http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/gwinnett/0505/01runaway.html
Jubilation gives way to harsh reality
Published on: 05/01/05
It was like Jennifer Wilbanks had come back from the dead.
John Mason stood in the front yard of his Duluth home early Saturday morning almost giddy with excitement. Hours earlier, the fianceé who had vanished three days earlier called to tell him she had been kidnapped to New Mexico.
John Mason reacts in front of his Duluth home early Saturday after hearing that Jennifer Wilbanks had been found alive.
But she was alive and well.
The darkness in front of Mason's bungalow had been replaced with the glare of television cameras. Reporters clamored for interviews.
"Is this 'Good Morning America'?" he asked as techs wired him with a microphone. "That's kind of cool."
Agents in an unmarked car got out and walked toward the house. "That's the FBI," Mason said, pointing. "Hey man, y'all know anything else?"
They didn't answer.
"I feel like Tiger Woods," he joked as he waited to go live.
Friends and relatives darted back and forth across the yard embracing each other. Someone had used a marker to add the word "not" in front of "missing" on a large yard sign with Wilbanks' picture.
In front of the cameras, Mason rejected the suggestion that his fiancée could have made up the kidnapping.
"I never thought she got cold feet," he said. "She put too much into this to leave four days before."
At the Fox News tent, Mason turned into a groupie. "When's [Sean] Hannity going to come down to see me?" he asked before gushing when a producer told him soon. "Oh man, that'd be awesome."
A couple of journalists were still waiting to talk to Mason when friends abruptly pulled him from the tent and rushed him into the house.
Everyone but immediate family was told to leave the house. Blinds were drawn and the front door closed. Several police officers converged on the front porch as news began to trickle among reporters.
It hit friends on the lawn like a bullet.
Jennifer Wilbanks was a runaway bride.
"She got cold feet," Duluth Police Chief Randy Belcher told reporters.
For Mason, the reality would be even more harsh: His future bride — desperate to escape the pressure of 600 wedding guests, two prominent families and a head full of doubt — had just wanted space.
And she disappeared on a Greyhound bus to get it, using a ticket she may have purchased more than a week ago.
(snip)
