It was one of those “How could she?” moments.
Early Saturday morning after it was reported Jennifer Wilbanks had “escaped” from her captors, I was relieved for her family. If she were up to it, she could still get married today, I thought. Finally, a story with a happy ending.
But she’d been missing for days, so most assumed she was dead. The longer she was gone, the less likely she’d be found alive. Those who cared enough to follow the story braced themselves for another woman-killed-by-man-she-trusted outcome. Then a miracle happened. Against the odds, she turned up alive.
Later that morning I heard she’d faked the whole thing. She was a liar. We’d been manipulated.
Wilbanks’s incredibly inane stunt cost time and money and wasted manpower. It cost her family needless worry and sleepless nights. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (reg. req.):
The number of local, state and federal agencies participating in the four-day effort to find the 32-year-old woman may make an exact accounting difficult, but police in Duluth said Sunday they have begun calculating the hours of overtime and expenses. Most of the Gwinnett city’s 47 uniformed officers and all four of the city’s detectives worked overtime to find Wilbanks, Maj. Don Woodruff said….After Wilbanks’ fiancé, John Mason, reported that Wilbanks went missing while on an evening jog, police set up a mobile command center, mapped areas to be searched and brought in tracking dogs. Officers fanned out from the jogging route that Mason gave them. They checked the banks of the nearby Chattahoochee River and state Department of Natural Resources searched the river.
GBI agents ran down hundreds of telephone tips inside Georgia while FBI agents tackled those from outside the state.
Gwinnett police sent several officers to aid in the search and scanned the area with a helicopter, said Gwinnett police spokesman Officer Darren Moloney.
Many suspected the worst, that John Mason, the man she was going to marry, murdered her and dumped the body. And when she said a Hispanic man (and white woman) kidnapped her, it stirred up resentment about the present illegal alien problem. Why did she go there? Echoes of Susan Smith reverberated when I found out the Hispanic man who “abducted” her came from her own mind.
If nineteen-year-old Alicia Hardin is facing charges stemming from her fake hate mail campaign, Jennifer Wilbanks had better be charged for faking her own kidnapping. If not, I’m afraid my conservative readers will be disappointed with subsequent posts. They will be rants about the apparent racial bias between the two cases. I will figuratively stand side by side with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton on this one.
I thought I was going to be sick when the excuse-making for Wilbanks’s childish and criminal behavior began almost immediately. Talking-head shrinks popped up to give us insight about this “overachiever” and the stress a looming big wedding had caused. That poor thing! And the cops. After what Wilbanks had put them through, they were “friendly” toward her. Read this, and try not to gag:
Wilbanks boarded her plane wearing a new FBI hat, blazer, polo shirt and pants and carrying a new tote bag and teddy bear, a gift from the aviation police chief. She flew first-class and said she planned to name the bear “Al,” for Albuquerque.
Sickening. This woman should have had handcuffs around her wrists instead of a teddy bear in her arms. A teddy bear for a grown woman? That’s another subject for another post.
Wilbanks is currently in “seclusion,” where she should remain for a long time. She ought to hang her head in shame. If Mason marries her after all this, he should seek help himself. At the very least, Wilbanks needs counseling. Life has a way of becoming stressful to the breaking point, and mature adults learn to deal with it. Wilbanks is lacking in this area. Will Mason take the risk and marry a woman who might walk out on him and her own children one day?
Do me a favor? Dump the “runaway bride” designation. Such fairy tale notions have no place in this scenario. Jennifer Wilbanks is an immature, manipulative, maladjusted woman who should be preparing a legal defense instead of a wedding.
Update: A citizen goes off! Trey Jackson has the video.
Sean at The American Mind asks: “Suppose I left a brief note saying I want to be left alone so don’t try looking for me. Yet a manhunt is organized. Am I still responsible? Why?”
Update II: I need to clarify a few things. I have never denied that racial prejudice and bigotry exists. We all have such feelings toward each other at various times. That’s called life. What I argue on this blog is that racism as historically practiced is not a significant factor in most black people’s lives, and I still believe that.
When I made the “racial bias” remark in reference to Alicia Hardin and Jennifer Wilbanks, I did so in anger. I don’t naturally assume that whatever happens or doesn’t happen to someone is because of his/her race. There’s a whole post-civil rights era industry for that. My point is that Wilbanks filed a false criminal report and should be charged with a crime.
Comparing the two cases is useless and irrelevant. What matters is the law, and filing a false report is a crime. Leaving town without telling your family, knowing they’ll worry about you, is not a criminal act. Even if I wished for it real hard, she can’t be charged with “criminal thoughtlessness.”
Maybe it was the gentle treatment this “runaway bride” received that set me off; perhaps it’s because the Hardin and Wilbanks crimes occurred closely in time. I don’t know. But if Wilbanks is not charged with a crime, I’ll suspect that her race is part of the reason why, even if it’s only a small part. If it upsets conservative readers and bloggers that I could say such a thing, I suspect you’ll get over it.
Read the transcript of the 911 call for “help.”
