.

“I have a cousin with the disease, and I know it’s necessary to have that stuff, so I said to myself, ‘Here’s a chance to do a good deed,’ ” said Dean Giser, the pharmacy owner.

Nordhoff Principal Ron Barney said Murray brought to school “a great-looking unofficial transcript,” Barney said. It was written on a Western Union telegram with a return address to Military Educational Services in New York City.

“Quite a character . . . he sure fooled us,” Barney said. By the fourth week of class, however, the official transcript had not arrived to substantiate the first document and school officials were getting suspicious. Eventually, Barney called the police.

Ojai’s alleged impostor was handcuffed and arrested on the school grounds, as dozens of shocked students watched. He was later charged with grand theft in connection with the alleged pharmacy swindle and $400 in money owned to the Johnsons as well as parole violation in connection with a Texas conviction.

As details of the case began to filter in, Stone became the focus of campus jokes. The most common ones were variations on students asking each other in mock disbelief, ‘Are you sure you are so-and-so?’

Others wondered, as one tough-looking sophomore in a leather jacket and torn blue jeans put it, “How could the principal be so dumb to believe the guy’s story?”

Ever the optimist, Stone called the Johnsons that night to tell them that it was all a big misunderstanding, and that he would be released as soon as he made a couple of phone calls.

A short time later, the Johnsons sat on a couch in the office of the Ojai high school where Dorothy Johnson works, holding hands and wincing at the thought of what had happened.

“We brought the story hook, line and sinker,” Ken Johnson kept repeating, shaking his head in disbelief.

But then the Johnsons looked at each other, smiling at the thought of the fantastic stories police say “their Shi” had managed to pull off during his brief period in Ventura County.

“Our Shi was a perfect gentleman,” Dorothy Johnson finally said.

Together with their two teen-age children, the Johnsons come across as the perfect, almost stereotypical middle-class Christian family. Inside the county jail, their former house guest agreed with that description.

“They’re pretty perfect all right,” he said. “They were the strict disciplinarian type, and I wouldn’t change a thing about them.”

The man police call Murray, who now wears a plastic wristband with the inscription “Shi Stone,” on it, seemed insulted at the suggestion that he prolonged his stay with the Johnsons because he started liking his adoptive family too much.

“Gimme a break!” he said, with a heavy Southern drawl, sounding surprised and disappointed. “I thought the transcript would hold up, that’s all. There’s nothing in Ojai that interests me. All I wanted was my high school diploma to go on to college, maybe Harvard.”