Ex-Teacher Faces Murder Charges in ’89 Incident : * Crime: Stanley Hershey was previously convicted of stealing a fellow traveler’s motor home and possessions. The victim’s body has not been found.

A former Santa Monica teacher is scheduled to be arraigned today in Shasta County Municipal Court on charges of murder and robbery in the disappearance of a retired Glendale accountant whose body has never been found.

Stanley Alan Hershey, 47, is accused of murdering Gordon T. Johnson, who disappeared in 1989 while traveling in a luxury motor home in Northern California and Oregon.

Hershey and his wife, Jan Fine Hershey, are serving federal prison terms for stealing the motor home and life savings of Johnson, whom they met while both Johnson and the couple were traveling across country in motor homes.

On Oct. 16, the second anniversary of Johnson’s disappearance, Shasta County authorities filed murder charges against Stanley Hershey. Jan Hershey has not been charged with murder and is expected to testify against her husband, her attorney said.

The murder charge cites special circumstances, which means a conviction could result in a death penalty.

Stanley Hershey, who was transferred last week from federal prison on Terminal Island in Los Angeles, was granted a continuance on his arraignment Friday and again on Wednesday after he told a judge he hoped to arrange for a private lawyer rather than a public defender.

The Hersheys were convicted a year ago in Las Vegas federal court of stealing Johnson’s $219,000 motor home, a four-wheel-drive Suzuki and $120,000, which prosecutors said they used for traveling, including a trip to Tahiti, gambling and expensive clothing such as men’s silk Italian suits. There is no murder charge under federal law.

Stanley Hershey was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and his wife, who was described during the federal trial as being a dupe of her husband, was given five years.

Jan Hershey has been held in a Shasta County jail since last summer while local authorities continued their murder investigation. Her attorney, Russell Swartz of Redding, said that Jan Hershey “was not a witness to any murder” but that she “can provide information as to the relationship between the parties until Johnson disappeared and what she observed after he disappeared.”

She had refused to testify against her husband of two years in the federal trial and professed to love him deeply. The couple’s first child, a daughter, was born just days after the federal trial ended in October, 1990, and is being cared for by Jan Hershey’s parents in New York, authorities said.

Swartz said Jan Hershey now “feels hurt and betrayed” by her husband. “The reality of what this man, Stan Hershey, did to her is beginning to sink in,” Swartz said.

Although Johnson’s body has not been found, federal and state investigators have long said they believe that Johnson, 62, was killed while traveling with the couple from Oregon to Northern California. Local authorities were unsure which jurisdiction should press murder charges.

But investigators said evidence since the federal trial indicated that Johnson’s body might have been dumped in Shasta Lake, just outside Redding. The bodies of at least 23 boaters and fishermen killed in accidents are thought to be on the bottom of the state’s largest man-made reservoir, which has a 370-mile perimeter.

Lt. Larry Jarrett of the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department said Stanley Hershey knew the lake well because his father had lived nearby for years. Evidence in the federal trial indicated that Hershey rented a boat at the lake on Oct. 16, 1989, the day after Johnson was last seen leaving a motor home park in Bend, Ore., where the Hersheys also had stayed. Shasta Lake is about 300 miles south of Bend.

Jan Hershey testified in her federal trial that she and her husband, both teachers with master’s degrees, practiced “channeling,” in which they relied on spirits to guide their destiny. She said she believed her husband had a special connection with a spirit guide.

She also testified that Stanley Hershey told her that Johnson gave them permission to use his motor home and money to support their spiritual work. After Johnson’s disappearance and before her arrest, Jan Hershey wrote in a journal, read at her trial, that her greatest fears included “jail” and “more assignments like the last one.”