WWW- A jilted Georgia groom still dreams of a fairy-tale marriage - even after his runaway bride humiliated him in front of a nation.
"The first thing I gave to her when I saw her was her diamond back. ... She put it right on her finger," would-be hubby John Mason told FOX News' Sean Hannity last night.
He didn't flinch when Hannity asked if he still loves Jennifer Wilbanks and wants to marry her.
"Absolutely," Mason said. "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."
Mason said he loves, forgives and wants to marry Wilbanks, who fled 1,420 miles on a Greyhound bus so she wouldn't have to join him at the altar.
"Ain't we all messed up?" said the love-struck laughingstock. "You know, haven't we all made mistakes?"
Cops say Wilbanks was a wide-eyed wanderer who bought a bus ticket under a fake name a week before she ran away. But Mason still hopes they'll get married and have a family.
"Her mom always says she was put on this Earth to be a mother. So, you know, we're looking forward to that one day," Mason said. "I've forgiven her. I forgave her five minutes after I found out exactly what had happened."
Wilbanks, 32, vanished from Duluth, Ga., four days before she was to have married Mason in a mega-ceremony with 600 guests and 14 bridesmaids.
While cops and volunteers wasted days scouring the state, Wilbanks chopped off her long hair and hopped a bus to Las Vegas, then rolled on to Albuquerque - where she called 911 Saturday morning with a flimsy story about being kidnapped while jogging.
"She was scared, and I don't know that the wedding had anything to do with it," Mason said. "She just never has been good about talking about stuff inside, and that's not an uncommon problem, is it?"
Mason said she bought the bus ticket "just in case she couldn't handle anything else," and insisted she didn't live it up in Las Vegas.
Of course, he also said they've never even slept together.
"Our relationship from that standpoint is still very pure," he said. "I know that that's been a question on a lot of people's minds. But we weren't technically living together; very platonic relationship."
Mason appeared with his would-be father-in-law, Harris Wilbanks, and their family pastor, Tom Smiley. They all said Wilbanks was scared and confused and wrestling with "issues" they wouldn't name.
"Jennifer is not crazy," Smiley said. "But she does have some real specific issues that she's got to deal [with] and work out."
WWW- Jennifer Wilbanks, the Georgia woman who faked her own cross-country abduction, should be prosecuted aggressively for lying to law enforcement officials about her nonexistent kidnappers.
Unless Wilbanks can prove she's abused, or insane, she ought to go to prison, if only to serve as a warning to the growing number of hoaxers who falsely report crimes.
Wilbanks vanished shortly before the day she was supposed to marry. All 50 or so cops in Duluth, Ga., launched a search, joined by county and state officials and the FBI.
Wilbanks turned up Friday in Albuquerque - calling 911 with a tearful, hysterical claim that a Latino man and white woman had kidnapped her at gunpoint and driven her clear across the U.S. in a blue van.
After a few hours of questioning, the whole thing turned out to be a lie.
The only good news is the authorities didn't start yanking Latinos out of blue vans all over the Southwest. Wilbanks has been dubbed the "runaway bride," a wholly inappropriate reference to a Hollywood romantic comedy that starred Julia Roberts.
The local DA in Duluth says he is still mulling whether to file criminal charges. And the feds simply gave Wilbanks an FBI cap to wear on the trip back to Georgia and said they have no plans to prosecute.
This kind of leniency undermines public safety from coast to coast.
In recent years, America has developed an impressive degree of coordination among different law enforcement agencies and media organizations - systems like the Amber Alert - to instantly alert the public to child kidnappings and other crimes in which fast detection is crucial.
But sick people abuse the system, causing skepticism that could make the public shrug off future alerts.
This year, Jersey cops busted a hoaxer group believed to have organized half a dozen "bombing" incidents, in which people linked by the Internet send fake calls to authorities about scary, violent crimes in progress to see who can draw the greatest response.
One member of the gang allegedly placed a call from Texas to New Jersey cops, claiming she was a 14-year-old girl who had been raped and was chained to a bed in New Brunswick; cops responded with a nationally televised SWAT team siege.
Last year, University of Wisconsin student Audrey Seiler claimed to have been abducted and left, bound with duct tape, in a marsh. In 2001, Katharine Robb at the University of Iowa claimed to have been abducted and raped by four men. In both university cases, the hoax was exposed, resulting in fines and probation rather than jail time.
Allowing Wilbanks to get away with the same slap on the wrist will make the public disregard police alerts the way we do car alarms - momentary noise that can be safely ignored.
