Last Tuesday, 32-year-old Jennifer Wilbanks, a resident of Duluth Georgia, went out jogging and disappeared. Her disappearance was out of character for the young woman who was to be married the following Saturday. almost immediately, the police began an investigation and a massive search was underway that involved over 100 police officers and several hundred volunteers. all that was found was a clump of hair that might have been Jennifer’s.
Early Saturday morning, Wilbanks went to a payphone located at a 7-11 store in albuquerque New Mexico and phoned her family and 911. She told both her family and the police that she had been kidnapped by a "Mexican" man and a white woman in a blue van. They cut her hair but otherwise did not harm her. She managed to escape and was able to make the phone calls.
Two hours later, while being interviewed by the albuquerque police and the FBI, Wilbanks admitted that she had not been kidnapped. She had gotten cold feet about her wedding, and decided to just leave home. She had put money aside for her trip and had cut her hair, presumably to alter her appearance. She took a bus from Georgia to Las Vegas where she simply hung around for a couple of days before she took another bus to albuquerque. Out of money, she called her family and told them that she wanted to come home. Later on Saturday, Wilbanks’ stepfather and uncle flew to New Mexico and brought her back.
She was never charged with any criminal offence in albuquerque. But Georgia authorities are now deciding whether or not criminal charges should be filed. as disgusting as the actions of this obviously self absorbed woman were, many of the things that she did are not, and should not, be the subject of criminal charges. She cannot be charged for simply leaving home. adults have the right to runaway from home if they want to and are not under any requirement to notify the authorities if they do. It really wasn’t Jennifer Wilbanks’ fault that it was a slow news week and CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC adopted her as the new Laci Peterson. Nor is it an offence for having the country and the world look at her fiancé and compare him to Scott Peterson. It could however be argued that if she had knowledge of the massive search between the time that she disappeared and the time that she resurfaced, and did nothing about it, she then became a party to the police continuing upon a false investigation.
The police in Duluth are not without fault in this matter. adults, for various reasons, take off all the time without notifying their families or telling anyone where they are going. The usual practice is that, barring an obvious crime scene, police wait a couple of days before beginning an investigation. In this case, the response to Jennifer Wilbanks’ disappearance was mainly supposedly because both Wilbanks’ family and that of her finace, John Mason, were prominent in Duluth. This was not similar to that of Laci Peterson where an immediate investigation was launched. The police acted quickly in Peterson’s case because Scott Peterson had said she had gone for a walk and the authorities had some concern for Laci’s health; she was eight months pregnant and tired easily when she went out walking. You cannot help but wonder if it all those resources would have been deployed so quickly if it was a black single mother on welfare who went missing.
The real crime that Jennifer Wilbanks committed happened not in Georgia but in albuquerque. It was there that she filed a false kidnapping report. although her ruse only lasted for a couple of hours, no doubt more to do with the skill of the police officers than Jennifer wanting to come clean, she did lead the police on a false investigation. Those two hours were not a good time for Hispanic males who owned blue vans. The potential for hassling and possibly arresting kidnap suspects where no kidnapping did in fact take place is the real crime.
Jennifer Wilbanks deserves to be charged. all she had to do to avoid the entire episode was to drop some money in a payphone, call her family, tell them she had taken off and then hang up. It only would have taken a few seconds to avoid the entire mess.
If she is convicted, hopefully she will be required to make restitution for the thousands of dollars that was spent investigating her disappearance. With all the royalties coming in from books and made-for-TV movies, that shouldn’t be much of a problem.