Town Without Pity Offers Hisses to a Runaway Bride

Although Jennifer Wilbanks’ fiance has welcomed her back home with affection after her cross-country flight from the altar, the people of Duluth have neither forgiven nor forgotten.

Some think Wilbanks should be billed for the $40,000 to $60,000 in city funds that were spent searching for her, and some want to see her perform community service. One thing they all want -- from the mayor to the man who does her dry cleaning -- is an apology.

“I hate to glorify a lie,” Mayor Shirley Lasseter said Tuesday, standing outside Duluth’s City Hall in a pink suit and sneakers. “I always spanked my children when they lied.”

The relief that greeted Wilbanks’ reappearance Saturday has been followed by a harsher sentiment. Civil rights activists demanded an apology Tuesday from Wilbanks for playing on racial stereotypes by telling police she had been abducted by a Latino.

Gwinnett County Dist. Atty. Danny Porter was deciding whether to prosecute her for giving a false statement to police, a felony punishable by a maximum of five years in prison. Lasseter is considering a civil suit to recover money spent on the search.

And ordinary citizen Glenn DelConte, 43, made his opinion known this way: He drove past fiance John Mason’s house, rolled down his car window and yelled: “Don’t marry her!”

“I don’t think it would be the best idea if she decided to live here” if the two marry, said DelConte, 43, who works at a Duluth print shop. “The next county down the road might be a better idea.”

The saga of the missing bride shocked people in Duluth, an affluent, mostly white city of 22,000 about 25 miles northeast of Atlanta. Duluth has ballooned into the quintessential Atlanta bedroom community, where families gather for concerts on a rolling town green and violent crime is virtually unheard of.

Wilbanks, 32, disappeared while jogging April 26, four days before she was to be married in front of more than 500 guests. The search for her, said Maj. Don Woodruff of the Duluth Police Department, was “the largest operation we’ve ever dealt with, other than possibly a tornado that came through town.”

Early Saturday morning, Wilbanks called her fiance from Albuquerque to report that she had been kidnapped by a Latino man and a white woman. After police began questioning her, she confessed that she had arranged her own disappearance because she was overcome by anxiety.

Although Wilbanks has not spoken publicly, people close to her have described a woman in mounting crisis as her wedding approached. Tom Smiley, her family’s pastor, said in an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” on Monday night that Wilbanks’ fear was “not about the wedding” or whether to marry Mason, but centered on “issues that caved in on her.”

As she rode a bus across the country, Mason said, she was petrified.

“She needs some treatment, for lack of a better word,” he said. Mason told Sean Hannity that he still wanted to marry Wilbanks and had returned her engagement ring, which she left when she went jogging.

“Just because we haven’t walked down the aisle, just because we haven’t stood, you know, in front of 500 people and said our ‘I dos,’ ” he said, “you know, my commitment before God to her was the day I bought that ring and put it on her finger. And I’m not backing down from that now.”

Edward L. Hartness, who initially represented Wilbanks, said Tuesday that he had turned her case over to another lawyer with more criminal experience.

Wilbanks’ flight was not a sudden decision, Duluth Police Chief Randy Belcher said at a news conference Monday. On April 19, she purchased a bus ticket to Austin, Texas. When she went jogging April 26, she called a taxi, which picked her up at the Duluth public library and dropped her off at Atlanta’s bus station, Belcher said.

Mason said punishment was unnecessary for a woman “dealing with the consequences right now.”

“She’s having to, in her mind, wonder what people are saying about her. And I can’t imagine that’s real good or real easy to deal with,” he said. “That’s got to be consequence enough to me. And then to have to deal with all the hurt and the pain that she has on the inside anyway.”

Representatives from two civil rights organizations met with Porter on Tuesday to discuss Wilbanks’ invention of a Latino kidnapper.

Fernando Mateo, president of Hispanics Across America, told Associated Press he would like Wilbanks to do community service in a Latino neighborhood. Joe Beasley, southern regional director for Rainbow/PUSH, said he would demonstrate at her home if she did not apologize.

“When this lady named her kidnapper a Hispanic male, she branded a whole ethnic group,” said Beasley, 68.

“That’s just unacceptable, and she should not be able to get away with it.”

People interviewed in Duluth on Tuesday wanted an apology too. Since Saturday, Lasseter said, she has waited for a statement from Wilbanks.

“I respect her privacy, but it’s been three days,” she said.

Several people spoke of Wilbanks with compassion.

Susan Delaney, 46, said Wilbanks’ fellow citizens were inclined to forgive if they sensed she was genuine.

“If she would just try,” Delaney said. “She doesn’t have to be perfect. She just needs to come clean. She needs to say, ‘I’m sorry I messed up.’ ”