FBI Reports Describe Runaway Bride’s Travels and Motivations

Investigation reports by the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were released Tuesday detailing the results of their joint investigations of Jennifer Wilbanks, the infamous "runaway bride" who vanished three days before a lavish wedding in Duluth, Georgia. Wilbanks also described her "ordeal" in an NBC interview Tuesday night, telling the world that when she fled Duluth, she was trying to decide between killing herself or killing her fiance’s hopes for a happy life together. "I had a bottle of pills or I had the bus ticket," she said.

The reports paint a disturbing picture of a 32-year old nurse with the emotional depth of a naïve child, whose mother did her banking for her and controlled her life. According to Wilbanks, she had to scrape together the $240 she used for her trip in various ways, by cashing a $100 rebate check for her cell phone, closing an old bank account, and withdrawing $40 from an ATM machine. She was afraid to use her card again after that because "her mother would be able to track her down." She used part of the money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket for April 26. On that day, she took a bath, ate dinner, and told her fiancé that she was going jogging and would "run until she was tired." Instead, she ran just a few blocks away to the library, where she called a taxi to take her to the bus station. "Wilbanks realized during her travel on Greyhound that the Greyhound bus traveled to really rough areas for their bus stations," the FBI report states.

Wilbanks’ plan, if it can be called a plan, was for her final destination to be Austin, Texas. Her choice of Austin was based on an interview she had seen on television where actor Matthew McConaughey talked about his hometown of Austin and how wonderful a place it is. She did some Internet research of her own and decided that Austin would be "a nice place to visit because of Austin’s ranches and national parks." But when she arrived in Austin she had nowhere to stay and she was scared that the bus might stop in a bad area of town, so she spent another $107 of her quickly dwindling money to continue on to Las Vegas. She tried to get a room at three different hotels near the bus station in Las Vegas but they were all too expensive, so she decided to go back to Albuquerque, where she had seen a street full of hotels as the bus passed through town. Although she had only about $80 left, she still bought a $76 ticket to Albuquerque. Arriving there the next day, she flagged down a taxi to take her to a hotel she had a coupon for, that supposedly had rooms for $19.99. But she didn’t even have enough money to pay for the taxi ride, and the driver took her only part of the way. Broke and exhausted from her "ordeal," Wilbanks finally gave up and called her fiancé collect, concocting an elaborate story of how she was abducted and sexually assaulted. Her story quickly fell apart.

The Georgia bureau’s report discloses the not altogether surprising revelation that Wilbanks’ escapade was not her first flight from the altar. She broke off an engagement to another man several years ago, and even though she had been in a relationship with her current fiancé since August 2004, she had secretly preserved text messages saying "I love you" on her cell phone from yet another man she dated in 2003.

Earlier this month, Wilbanks pleaded no contest to lying to the police, and she was sentenced to two years probation and 120 hours community service. She was also ordered to pay the sheriff’s office $2,500 and continue mental health treatments, which she obviously needs. The reason Wilbanks gave to officials for her flight was that she feared she could not be the perfect wife that her fiancé, John Mason, needed. Certainly the city of Duluth, and even the whole country, now agrees with her.