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Search for Bride-to-Be Now a Criminal Probe

Thursday, April 28, 2005

DULUTH, Ga. — Searchers looking for a missing Georgia woman who was scheduled to be married this weekend found a clump of hair Thursday and authorities are working to see if a DNA match exists.

WAGA-TV, the FOX affiliate in Atlanta, reported that the hair was found in an office park near the home of Jennifer Wilbanks (search). The station reported that authorities could not say yet if the hair was connected to Wilbanks' disappearance.

Wilbanks left her home Tuesday night to go jogging but never returned, according to the man she was supposed to wed this weekend. Her family told authorities it is "totally uncharacteristic of her behavior" not to let someone know where she is, police Maj. Don Woodruff said Thursday.

So far, police said they have few developments in the case and treating it as a criminal investigation.

"We really don't have any suspects ... We really have nothing at this point," Duluth Police Chief Randy Belcher (search) told reporters Thursday morning.

Belcher said searchers would continue looking for Wilbanks, this time with the aid of bloodhounds.

Wilbanks' fiancé, John Mason, said she left the house "in good spirits" with her MP3 player around 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday for a jog and said she would return in about 40 minutes. Mason said that after an hour passed, he went looking for her on foot and then checked area hospitals. He called police 2 to 3½ hours after she left the house, he said.

Before she left, "she talked to her mom … about the different wedding stuff they had to get done for today,” Mason said Wednesday night during an interview on FOX News' "On the Record With Greta Van Susteren."

Mason, who had just returned from a run himself, said Wilbanks prefers to run by herself, but “she doesn’t just go and run and hide.”

Belcher told FOX News in an interview Thursday that Mason was the only person who has told them that Wilbanks went jogging.

"We're not doing a polygraph at the present time but he has volunteered that he would like to take a polygraph," Belcher said.

At a news conference Thursday, Woodruff said the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (search) were assisting in the search. But authorities did not have any suspects, he said.

Speaking on a network morning news program later Thursday morning, Woodruff dismissed the idea that Wilbanks' disappearance was a case of a bride getting cold feet.

"There's been a lot of speculation from that perspective that it could have been a case of the premarital jitters," Woodruff said. "But again, according to all of her friends that have been interviewed, all of her family, that's simply not the case. ... This is totally uncharacteristic of her to have just simply disappeared this way."

Hundreds of volunteers searched Wednesday for the woman. Authorities called off the volunteer search late in the day but continued canvassing door-to-door in this northeastern Atlanta suburb seeking clues in the disappearance.

Woodruff said police had checked the banks of the nearby Chattahoochee River (search) and that the state Department of Natural Resources would be searching the river.

Wilbanks is described as 5 feet, 8 inches tall, about 123 pounds, with shoulder-length dark brown hair. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and blue sweat pants when she went out, police said.

"She left out of here with just a radio and the clothes she has on," Mason said. "Her cell phone is in there, her credit cards, her pocket book, her money, her keys to her car, her diamond. Everything she owns is in the home. If this is cold feet, it is the weirdest case of cold feet I have ever seen."

Mason's father, Claude Mason, is a former Duluth mayor and municipal judge.