Hunt Continues for Missing Retiree : Mystery: Police have plenty of clues and two suspects in the disappearance of a Glendale man. But investigators say they need to find the body before they can file charges.

The news crackled over a sheriff’s radio. A body had surfaced on Shasta Lake. Local and federal investigators in six states waited for more news.

Investigators were hoping the body was that of Gordon T. Johnson, a retired Glendale accountant who had been on the road in a motor home, but disappeared Oct. 15 after departing from Bend, Ore. But the man found in the lake two weeks ago was a drowned fisherman, one of 24 corpses known to rest on the bottom of the state’s largest man-made reservoir.

Sgt. Larry Jarrett of the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department related the find with a grim quip. “The bad news is that it wasn’t Gordy,” he told a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in Las Vegas. “The good news is that bodies are starting to float.”

Authorities who have detained two suspects in the illegal use of the vanished man’s property believe that Johnson, 62, was murdered, and that his killers were compelled by inner spiritual voices into committing highway robbery and murder. Investigators say that all they need is a body to prove that Johnson was killed on Oct. 15 or 16, then dumped somewhere along the rugged and isolated 300-mile route of U.S. Highway 97 between Bend and Redding, Calif.--most likely in Shasta Lake.

The suspects in his disappearance are two California schoolteachers with master’s degrees--Stanley Alan Hershey, 46, and his wife, Jan Vicki Fine, 37. Both, say investigators and acquaintances, apparently are disciples of the New Age practice of “automatic writing,” in which spirits are said to guide peoples’ hands in spelling out their destiny.

Friends and co-workers who knew Hershey and Fine as compassionate counselors are mystified by police allegations that the couple entwined themselves with Johnson, who--accompanied only by a dog--had taken to a lonely life on the road in a motor home last fall.

Hershey and Fine are being held without bail in a Las Vegas jail on federal charges of conspiracy, transportation of Johnson’s stolen car across state lines, and illegal use of his automatic banking card. In addition, the couple are suspected in the theft of Johnson’s motor home and car and misappropriation of most of his $160,000 in life savings for trips to Tahiti and Las Vegas and shopping sprees.

Hershey and Fine were arrested in Las Vegas, where the FBI found them with Johnson’s Suzuki four-wheel-drive vehicle. They had made numerous cash withdrawals from Johnson’s Glendale bank account, using an automated teller card, the complaint charged. They are also accused of transferring $100,000 from Johnson’s account to their own money market account.

A federal grand jury indicted the couple on March 15 and a trial, scheduled for April 30, has been postponed until Sept. 10.

If convicted of the lesser charges, Hershey and Fine face a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison, said J. Gregory Damm, a U.S. assistant attorney in Las Vegas. A federal magistrate ordered that the couple be held without bail because “a strong finger of suspicion” points to them in the possible murder of Johnson.

But without Johnson’s body, officials said they do not know where the murder might have occurred or in which county to file charges.

According to interviews with investigators, friends, business associates and relatives, Hershey and Fine were well-educated, respected specialists who tutored severely emotionally disturbed and educationally handicapped youngsters.

In March, Fine agreed to be interviewed by The Times, but her federal public defender objected. Defense attorneys for Hershey and Fine have since failed to return calls from The Times.

Hershey’s former wife, who declined to be identified, described him as a family man, a devoted husband with a daughter and two stepsons who was involved in community affairs in a small Northern California town that the woman asked not to be named.

“I thought we had a very good marriage,” she said.

He taught for eight years at San Quentin prison, then sold Encyclopaedia Britannica and spent four years as an investment counselor for two brokerage firms.

Briefly a pre-ministerial student in his youth, Hershey spent much of his spare time reading books about New Age religion and spiritual channeling--a religious social movement based on the belief that spirits can help determine peoples’ fates, his former wife said.

Suddenly, during a two-week period in April, 1986, Hershey’s personality changed drastically, she said. He announced that spirits had informed him that he should get a divorce, change jobs and change his life.

“He does automatic writing through spirits,” she said. “He would write down instructions, then read them to me. He left me about 50 pages of automatic writings.”

Hershey’s former wife said she never took her husband’s transformation seriously. “I thought he was just going through the mid-life crisis,” she said. “I was his closest friend. I kept thinking he would come back. Even after I filed for the divorce, I thought he would come back.”

Instead, Hershey moved late in 1986 with three friends to an apartment in West Los Angeles. The four “frequently channeled together,” recalled apartment manager Melissa Ward. “They said they were sent on earthly missions by interplanetary spirits.”

Hershey worked briefly in early 1987 as a teacher at Wilshire West in Santa Monica, a school for troubled and learning disabled teen-agers. There he met Fine, a teacher and counselor with master’s degrees in special education and educational psychology.

“She was the consummate pro,” said Mark Mitock, owner-director at Wilshire West. “She had the interest of the kids at heart. She worked hard, was very caring and worked well with both parents and people in the community.”

Hershey stayed two months at Wilshire West, saying that he had a heart condition and that the work was too stressful, Mitock said. While Fine stayed on until June, 1988, Hershey left in March, 1987, to spend a year with the Los Angeles Unified School District as a teacher of emotionally disturbed students.

In September, 1988, the couple moved to New Orleans, where Hershey went into business as a personal counselor and gave motivational talks on television, associates said. Hershey and Fine were married on Nov. 25, 1988, by a New Orleans parish judge.

But Hershey was not happy with his work and planned to get a teaching job with a correctional institution in Minnesota, associates said. The U.S. prosecutor said in a court hearing in March that Hershey and Fine, driving a camper, checked into the Lebanon Hills Park Campground in Apple Valley, Minn., on Aug. 20, 1989.

Apple Valley also was on Johnson’s itinerary.

The longtime bachelor had worked diligently at his accounting career. Johnson had paid off the mortgage on his Glendale home and planned for a retirement of leisurely travel. He sold the house for $385,000, replaced his old Volkswagen with the new Suzuki and set off in August for Bend, to buy a motor home.

In Bend, Johnson paid $219,000 for a diesel-powered 1989 Beaver Coach Marquis equipped with solid oak cabinetry, two televisions, a VCR and lead crystal in the bar.

Johnson wanted to be “just like a turtle, with his home on his back,” said his brother, Del Johnson, 51.

Accompanied by a retirement gift, a dog named Rocky, Johnson left in late August on his maiden cruise to visit relatives in Minneapolis, where he planned to stay about a month at the Lebanon Hills campground.

According to an account given by the U.S. prosecutor in court, Johnson, Hershey and Fine left the campground in early October for Bend. Authorities said they all checked into the Crown Villa Recreational Vehicle Park at about the same time.

On Oct. 15, according to Damm, Johnson, Hershey and Fine left the Crown Villa park. Johnson has not been seen since.

But on Oct. 16, Hershey rented a boat at Shasta Lake, staying out most of the day, according to authorities and rental operators. Jarrett, the Shasta County sheriff, said that Hershey knew the lake well because his father has lived there more than 15 years.

With a 370-mile perimeter, the lake has the longest shoreline of any in California. It has also been a repository for the bodies of swimmers, boaters and fishermen who have accidentally drowned. Some have remained at the bottom for years, even decades. “Not counting Gordy, there are 24 known bodies in the lake,” Jarrett said.

Then remembering the recent discovery of the fisherman, he corrected himself: “Make it 23.”

Jarrett said investigators theorize that Johnson’s motor home was parked at a recreational vehicle campground in Redding, just south of Shasta Lake, on Oct. 17. But he believes that it was Hershey, and not Johnson, who checked in there.

According to the complaint filed in Las Vegas, Hershey rented a post office box in Barstow shortly after Johnson’s disappearance. Retirement checks were sent to Johnson there, then deposited to his account but not signed by him, investigators said. Checks also were written on the missing man’s account to pay for Hershey’s bills, said Sgt. Robert Cosner of the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department in Bend.

The court complaint also lists numerous cash withdrawals made on Johnson’s account from automatic teller machines in Santa Monica, Barstow, Las Vegas and Boulder City, Nev. And in January, $100,000 was transferred from Johnson’s account to an account in Sherman Oaks in the name of Hershey and Fine, according to the court complaint.

Yet it took three months after Johnson’s disappearance for relatives to file a missing person report with the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department in Oregon. Relatives said they were not alarmed until they found a canceled check in some of Johnson’s mail forwarded to them by his Glendale bank. The check, dated Oct. 15, was used to pay for a trip to Tahiti for Hershey and Fine, Cosner said.

When Oregon authorities learned that the tickets were sent to a recreational vehicle resort in Surprise, Ariz., near Phoenix, Cosner asked police there to investigate. On Jan. 29, at the vehicle resort, a deputy marshal found Johnson’s motor home and Suzuki parked in a space rented by Hershey. But when the marshal confronted Hershey, he denied knowing Johnson.

Police returned after learning that the motor home and car were registered in Johnson’s name, but by then, Hershey and Fine were gone. A note was left on the door of the motor home, indicating Johnson was being treated for AIDS at a Las Vegas hospital. “Gordy has taken a rapid turn for the worse” and was too “humiliated and embarrassed” to contact relatives, the note said.

It was not until March 1, after FBI agents learned about an $8,000 purchase of expensive Italian suits in Las Vegas, that authorities finally caught up with Hershey and Fine. The couple were tracked to Bally’s Grand Hotel, where they had parked Johnson’s Suzuki.

Since their arrest, Hershey and Fine, now two months pregnant, have been living in separate cells at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas.

Shasta County sheriff’s deputies have spent weeks combing the shores of Shasta Lake in search of witnesses who might have seen the suspects or Johnson. And federal and local investigators said they plan to conduct a massive sweep along the highway route soon, in an attempt to pinpoint Johnson’s disappearance.

“We have leads, but nothing for sure,” said Sgt. Jarrett.