A woman who felt pressured by her own wedding faked her kidnapping so that she wouldn’t have to get married.
Back in April 2005, then-32-year-old Jennifer Wilbanks disappeared just moments before her massive 600-person wedding was about to take place.
Days after she had run away and sparked a police search, Jennifer popped up in New Mexico where she told the authorities that she was kidnapped by a Hispanic man.
During the interrogation by the FBI, however, the woman admitted that she had staged her own kidnapping in order to get away from the “pressures of the wedding.”
Needless to say, her deceit led to the end of her relationship with her then-fiancé.
Years later, Jennifer met and married another man, Greg Hutson from Georgia. As People magazine has now revealed, however, this romance also didn’t have a happy ending, whereas the couple separated in April 2021 after more than a decade together.
Wilbanks hit the international headlines back in 2005 after disappearing without sign on April 26 during her evening jog. Three days later, following a massive police search, the runaway bride called her fiancé using an Albuquerque payphone.
The woman then went on to claim that she was kidnapped by a woman and a Hispanic man who drove her around the country and assaulted her before dumping her in New Mexico.
Fortunately, the FBI got to the bottom of the story as they made the runaway bride admit that the entire kidnapping story was a hoax and that she simply wanted to escape her responsibilities.
“She left Georgia because of the pressures of the wedding. The list of things she needed to get done and no time to do it made her feel overwhelmed,” officer Michael V. Medrano confirmed.
Following her 2005 stunt, Wilbanks was charged with making a false statement. She pleaded guilty to the felony count and was ordered to carry out 120 hours of community service on top of two years of probation. She was also ordered to pay more than $13k for expenses caused by the search.
While the woman and her fiancé stayed together for another year after the incident, they decided to go their separate ways in 2006.
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